Created in his own image

I worked on a project team installing a system in the Pentagon. The project manager left, and the our boss picked the most senior programmer to take over as project manager. He decided that he wanted to review every subroutine.

Without getting too geeky here, everyone else on the programming team had a uniform way of indenting "if-then" statements. The new manager preferred a different way and said that he couldn't read the code the way everyone else wrote it. He then started going through every program file to reindent the code his way.

He also started to microanalyze the program logic. For example, there are sometimes multiple ways to create a logic test, such as "If x=True" or "If x is not False." The project manager went through every program with the programmers to find out why they wrote the logic the way it was. He then argued with the people to find out why they didn't do it the way he would have done it.

This was only the beginning. Needless to say, the project, which was ahead of schedule when the manager took the reins, fell weeks behind. Also needless to say, nobody came to his defense when the client lodged major complaints about the delay.