I wish I could tell you this was a happy story about IT conquest. You know, the pursuit of doing cool things with big stakes. It’s not. It’s a story of warning, abysmal decisions, megalomanical personalities, and how to burn $150M like they were scratch-offs.
Just a few disclaimers up front. This is a completely true story. This will be a multi part story. How many parts, I’m not sure. I’ve changed names to mostly protect myself but I’m sure a few of their egos need the cushion of anonymity.
It all started on a beautiful autumn day a few years ago. I’m sure birds sang majestic melodies and children played their silly games. But where I worked, we were about to embark on a super sh*tstorm and I didn’t even know it.
I was pulled into a conference room for a kickoff meeting to work on a “modernization” project. I didn’t know much about it, except there was a budget of $75M over five years — so it sounded pretty serious.
There were three of us engineers in the room. I was the Windows engineer. The other two I didn’t really know, a Linux engineer named Jeff and an Application engineer, Han. Han was quiet. I’d seen him around the office before, very smart guy but didn’t say much.
In came the architect, Shinesh and the Project Manager (PM), Pedro. I’d never met these guys except I had…
