Walking down the central aisle under the pleasing architecture of the Victorian-era curved roof, I hurried along. I found I didn’t want much to speak to anybody — and nor did they to me; most had probably already forgotten the reason I had been away. As usual there was a whole series of scents as I walked down that aisle. The combative mix of cigarette smoke and air-freshener sprays was overlaid with a strong coffee stink and the stale scents of yesterday’s lunch. Sometimes, when I worked in there late at night, I could swear I picked up a subtle and unmistakable almond whiff.
I was privileged enough to have an office, one of a set arrayed along the side walls of the office, for I was a manager, in charge of “test coordination,” as we called it. I hung up my jacket and dug a bottle of Evian water from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. I booted up my PC and waited for it to download my intranet mails. I riffled through the snail maiclass="underline" just a few flyers from software utilities vendors.
Vivian Cave walked into the office next to mine. She was late thirties, perhaps forty, a midheight graying blonde. She spotted me through the glass walls that separated us, gave me a half smile, and raised an invisible glass to her lips. Drink later? I waved back. Sure.
The PC screen speckled with icons. I found a total of thirty-two mails, after four working days away. Just eight a day? And most of them were routine stuff about Internet viruses, an offer to sell an unused snorkel set, and a mighty eleven mails with soccer score updates sent to the rest of the office by one diligent observer working late during a European Champions League match. But nothing from my line manager, or the software development project managers whom I was supposed to work with.
No work for George today. I knew I should launch myself into the online reports, or storm around the office setting up meetings. With a role like mine, fighting for work was part of the job.
I kicked the door closed, sat down, and sipped slowly at my Evian.
I’d been here three years. It wasn’t the first job of its kind I’d taken. I’d drifted into positions like this much as I’d drifted into my career in software development in the first place.
Leaving school, fairly bright but hopelessly unfit, I’d had vague TV21 dreams of becoming a scientist — an astrophysicist maybe, probing the far reaches of the universe, or a space engineer, building and controlling rockets and spacecraft. I was bright enough for college, but a few “down-to-Earth” harangues from my dad the accountant had made me see the wisdom of keeping my options open.
I got a place at Warwick University, where I read math. It was a bright, friendly place, the math faculty at the time was sparky and innovative — the home of then-trendy catastrophe theory — and I soon found myself forgetting the ostensible reasons I’d gone there. Working my way tidily through the groves of axioms, postulates, and corollaries, I quickly hit my intellectual limits, but I discovered in myself a deep appreciation of logic and order.
In my last year I traipsed around the milk round of potential employers, trying to find something that would plug into that interest in mathematical logic. I found it in software development — which brings a wry smile to the lips of all my acquaintances who have ever found themselves staring at a blue screen with a baffling error message.
But software ought to be logical. The math underlying relational databases, for instance, accessed by virtually every Internet user every day, is pure and beautiful. There is a whole discipline called “formal methods” in which you set out what you want to achieve and write a program that is a self-proof that it will do exactly what it’s supposed to do.
That was the dream, as I began my career — first in Manchester, and then, inevitably, in London, the center of everything in Britain. When I could afford it I took a small flat in Hackney, and started a gruesome daily traveling routine by bus and Tube. But as I started work, first in the software development departments of large corporations and then in independent development houses, I soon found that rigor was expensive — less so than the cost of fixing all the bugs later, but an upfront cost virtually nobody was willing to pay.
Eventually I drifted into testing, the one place where you are supposed to be rigorous. For a while I prospered. The fashion was for development methods that were, if not formal, at least structured and so open to inspection. I would draw up my test plans covering every conceivable condition the software could take, with predictions of how it should react. I turned up errors at every level from typos in the code to compilation into machine code to fundamental design flaws — but that was okay; that was the job, and it was satisfying to make things better.
But there was a constant pressure to cut costs on testing, which higher-level managers could never quite figure the benefit of, and endless turf wars between competing teams of developers and the testers come to rip to pieces “their” code. I started to be bypassed by development managers who could boast they were delivering something of direct benefit to the end user — and who, unlike me, had significant budgets and teams to run.
Not only that, they were all tall men. It’s always tall men who get on in management hierarchies, no doubt some deep primate thing. I’m a man but was never that tall, so was stuffed from the start. My trace of a Manchester accent didn’t help, either.
And then, in the nineties, a new wave of software development techniques came along. The new languages were much lower level than some of those in the past: that is, closer to the machine. As a developer you could deliver all sorts of fancy miracles. But your code would be dense and highly interconnected: difficult for an outsider to read, hard to test, all but impossible to maintain. In the wine bars and pubs of post-yuppie London I would rage against this retreat from the mathematical high ground to a kind of medieval craftsmanship, and the lower standards it would bring. But the tide was against me, even as giant applications in the stock exchange and the health service crashed and burned, even as every user of PC software howled with rage at errors so fundamental they should never have gotten past the most elementary level of inspection.
Long before I was out of my thirties my career was stalling. I still had choices, even stable employment of a sort. Testing was never going to be fashionable, but you could hardly run a respectable software development shop with no testing effort at all.
And so here I was at Hyf. I was aware that I was really a kind of totem, a personalized embodiment of the company’s illusory commitment to “high-quality deliverables.” But I’d stayed there, for three years already. Whatever I thought of the job I had bills to pay and a pension to build up. And, just sometimes, I managed to get some work done that satisfied my need to carve order from chaos — a need, as I was going to find out, that went deep in me and my family, indeed.
If I sat up in my chair I could see the end wall of the office, a slab of Victorian brickwork capped by the curving roof of the old station structure. I was struck now how good the brickwork was compared to my father’s house. A station clock maybe six feet across was set into the wall, a translucent disc marked with big Roman numerals and two spearlike hands. The back was faced over with glass that revealed the works, which still operated. Sales types would use it to impress clients. I stared at the big minute hand long enough to see it wobble its way through two, three, four minutes. It was a relic of vanished days, I thought, days of heroic engineering. There have always been engineers in my family.