Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Dance, Engineers, Dance!

It seems like everybody has a touchdown dance these days. I just watched Willis McGahee of the Baltimore Ravens barrel into the end zone, spin the ball away, crouch over his haunches and do this sort of rhythmic walk-like-an-egyptian two-handed dog-patting routine. Now, I don’t play football, but I am a programmer, which means I live kind of the same life: every morning, I don my mental pads and charge headlong into a wall of murderous design challenges, using wits and instinct to type my fleet-fingered way around a host of bugs intent on taking me down. It’s very, very similar.

And yet: I have no dance.

Nor do any of my colleagues. Just the other day, I personally witnessed my officemate, a brilliant and first-rate engineer, single handedly wrestle a pesky SQL Server deadlock to the ground. How did he respond? Did he jump out of his seat and execute a shimmy-shouldered moonwalk down the hall? No. Did he electric slide through the lobby? No. Did he jitterbug into the men’s room and drum a sousa march on the stall doors? No. He just sort of sat there, a slow grin on his face, then locked his screen and went to lunch.

It’s tragic. An engineer’s day is simply littered with triumphs like these, large and small, and the most we allow ourselves in the way of reward is a sardonic smile, maybe an extra twinkie, sometimes a bit of sarcasm-laden half-boasting in the fallow slacktimes between builds.

We need to dance, engineers. We need to clamber onto our twinkie-wrapper-littered desks, raise our arms to the fluorescent fixtures that bathe us daily in their deeply unnatural light, bend our knees and stick out our asses — and dance.

It sounds like you’re either in a repressive company or in one where you’re not challenged enough. In the company prior to the last one I worked at, I had all sorts of verbal announcements:

• If an engineer did well, I’d thrust my fists rhythmically to 5 and 7 o’clock repeatedly while chanting, “Go ! Go ! It’s your system! Hallelujah!” (Name had to be two syllables, with a stress on the first. Somewhat difficult with the Indian programmers.) If standing, accompanied by hip thrusts. Totally unbecoming a manager, but the engineers appreciated it.

• Same song was done sans fist thrusting and in a Jack-Nicholson rasp when the engineer did something stupid. I found it more effective than yelling or nasty e-mails.

• During an incredibly painful revision to the requirements, I excused myself and spent about five minutes walking around the outside of the building muttering “die” repeatedly; I didn’t realize the CTO was following me the whole time, keeping a tally of how many times I said it (370). He told me later that if I hit 400, he would have fired the business analyst and sent me to therapy.

Companies that do not allow engineers to express themselves probably wonder why they get such high churn rates. I blame HR being paranoid about violently vengeful ex-employees; but then, don’t the newspapers always say afterwards that it is always the quiet ones?

You, sir, are an inspiration to us all. If I had a cap, I would doff it.

I would argue that there are engineers at your company who dance whenever they do something good. I know one very well! =)

I may not dance, but I’ll reward myself with an extra hour of WoW that week…