Chapter 6
My interviews were in full swing.
Over at Voyager Solutions, the tech department had turned into a mess.
At 10 a.m. on Monday, the company's core transaction system suddenly crashed across the board.
Orders couldn't be placed, and every single payment request was throwing errors.
The customer service lines were blowing up with calls.
Everyone from the tech team was called into the conference room, and every face was tense with anxiety.
Victor sat at the head of the table, stone-faced and saying nothing.
On the table in front of him sat a cup of coffee that had gone cold a long time ago.
Peter Hall, the new tech lead, was frantically clicking around at his computer, totally flustered.
Beads of sweat dotted his forehead.
"Any progress? Have you found the problem yet?" Victor asked.
His voice sounded like it came straight from a freezer.
"Mr. Brooks."
Peter's voice was shaking.
"The system's logging module is messed up too. Now we can't track down the root cause.
"The code for this system is all over the place. There are almost no comments at all.
"It's probably some mess the last supervisor left behind."
With that, he washed his hands of the whole thing.
He dumped all the blame on me, the very person he'd just pushed out of the job.
The senior engineers in the tech department shot each other uneasy looks, their faces twisting with discomfort.
They all knew the real story.
A year earlier, I had led the team that rebuilt that entire transaction system from the ground up, and it took us three months.
Since launch, it had been steady as a rock, never a single major outage.
Comments? Please.
My code was clear enough that comments were never the point.
If anyone thought it was messy, that only proved they couldn't handle it.
"A legacy issue?"
Victor's face darkened, and his brows pulled into a hard knot.
He snapped, "I don't care about any legacy issues. I want results, and I want them now!
"How long until it's back up?"
"Well..." Peter stalled, and nothing else came out.
He was completely clueless.
His real talents was maling slick PowerPoints, sucking up to the higher-ups, and sketching out big, impressive tech diagrams.
But when the heat was on and things got real, he was totally lost.
"Mr. Brooks, should we call Julia?"
One of the younger programmers put it out there, barely above a whisper.
"Whenever stuff like this happened, Julia always had it fixed in just a few minutes," he added.
That suggestion hit Victor like a needle straight to the nerve.
He snapped his head up, and his glare sliced through the room like a knife.
"She's already left!" he barked.
"The company is paying seventeen thousand a month to bring you people in, not so you can go running to the person who used to do your job every time something breaks!
"So what exactly am I paying you people for!"
His roar left the whole conference room dead silent.
The young programmer ducked his head, trying to make himself invisible.
Peter's face flushed red, then turned pale.
Victor's fury was laser-focused on him.
Time ticked by, every second feeling like an eternity.
The damage from the crash kept spreading.
The director of operations burst in, panic written all over his face.
He said, "Mr. Brooks, this is bad. Some of our biggest clients are already complaining in the industry group chat.
"If we don't get this fixed soon, we'll lose at least 30 percent of this month's revenue."
Thirty percent!
That number made Victor's eyes snap open in shock.
He shot to his feet, pacing back and forth across the conference room.
Frustration and anger churned in him, and underneath it sat a trace of regret he did not want to admit to himself.
He thought of Julia.
Over the past five years there had been dozens of moments just like this one.
No matter how big the crisis was, as long as Julia was around, he'd always feel a sense of calm.
She always managed to pinpoint the problem and fix it in record time, no matter how tough things got.
Then she'd say something easy like, "Mr. Brooks, it's done," as if it were nothing.
But now, the one person he could always count on to bail him out was gone, because he'd pushed her out himself.
He'd done it to save a laughable amount on salary and to chase his fresh-blood theory, and he'd thrown away the one person who could hold the whole thing together.
"Emily!"
Victor stopped in his tracks and shouted toward the door.
Emily Grant, the HR director, came running over.
"Mr. Brooks, you called for me?" she asked, a little out of breath.
"Do you still have Julia's contact info?" Victor asked, his voice rough with barely concealed urgency.
Emily paused for a second, caught off guard.
She said, "Yes, I do."
"Call her!"
He was giving orders now, and his tone left no room for argument.
"Get her back here. Tell her the company needs her, now.
"And let her know, if she's willing to return, anything she wants, salary, benefits, you name it, is on the table!"