I think I just adjectivized something that’s never been adjectivized before

After today’s “State of the Project” meeting, I was looking for a sentence to describe it, and I settled on “It looks like things are progressing in a clusterfuckian direction”.

Basically we’ve got a bazillion things to do, they all have to be done by the end of business tomorrow, and we don’t have enough people to do it. So we’re prioritizing.

Unfortunately, one of the priorities is a project I want to be a little cagey about the nature of, because I don’t want my company’s lawyers to find this post by googling on certain keywords. (Note in advance to readers: If you post a comment unrotting names I rot13 or figure out what I’m talking about it and spell it out, I’ll not only remove your comment, I’ll ban you from the site. I don’t want a repeat of Peter da Silva’s “why did you rot13 <blah>?” post.)

The project is to produce something in software that formerly we’ve done in hardware, because the hardware devices are too expensive and our per-unit cost is already too high. To do it in software requires some cooperation from the video card beyond the basic “colour this pixel this colour” stuff. And the video card that comes in the (rhymes with Hell) computers we’ve been delivering so far doesn’t have a Linux driver that can do that. So the powers that be are all set to have us move a large part of the project from Linux to Windows. A bunch of us are saying “Excuse me? Why don’t you just switch from NGV to AIvqvn? AIvqvn has good Linux drivers that do what you need.” But of course we were being roundly ignored. And so in the prioritization meeting today, we’re being told that one guy is doing a project to prove that AIvqvn can do everything under Linux, but if that fails we’re going to have to shelve the 4.0 release we’re nearly finished working on, put a bunch of us on the Windows development, and the remainder on putting one or two absolutely vital things back into 3.3. Never mind that 4.0 has a vastly different architecture in several ways so “backporting” will be more “redeveloping”. Never mind that 4.0 has an automated update/upgrade system in place so that our service people won’t have to log into our 1200 existing customers sites to manually upgrade them to the newest software. Never mind that we’re going to spend millions and lose millions in other business in order to avoid raising the cost of the system by $100 a unit – and just how much do they think a Windows license is going to add to the unit price, anyway? Just shut up and do it.

Clusterfuckian.