For the past couple of months, I’ve been focusing most of my time at work on developing a single product: a reengineering of a popular and wide-spread PHP program to work against an entirely different database schema than what it was originally designed for. It’s been an interesting project: at times quite rewarding but more often singularly frustrating. I’ve learned a lot about PHP and how it connects to Oracle. It’s a close second to some of the learning opportunities I’d have had at the University, and once it’s complete I will probably end up relegated to HTML monkey-work again, but this has been fun while it’s lasted. We’re due to release this product this week, after two false starts and an original sizing that was woefully inaccurate.

The frustrating thing about this project, though, is knowing that it probably won’t be used. Once Quality Assurance is finished with it and Product Management has given their final writeoff, we go live… but who knows if it will ever get used? We’ve had the original product in place for nearly ten months now, and it’s barely gotten any utilization at all. The new product will have an identical user interface to the old one, and our users — whoever they are — won’t notice a difference at all. And according to our reports, this product hasn’t been used since February.

So I can’t help but wonder what the point is.

At a development staff conference call last week, the development manager up in Portland announced that our parent company will be hiring three new developers, that these were critical hires because of urgent customer issues. With the "mute" button on the telephone activated, I looked at one of our PDA developers and said, "Because, after all, we might have a customer any day now." The announcement of the hire of three new core developers came shortly after the announcement that my own company wasn’t meeting its revenue goals and that our plans to hire a new developer to focus on front-end HTML monkey-work were canceled.

I don’t like developing in a vacuum, making products that no one will see or use. I like feeling like I’m doing something worthwhile, that what I’m doing will making a difference. But working for this company hasn’t felt like a real job ever since I saw our first utilization numbers back in September. It feels more like the way it felt when I was running a Live Action Role-Playing game in Davis. We pretended it was important, we pretended that the fate of the world rested on what our characters did, we pretended that what we did was important… all the while knowing that we were just a bunch of kids (and not-quite-kids-anymore) pretending to be vampires in a college town in Northern California, and that what we did really didn’t affect more than a couple dozen people, max — and even then, in it affected us in game time only.

I remember thinking, when I worked at IT at the University, that it was amazing that I was getting paid to actually do what I was doing. I still feel that way, but for much more cynical reasons: back then, I was amazed to get paid for doing work that was fun. Now I’m amazed that I get paid for doing work that no one will ever see.

I’m developing in a vacuum, and I don’t like that feeling at all. While in the PHP community there has been considerable interest in what my fellow programmer and I have been doing, I doubt that it will be noticed by our customer base — such as it is — at all.