I'm such an asshole (and I really think it's going to pay off big)!

The company I work for moved into new office space awhile back. We simply outgrew the old space (well, that, and the boss went in with some other investors to buy a building in China town).

One of the worst parts of the old space was that the developers sat in "the back room". To get to the restrooms, you either went out the front door, or through the back door (which was in the back room). This resulted in numerous "drive bys".

A "drive by" can range from a random thought to "the next big thing". It usually starts in the mind of a salesperson or marketing type. The process can start anywhere, but the urinal seems to be a treasure trove of drive by opportunities. As soon as the thought forms (but hopefully not before hand washing is complete), the thinker looks for the first developer they can find. Then, the thinker unloads his wonderous wisdom upon the developer who is supposed to stand in awe, absorbing all of the ingenious and innovate ideas spurting forth. Once the stunned feeling subsides, the developer is naturally going to figure out some way to fit the new feature into the product as soon as is humanly possible (or faster).

Needless to say, drive bys suck! These are ideas that, if fed, will be spread to clients and throughout your entire organizations sales engine. Before you know it, what you thought was an innocent head nod has come back to bite you. If you're lucky, you find that this great feature (which has no specification, definition or clear vision) is already overdue. If you're not so lucky, you get a bug report from a client asking why they just paid your company money for a product when they can't get that feature to work (because, of course, that's the one thing the client bought your software instead of your competitors).

At our new office, we're no longer in the "bathroom path". Drive bys have been reduced exponentially! I owe a big thank you to Cody, who was the dev team manager when we moved into the new space - he worked hard to make sure drive bys wouldn't be an issue, including getting us a door - that locks!!!!

But yesterday, while trying to troubleshoot a failing unit test, here comes Mr. Salesman with "the next big thing". To be honest, as he stood over my desk and asked whether our puny brains could fathom how to realize his incredible concept in software, I didn't even listen. All I heard was "will the new product have blah blah blah" and "no one else does that". And, instead of politely nodding, I shook my head and said "I don't know. You'll have to ask Jeff and Sheryl what's going into the new product". When this didn't seem to satisfy him, I added "I don't know what's going to be in there, but I don't think we'll have that."

First of all, I have since found out, we will, indeed, have this innovative concept in our new product. In fact, it's so innovative that it's already been thought of and defined. Apparently, even though I still don't know what the feature is, it's something we've already built.

Secondly, I suppose I could have saved Mr. Salesman a few minutes by actually listening to him. I could have listened and realized that "yes, we've already built that". I could have even taken some of the credit and made myself look smart by explaining how well we wrote that particular branch of code. I should have probably flushed the error I was trying to track down from my mind, realizing that however long it took to get my head back in the code, it was time well spent to make sure that this saleperson could turn his attention to even grander innovations.

But, my reaction was to basically tell him he was talking to the wrong person. I was polite enough to not be offensive, but steadfast enough to make sure there was no question that I would not play the "define a feature" game. If you want to talk about whether a feature is technically possible, then by all means, let's chat! If you want to understand how our architecture will impact future growth, integration possibilities or performance, then I'm all in! But, if you want to tell me about a rough draft of an idea that occurred to you in the shower, then fuck off! I have better things to do!

So, as bad as I feel about turning Mr. Salesman away with the understanding that I will not take part in inflating his ego, I think it will pay off! I'm pretty sure I've helped cure someone of "drive by disease".