Excitement Intensifies, World Peace De-Prioritized

I snapped on Friday. A project on which I have a very small dependency has been dragging on, and on, and on. I've heard reports of everyone from my direct peers to a sister department's director being pulled into the quagmire. There have been inter- and intra-team disagreements, and even an incident of outright hostility. All of this around what was supposed to be a small project to introduce incremental improvements to one of the most-used pages in our application.

The previous Friday I had been promised that a final design would be ready for me to look at (with which to integrate one piece of my own project) by the end of the day. End of day Friday turned into Monday. Monday slipped gradually to Thursday evening, when I was shown a near-final design like nothing I had seen up to then. By the morning of Friday the 19th, that design was finalized and approved, but now I had some serious concerns about the very part of it that I had to work around. By the time I met with my counterparts on the other side of the building, more hell had evidently broken loose and the design direction had been changed yet again. With two interview sessions, a team lunch, and a large all-hands meeting to attend, it was around 4pm before I was able to really settle down at my desk, and that's when I learned that things were still up in the air with the hot-potato project, and changing regularly

And so, I snapped. I literally could not take it anymore. Everyone on the project is extremely talented. Heck, I had met with each of them individually and fully agreed with their concerns, and they were all trying to do the right thing for the company and for our users. So, why was this project so politically charged and wrought with heated debate? It was time for this madness to end. Luckily at 4:45pm on Friday all of the key players were still in the office, and after doing some crash-prep with each of them separately to make sure I would be sensitive to their individual concerns, I managed to get them all together. So help me, this was going to be the final confrontation.

By this time, I have to admit, I was feeling quite uncomfortable. None of the folks on this project report to me (I'm not even a manager to begin with). Most of them are my seniors, by a long shot. This wasn't my project in any way, shape, or form. I've been with the company for what, eight weeks, and here I was completely overstepping my bounds, essentially imposing myself as acting project lead, entirely out of the blue. Not good.

But by golly, whatever I did, worked.

The dust settled quickly (people had to leave to do things like pick up kids from daycare or meet with spouses), and I settled into the cube of one of my sempai, taking turns at the mouse & keyboard as we worked Photoshop magic to slay this screen-sized beast once & for all. A little after 8pm, we were done. I'm looking at the end result as I type this. A thing of beauty, it is, not primarily for its design, but for the fact that it represents a cornerstone of PayPalian world peace.

It's just a shame that achieving world peace was officially pushed down a notch in priority at the all-hands meeting earlier in the day, beaten out by a drive to further increase customer conversion rates or something of that sort. I kid you not. It was in the PowerPoint. Bummer, huh?