
Bartholomew L. Bartholomew - dhosek
https://masqueandspectacle.com/2017/03/01/bartholomew-l-bartholomew-d-a-hosek/
======
Apocryphon
I like how you're never certain if Bartholomew is in the right for rebelling
against the arbitrariness of Agile practices and an overbearing paranoid boss,
or if the narrating manager is right that B.L.B. is a shirk just pretending to
do work and disrupting the environment with laxness and insubordination. And
both the HR rep and the VP are either responding appropriately or with
bureaucratic indifference.

The ambiguity of it all is what really makes the story sound true to life.

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jbattle
I hated bartleby the scrivener in high school. I thought it was a boring story
about a boring guy who didn't do anything. Once I'd been working for several
years I re-read it again and found it to be really funny and interesting.
Kinda countercultural

~~~
Apocryphon
Bartleby, like Walden or even modern office sitcoms, only sounds true to life
and appealing once you've found yourself in that position. I still don't
really understand the ending of the original story, though. Melville reveals a
character point that seems out of nowhere. Is handling dead letters for the
post office really that soul-crushing?

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gwern
Background: [http://www.bartleby.com/129/](http://www.bartleby.com/129/)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartleby,_the_Scrivener](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartleby,_the_Scrivener)

This rewrite differs considerably from the original. Bartholomew is sinister
and parasitic in a way that Bartleby was not. Less absurdist Kafka than
Orwellian nightmare. Both versions have virtues.

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smoyer
It's an interesting modernization of the classic ... overall I liked it!

But ...

The grey text on the black background is horrible for those of us with "older
eyes". It needs more contrast and/or a heavier font. It's especially bad that,
when scrolling, the font's contrast dims even more (making it very difficult
to see where I am).

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_The grey text on the black background is horrible for those of us with "older
eyes"._

I agree. But I also feel that this battle has been lost a long time ago. So
when I read the article in Firefox and hated the background, I just did View
-> Page Style -> No Style.

In the same vein, I have min font size 18 and I also have Lucida Grande set as
my font, and don't allow pages to choose their own. I also have JavaScript
turned off by default.

If I feel I'm missing something on a particular page or site I'll view it in
Safari or Chrome. But 99% of the time I don't need to do that.

When these hipster web designers are sixty years old, they will say "WTF was I
thinking when I did that???" But until then, it's the arrogance of youth.
Absolutely nothing someone older says to them will make any of them care about
the accessibility features of their websites.

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kainolophobia
I've witnessed this scenario before, almost verbatim.

Clearly the manager was wrong, but so was the employee. The issue here is that
the employee is doing everything "right" from their perspective, without
understanding the negative impact it has on the rest of the team. I'll spare
my theories on how to "resolve" the situation, but suffice it to say, toxic
employees can destroy companies; especially startups.

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zxcvbasdf
The author of the story should have been terminated on the spot. "I pulled the
headphones from Bartholomew’s head, cracking the plastic in the process"
Really, as a coworker I would have stoop up for Bartholomew.

~~~
uzoodoo
_Narrator_ , not author

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soneca
The author should be proud of his research for this writing. Plausible enough
for HN readers mistaking it for a real story.

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Radle
The narrator fails as a manager. When he took of B.L.B headset he should have
been ready to fire him. He should have also immediately offered to replace the
headphones. He should also be capable to bring his authority to HR and his own
boss. If he can make decision but is unable to execute on them he is an
employee not a manager.

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RamshackleJ
I can see myself enjoying reading this when I'm older and no longer working in
professional software dev. But right now it just left me anxious and
questioning why I work in this industry.

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tux1968
Maybe if I committed myself and more time to analyzing this story I would
understand its significance. But I'd rather not.

~~~
mercer
I feel similar. At best I can conclude that both the narrator and Bartholomew
failed at their jobs, but honestly for the most part the story has an 'uncanny
valley' vibe. It feels true enough to read the whole thing and identify with
some of it, but somehow I've never quite encountered any situation quite like
it - and I've experienced quite a variety of corporate/IT environments.

Actually, the story comes across as the kind of 'incomplete, subjective
account' I'd hear from both sides in the past, somehow mashed together into
one. Maybe that's what makes it interesting?

~~~
drostie
Taking the manager's side for a moment, it echoes a somewhat-uncommon-but-
important problem which we have in our industry: when management makes risk
decisions for engineers, rather than engineers making those decisions for
themselves. This gets into a mess of definition, but we can define that a
superior in the organization who is fully informed about the costs and
benefits and trade-offs and options, understanding and weighing it all, is
still doing "engineering" and the problem is precisely that some way up the
organizational hierarchy this capability breaks and we transition from
"engineering" to "management". And the problem is precisely that at that
level, administration has to transition from top-down authoritarian to bottom-
up support, from a general directing their soldiers to the janitor slopping up
their messes. Of course there is still some role for long-term vision, but the
point is that this role does not encompass specific decisions that bear
business risks, because these roles can't, because these roles are by
definition not able to be completely informed about those risks.

In this case, we see a supervisor who is still close enough to the code to
have the engineer's hat on, but whenever they interact with their own
superiors they get the same refrain of "I don't understand this" \-- so those
people are managers. The problem is that the risk decision of keeping or
firing the troublesome team member (as well as other decisions like whether
the team's methodology should be agile or not etc.) has been usurped by
management.

Normally this decision-making takes a more-concrete form like the 90s-era "And
the code absolutely must be written in Java" ... "do you know what Java is?"
... "Yes, it is the software that enterprise businesses like ours use! We must
use it!" ... "But this will be faster and more maintainable in another
language" ... "Don't care, we need Java", or whatever. In this case I find it
interesting that the issue exists one level up in hierarchy, sort of the same
problem at a higher abstraction.

------
vdnkh
_Bartholomew, the Programmer_

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bjourne
I don't get it. Is the story real or fiction? Why didn't the manager ask Bart
why he did not want to work? Why did he prefer staring at his desktop
background over working?

~~~
burkaman
It's a modern version of Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener". You
should read the original, it's very good.

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s3arch
Such an interesting read.

Is there any similar sort of stories(both fiction and non fiction). Esp
related to dealing with bad hiring, toxic employees and frustrated managers.

~~~
ARothfusz
One of my favorites is the portrayal of N.I.C.E. director John Wither in "That
Hideous Strength" by C. S. Lewis. (especially Chapter 3, "Belbury and St.
Anne’s-on-the-Hill")

[http://fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20141232](http://fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20141232)

~~~
ARothfusz
(didn't want to give too much away, but when you've read the story and
understand N.I.C.E. a bit more, you'll see how incredibly creepy Wither's
nonchalance is. Should be a primer for working anywhere known for a culture of
fear.)

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b3lvedere
"and I’d like you to view this as a lateral move, not as a demotion, your
salary will remain the same"

Run Forrest, Run!

