My Upcoming Teaching Job

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Today my quality manager made a very unexpected request on me. In a couple months, he wants me to teach the quality department and our production technicians the art of ... programming. Actually, it's not really a request. It is a directive that is coming down from our new, benevolent overlords.

I guess if your job consists mainly of skillless tasks such as shouting out commands, belittling lesser level employees, and successfully blaming away your mistakes, then everyone else's job must look just as easy to do. I noticed this ridiculous belief recently when talking with our company's president and a few VPs. Their attitude was that programming is nothing more than writing a few lines of text with incorrect punctuation thrown in for good measure. They wouldn't understand why a complex project takes more than a few hours to do. Hence the directive. Why would you want to hire someone who spent at least four years learning the craft of writing good, effective code? Obviously, if any monkey can be a feces-throwing manager, it's only a step down in being a programmer.

So instead of establishing a team of software engineers, upper management wants to burden my already overworked coworkers with the task of helping me maintain our test programs. These systems range from DOS based C-language to Windows VB and, more recently, LabVIEW. Just to be clear, my friends are more than capable of learning everything I know and then some. But how do I take 25 years of programming experience and condense it down into a few classroom hours of training?

Until today's request, my strategy was to create a database that would allow specific coworkers the ability to change test parameters as required. And I hadn't had a chance to do this effectively until I was able to begin converting our programs into LabVIEW last year. I still think this should be the goal. My quality manager agrees. This way they don't have to worry about the logic flow or how to modify sections of code without introducing bugs into the test program. Clean and effective, right? But this is the result of thinking as a method to solve problems. Anything else is destined to put you into upper management ...