Chapter 14

Still Claire’s turn:

After breakfast, Charley drove us out into the seething mass of people that is workday traffic in Southern California. I thought Seattle was bad, but this was like Seattle as far as the eye could see.

“How do people live like this?” I asked.

Charley laughed. “Sweetie, this isn’t bad at all. It gets ugly when the hills and water are closer together, funneling everyone onto just a few roads. It’s sort of like Seattle in those places, except with more than ten times the population.

“Still, people are amazingly adaptable. They can live in the arctic and deep in the desert, so living around here is easy. The weather’s good, there are plenty of jobs, the ocean’s close, but so are the mountains. You just need to be able to put up with millions of people, drought, wildfires and the occasional earthquake.”

I don’t know how long it took us to get to the office because I was distracted by our conversation about the craziness that is Southern California. I was almost surprised when she said, “We’re here, sweetie.”

The office was on the second floor of one of the ubiquitous glass-clad professional buildings that seemed to populate business parks. Just from the parking lot, I could see half a dozen similar buildings from three to five stories tall; all glass and steel, with some marble or granite thrown in to differentiate individual addresses.

As soon as we cleared the door to the office, the person at the front desk loudly announced, “Good morning, Charley!” Then he toned it down and said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Claire. I’m Jim, the receptionist.”

I was getting ready to reply when the reception area seemed to magically fill with people. They surrounded us, then someone gave a signal, and they all said, “Congratulations, Charley and Claire!”

In the brief lull that followed, Charley raised her voice and said, “I’ll get you for that, Jim! I’m going to grab you tomorrow night and dance on your feet instead of mine.”

After that, there were handshakes, hugs and more names than I could hope to keep track of. To Charley’s delight, Jim told her he had the small conference room prepared for her, and he’d just brewed a fresh pot of coffee. She forgave him the greeting and gave him a hug. As we were settling in, she told me that scrounging up everything to get set up was usually a major hassle.

Within fifteen minutes of our arrival, Charley was in her first meeting. I was there, too, mostly as an observer, but she made sure I knew I could ask questions as well. I decided to take her up on the suggestion, so I grabbed a notebook and got ready to jot down questions and ideas.

As people were filing in for the second meeting, she told me that this one was about the feature that had so frustrated her the Friday after we met. A woman, who was just coming in when Charley said that, blushed and stammered out an apology.

Charley just smiled at her and said, “I forgave you then, Mary. We all make mistakes, and you fixed it up and learned from it. I’m very happy to have you on the team.”

Turning to me, she said, “Claire, this is Mary Oliver, one of our customer representatives. She handles most of the things that we do that directly interact with her customers — training, handling complaints, taking suggestions and all of that stuff. As much as it frustrated me that day, I’d much rather have her over-promising than telling the customer we can’t do something that we might be able to do.”

Then Charley pointed to a slightly older woman. “The woman back in the corner there is the other Mary, Mary Timmons. She’s an incredibly rare find. She’s an engineer and she writes great software. Most engineers whose code I’ve seen stopped at simply writing programs that work, which isn’t nearly far enough along the curve. A few have written some pretty good stuff. Mary takes it up a notch from there.”

Mary laughed and said, “Yeah, well, I don’t let it go to my head. I took CompSci as a minor, so I was in better shape than most already, but I’ve still learned plenty from Charley and the others along the way.”

Charley nodded, but then said, “The difference is, you did learn. You’ve also put what you’ve learned to use. If you weren’t so valuable as our engineering/development liaison, I’d be happy to have you as a straight-up dev.”

From all I knew of my wife, that was high praise indeed!

“When I started here, Mary was the only programmer who had a clue about the process of developing software. Most of the rest of them were engineers who had maybe taken a programming class or two, or maybe just picked it up along with the way.”

“Most of them went back to just being engineers,” Mary said. “A couple of the others just could not wrap their minds around what Charley was suggesting. One of them quit within Charley’s first couple of months. He said that he’d be damned if someone who couldn’t even buy a drink yet was going to tell him how to program!”

At that point, Jeff took control of the meeting again, and gave a rundown on the project and how it was going. Maybe ten minutes into his presentation, he said, “The thing is, after talking to the others and a couple of customers, I think we need to change things up a bit.”

Up til then, Charley had been attentive but pretty much lounging in her chair. Suddenly, she leaned forward, put her elbows on the table with her palms together, and rested her chin on her paired thumbs.

As soon as he saw her change stance, Jeff laughed. “We all call that her ‘Sell it to me’ pose, Claire.” Charley grinned and winked, but then motioned him to continue.

Fifteen minutes later, he wrapped up. Charley was still for a minute, then sat back and gave him a thumbs up. “Great job, folks! It’s always good to see the work you put in upfront pay off.” She hopped up and went around the table to give each of the people working on the project a hug.”

Turning to me, she said, “Do you remember the day after we met, when you came over to see how we work?” I smiled and nodded. “I told you then that I need to be willing to let others do their part, in their own way. I’ve been reviewing Jeff’s design all along, and I’ve offered a few suggestions. I only remember one that he used, though. I didn’t push the others because I have faith in his ability. I think these changes argue for his direction, which means I learned some things as well.”

Jeff nodded, but said, “Charley’s ideas would’ve worked, too. It’s just that I felt more comfortable doing it this way, and she trusted me enough to let me prove it worked.”

Rather than take time out of the day, lunch was catered, and they worked right through. The first meeting after everyone was done eating, was about the ‘ARKit’ feature she’d talked about that first Thursday. Dave was the lead this time, but Mary Timmons was also there in her role as liaison.

When Dave asked for questions, I raised my hand. I’d been doing that all along, trying to understand how teams worked together and the development process. This time I changed things up, and took it in a different direction.

“So, ever since I first heard about this project in July, I’ve been trying to pay attention to construction sites, and I’ve seen something,” I said. “I know there’s a famous military aphorism about professionals discussing logistics, and I’m wondering about logistics here. Pretty much every site, big or small, seems to have things staged on-site or nearby. Bundles of lumber, pallets with hardware stacked on them, porta-potties and things like that. Are placements for those ad hoc, or are they done according to a plan?”

As soon as I asked the question, Dave and Mary started grinning.

Mary said, “On small sites, they’re largely ad hoc, but even there they need to be placed with some care in order for equipment to access them. We’ve only been thinking of the final structure, but you’re absolutely right — it won’t take much work to allow this to help them organize the site itself. It’ll be an even bigger thing where they can’t stage on the lot, but need to contract with someone else to use their property. With this app, it’ll be easy to show the owners of that property what’ll be happening and roughly what it will mean for their land.”

Dave smiled at Charley and said, “I’ve got dibs on her for an intern next summer!” Turning to me, he said, “I’m serious. That’s a great observation.”

“There’s one problem with it,” Charley said. “We write software for engineers, and the original app is about helping the engineer understand the site. As far as I can tell, the logistics here are about helping the contractor. Do we want to branch out into contractor software?”

That brought them all up short. I was thinking of the entire building process, not just the engineering side.

“I’m not saying we don’t want to, just that we need to get Steve involved if we think it’s a good idea,” she added.

Dave slipped out and returned in a few minutes with Steve in tow.

Dave said, “Claire was looking at our app and suggested there was another area where it could be a big help — setting up sites, even staging on rented land.”

Steve looked thoughtful for a second, then nodded. “And one of you realized that’s not something the engineer would normally be involved in, right?”

They all agreed, and I hung my head a little. It had sounded like such a good idea.

Steve must have been watching me because he came over and hugged me across my shoulders. “Cheer up, Claire. It really is a great idea ... and we’re going to do it.”

Seeing everyone’s surprise, he said, “When we first discussed the idea for this app, I think we all realized it was different, but we weren’t worrying too much about how it was different since it would do what they needed it to do. Folks, this isn’t an engineering app, per se, but an app that can help engineers understand a site. Why can’t it help contractors and others understand it, too?

“I don’t know how much contractor focused software we’ll end up doing, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if we find that any mobile apps we do are useful that way.”

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at a hole-in-the-wall place Charley knew of and had fish tacos for dinner. They were light and tasty, and nothing like I’d ever tasted before. Not better or worse, just different.

When we got back to our room, it was a bit cooler than we really wanted, so we changed the temperature settings, put on swimsuits and went down to spend some time in the pool. When we got back, the temperature was where we wanted it, so we stripped off and spent the rest of the evening enjoying ourselves. By the time we went to sleep, we were relaxed and pleasantly tired.

“You did great yesterday, love,” Charley said over breakfast the next morning. “Today’ll be a short day, but I’ve asked a couple of the other devs to talk you through their processes while I check in on the team and go over some personnel stuff with Steve.”

“Who will I be working with?”

“Jodie will walk you through how she turns a design into solid code. Her method is different from mine, but I’m very impressed with it for getting started on a project. Then Jeff will show you how he designed his current project and why and how he chose to change things at this point.”

“Sounds like fun!” I was thinking that it sounded like I’d have some good stuff to report back to class.