Chapter 114: Insufficiently Paranoid
Marcus had booked the small conference room for 9 AM and apologized for that too.
"Normally I'd take the big room, but this isn't... it's not a polished thing. I want to be clear about that up front." He'd written RETENTION AND INTERNAL MOBILITY on the whiteboard in blue marker, misspelled mobility on the first pass, wiped it, rewritten it, and the eraser mark was still visible underneath. The laptop on the table was his personal one. The screen showed a dashboard that looked like someone had wired a CRM to a spreadsheet and then apologized to both of them.
"I built this over the weekend," Marcus said, to the room, which contained Ethan, Sarah, Diana, and a projector that Marcus had not figured out how to use. He'd balanced the laptop on two reams of printer paper instead. "It's not pretty. I'm aware."
Sarah had her red marker uncapped. She wasn't writing. She was reading the screen.
The dashboard had three columns per engineer. The first was last real conversation with lead, a date stamp, green if within seven days, yellow within fourteen, red beyond. The second was unblocked work ratio, a percentage Ethan couldn't source the denominator for. The third was a free text field labeled what they said they wanted, and it was populated.
"I've been doing one on ones weekly since 2014," Marcus said. "Nobody asked me to. The data was in my head. It wasn't..." He paused. "It wasn't searchable. I couldn't cross reference it. If someone asked me how Kai was doing I could tell you. If someone asked me how the floor was doing, I'd say fine, because that's what it felt like. That was the problem."
"Maya said she was fine," Sarah said. Not looking up from the screen.
"Maya said she was fine every week for six months. Her unblocked work ratio was at forty percent for the last three. I noted it. I didn't act on it." Marcus said this flat and functional, same as always, the words delivered like packing material. "I should have. I built this so nobody has to remember to."
He clicked to the next view. A grid of all 138 employees, color coded. Six green rows. Eight yellow. The rest, red. The red was staggering.
"I checked the commercial options. Workday has a retention module. Culture Amp does engagement surveys." He said engagement surveys the way someone else might say wireless printer. "They're insufficiently paranoid about people."
Nobody spoke.
"They track sentiment. They track satisfaction. They don't track whether someone's work is actually unblocked, because they can't. That's internal data, it lives in tickets and commits and conversations with leads. And they don't track what people asked for, because you can't standardize that field. But you can write it down." He pointed at the free text column. "James asked for a second monitor six weeks ago. He got it in two days and the entry's closed. Prasad asked for a transfer to the inference team in October. Nobody saw that. It's still open. Prasad left last Tuesday."
Ethan looked at the screen. The free text column for Prasad read: wants inference team, said so 10/14, no response logged. The timestamp was from eight weeks before the resignation.
"The system would have flagged Prasad at yellow three weeks before he gave notice," Marcus said. "I think. I haven't tested it on live data yet. It might be wrong. The UI is..."
"The UI is fine," Sarah said.
"The UI is not fine. I apologize for the UI."
"Marcus." Diana leaned forward. She'd been the quietest person in the room, which was unusual. She'd been reading the sales org rows, which Marcus hadn't built yet, because he didn't have access to the sales org's conversation data. The rows were empty. Diana didn't care. "Can this track account managers the same way?"
Marcus looked at her. "If I have the conversation data. I don't have..."
"I'll get you the conversation data. My team does weekly check ins already, they're just in notes. Half of them are in napkins. This is..." She stopped. Looked at the screen again. "This is better than anything we have. I want it for sales before the end of the month."
"It's not ready for..."
"It's a dashboard and a text field, Marcus. It's ready."
Marcus closed his laptop, which he hadn't needed to do because the screen remained visible on the projector he wasn't using, and then opened it again. "I need to be clear about something. I don't want to own this. I built it because I was sitting in my apartment thinking about Prasad and I couldn't sleep, and I wrote code because that's what I do when I can't sleep. But if this becomes my job, I'm not at the rack. I'm not doing infrastructure. I'm doing..." He searched for the word. "People logistics. I'm not good at people logistics. I'm good at the system for people logistics. There's a difference."
"There is," Sarah said. "The difference is that a system nobody owns dies in four months. I've watched it happen three times."
Marcus looked at the sleeping bag rolled in the corner of the conference room. He'd brought it from the rack room out of habit; it had nothing to do with the presentation. "I know."
Ethan hadn't spoken. He'd been reading the free text column. Wants to lead a project. Wants to work remote two days a week. Wants to understand why the tokenizer was rewritten. That last one was Kai's row. The timestamp was from September.
"Build it out," Ethan said. "Full org. I'll fund whatever you need. Diana's team gets it first, parallel to engineering. You own the system, not the conversations. The leads own those. You just own the thing that makes sure they happen."
"That's what I was going to say. You said it better."
"I've had practice."
Marcus looked at him. "Budget?"
"Tell me a number."
"Twelve thousand for the first quarter. Mostly the database layer. I can use open source for the rest."
"Spend twenty."
Marcus wrote it on his hand, because his laptop was open and his phone was in his pocket and his hands were the most available surface. "Okay."
The flag fired at 4:47 PM.
Ethan was in the rack room because Marcus's laptop was there, balanced on a server case, and the dashboard had gone live for the engineering org at noon. He'd been checking it the way he checked training runs, compulsively, with no plan for what he'd do if the numbers moved.
A new row had gone yellow. Not red. Yellow. Last real conversation with lead: 12 days.Unblocked work ratio: 71%.What they said they wanted: lead a project, said so 11/2.
The name was Tomas Chen. Junior engineer. Talent Resonance 7.1, a comfortable number, stable, unremarkable. Ethan had walked past his desk two days ago and the passive scan had returned the same 7.1 it had returned every other time. He had not been worried about Tomas Chen. He had not been thinking about Tomas Chen. Tomas Chen was fine.
The system said Tomas Chen was twelve days from nobody having talked to him.
Ethan read the flag twice. The number on the screen and the number in his head were two different instruments, measuring two different things. The one on the screen had been built by a man who talked to people every week because nobody asked him to.
He wrote a note to Kai, who was Tomas's lead, and copied Marcus. Then he closed the laptop and sat in the rack room with the sleeping bag in the corner. The server fans ran. The pastrami smell came up through the floor. He did not improve anything.