Professionalism is HARD

I’m a young, professional lady. Not that I am a lady professionally, mind you - no one would pay me for lady advice. It would consist of things like, “Eat candy everyday!” and “Scales are a nasty source of information, throw them out”, and “10 Reasons Not to Wear Makeup to Work” (Spoiler Alert: all ten have to do with sleeping more).

At any rate, I’m working in Silicon Valley right now, essentially helping in the replication of existing products squished together, but for business people. The idea is that this product should replace a company’s intranet. For example, if you’re starting your first day at a Company X, you should be able to login to this system, and be able to hit the ground running.

Sounds amazing, right?

It’s not really.

It’s unwieldy and hard to use; each of the individual services are easy to figure out on their own, but together, it resembles something like an Internet version of Frankenstein’s Monster.  It’s become this huge open secret. Everyone knows, but no one is speaking up. What do you do? The predictions range from “MIT is gonna have a field day turning this into a case study” to “This thing is gonna be the laughing stock of the entire Valley and get roasted on TechCrunch.”

If so many individuals feel this way about this particular product, isn’t there some responsibility to warn someone? Anyone? So far, tongues are being bit so hard they could be drawing blood. Perhaps even severing said metaphorical tongues. I’ve always been the kind to say something, but it seems that the vast majority of the people here are keeping their head down until the project is over.

Though, some people are making their feelings known by defecting. The team has lost the majority of its brilliant engineers to other large competitors,  with several vowing to leave once the project is released. Maybe in the professional world, that’s good enough.

Le Sigh.