Our highest priority is to cover our behinds
through early and continuous streams of BS
and excuses as to why it's not working this time either.
We're careful to whine about each new
requirement, pretending that "everything's
going to break now" and "if only we'd known
earlier, this is the worst customer I've ever worked for".
Avoid doing any actual work at any cost, while
pretending to be busy anyway. This involves
telling everyone how busy you are, sending
a f*ckton of meeting requests, and then telling everyone
you can't join them because you're simply too busy.
Calling in sick for every one of those customer
demos you can't avoid. Sorry boss, I'm beaten
by my immune system this time again!
We're careful to never feel bad about how
useless we actually are. We're in fact doing
the customer a favour by not replacing their
Excel spreadsheets with something even worse, and that
justifies all the money they're spending on it. We even
take great pride in not having made it worse (yet).
We learn all the fancy business keywords and
recite them like a spell every time we talk to
the customer. It's also good for impressing interns
and then they'll want to get a job here for good, see
we're actually doing our boss a favour in our own way.
"The ways of the Bored are impenetrable; the Bored
works in mysterious ways" just read your Bible lad.
Everyone in the team gets a fancy job title,
something that we've heard of before but we're not
sure what exactly it was. Recommended job titles are
"Scum master" (useleness involved: 1 tshirt size) and
"Behavioural analytics consultant" (UI: 5 tshirt sizes).
The idea being of course that the customer pays
extra for extra head count. Thank me later, boss.
The best excuses, cover-ups, and creativity skills
emerge from our self-destructing teams.
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
to become even more useless, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly.