Creating ugly software (Chapter 3)
One September morning after I finished my breakfast, I put myself together and I took my favourite shirt and a saco. It was already a bit cold. I needed to catch the bus, which took me to one tram station and from there I went to the main train station. The weather was cloudy. I use to observe that the bus’ travelers are somehow different than the tram’s ones. The bus is not that calm as the tram, anyways...
The city journey goes on and I reach the main station, from there goes my train to the next city, Vienna. I loved that city. Just seeing the buildings and the beautiful parks made me travel back in time and feel the soul of the city. I take the metro, which finally takes me to the office where work is waiting for me.
For few months I traveled every day approx. 2 hours there and 2 hours backwards, but I love the trains as well. This is how my career started, half software engineer, half traveler.
As I arrived into the office, the beauty disappeared and something took it’s place... I could not speak a word in German, but as there was a huge need for developers, few English speakers got assigned there. Every document, even the code was written in German. I did my best to get a bit of understanding but it was not that easy I am telling you. Everyone knew we don’t know German, but they still went on also with meetings in this language, that’s what somebody calls language crash course.
What I wanted to tell is, I questioned and disagreed with a lot of things in my job, but I was still a junior, I did not want to give bigger voice to my disagreement and I needed to learn. I always had this thing, that I want to improve and innovate and bring new ideas. And of course it’s so interesting to know and see how people use a software… what makes them keep scrolling and clicking. But I was shut down fast with “this is not what the client wants”. After releases new and new issues revealed and all seemed waste of effort and budget. But in the end this was what the client wanted.
The time when we were building ugly software. Business had some idea about the solution and it was the most important thing. I mean we delivered what was requested, but the struggle and the pain went most of the time for the end user.
I was a part of few projects like this. I could learn so many skills, but there were not so many words about “usability”. I started to ask questions like this is really what I want to do?
