Welcome to corporate America. Silicon Valley is home to hundreds of successful tech companies and stories of their amazing climb to success galore. Not heard are the insolent, tormenting stories where hectors bring down the sky crashing and taunt the Achilles, the Paris freely, for; there is no such thing as righteousness here. It doesn't matter how great your product is, it doesn't matter how cutting edge it's technology is, it doesn't matter how large its scale is, it doesn't matter how prospective the future could be; if your corporate ladder so much as sneezes, you could be a walking ghost among remnants of what was your pride, pinnacle and now, is gradually but surely dying.

Large corporate cultures are essentially an aggregation of smaller, much more efficient (and much more productive in their heydays) sort of companies that, theoretically work together towards a larger common objective. Business continuity is ensured through multiple levels of cross ownership among teams and software engineers. Theoretically that is. In reality, business continuity in the technology industry is littered with inheritors who would lay claim to their predecessors's hard work the very next day or, would draft a 15 month project to reinvent the wheel touting new, attractive features and/or how the 'old code' sucks. Whatever the case may be, the inheritors' work usually bears little relationship to the remarkable piece of code they professed their love/hate to and the one that they started out to improve/rig upon. The HR calls it infusion of new blood to emphasize that all is well when in fact, it is a completely new exercise about how to justify the existence of Mr. & Mrs. Bigfoot and get a paycheck rather than a continuation of the original work.

The phrase "infusion of new blood," whatever it may have meant originally, actually refers to the mass exodus of people from one company to the other, usually by means of a referral at a very high position. Incompetency breeds and multiplies rapidly, usually starting from and at an executive level and its influence is usually so large that the competent (if an engineer is competent, he/she generally would have sympathizers at the same grass root engineering level -- Non executive) feel frustrated, powerless and bitch about anything and everything.

There's another degrading effect this "infusion of new blood," has. The hardcore programmers fight a pitched battle against an invasion which they feel is foreign, against their ideas, belief and culture. Basically none of the ideals that existed prior to the infusion exist anymore but the ones who remain must face the change, understand the intricacies and interactions of the change of command and replace their weak and inconsistent ideas! Many of the grossest mistakes a well-meaning engineer makes happen here, sordid dramas that are completely demeaning in their HR records, as well as unnecessary, if only they towed the new line of management.

So, what exactly is it that I am so cheerful about? I used to whine about shortage of hands. There was so much more we could do! So many more milestones we could reach and we could one day give competition a kick in their butt. Actually, I did get my wish.  They would still be able to do all that. There would be about 28 sets of hands taking care of something that we worked so hard for in the past 4 years. So why am I not celebrating?

Well, succession always involves tradeoffs, and the new setup of our artwork trades me and my team off its initial advantage. This baby is going to play where it can be taken good care of, where it can get the attention of the big boys. You might think that a large corporate entity would push its big lead over the competition and grind its hapless competitors even further into the dust. You'd be wrong. It may take very few engineers to build a product to prove its worth but it takes a hell lot of resources and attention to details to go from there. 

Why lay idle and let your competitors run you over when you're so far ahead? They did it for two reasons -- one good, one bad. If you're sticking with their vision, the market is not ready yet --Yet! until a competitor does something. If you're sticking with us, it was about time, we needed a life;

But before you take one of those answers, let's take a moment to celebrate one of the most remarkable distributed system we've built in programming history. It was the best. It was the worst. It gave us instant gratification. It drove us crazy. Against all odds, we pushed it far beyond its logical limits.

The Sunnyvale Sorbet Team ... 2004-2008.

It's time to pay our respects, throw some dirt on the coffin, and move on.