What has crawled into my beliefs these past days its the gruesome, terrifying, idiotic fact that effectiveness means nothing. But let me tell you the whole story so you all get a better picture and at the same time I write more than a paragraph worth of blog entry.

I'm an System Analyst, programmer and a sociable guy. Most of my coworkers say that I'm crazy due to some of my code, that is smaller and quicker to run but takes a few minutes to understand what the hell have I done there. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those elite programmers that uses the most hidden secrets of coding known only by the guys that created it, but some times my logic works differently than that of my coworkers.

The fact is that I was the guy that proposed to remove a very costly report software from our system and replace it by JSP (Java Server Pages for the non-geek reader). It was a bold move, trade a solid software with years of development for a in-house made solution. The way I got them to agree was simply the fact that it was free. So instead of paying about US$ 100,000 for the software, plus a server for it, plus the average guy's salary, plus backup and other stuff for this server the am mount would be resumed to the salary they already pay. The catch was to prove that JSP would have an equal-or-better performance, accessing the database was easy as the software in question tended to despise our fine-tuned queries and read the whole of the data instead of what we needed. In terms of layout fair and square, there's nothing a good HTML page can't do these days. The issue was to generate barcodes and graphics... The solution was a simple internet browse, some research and finally generating JPGs by means of Java and JSP. Took me two days to develop Interleaved, the barcode on most bills, and Code39, a barcode that uses letters and numbers that takes more space than interleaved.

Another issue that aroused just over a year later was graphics. Like those on charts, pies, lines, area and all that cool pictures they use on charts and statistics. Took me a week to make one. So now there is nothing our home-brewed free solution can't make that a package product can. All the while I'm on a frenzy redoing all the reports, sitting with the customer, improving the old ones and most of the time generating an average of two a day and at the same time everyone else would make one a day at best, the average hitting one every two days.

But since I'm a sociable guy and my productivity allows me, I was often out of my seat helping others, halting something in order to help another team to develop their project, chatting here and there. But I have never, ever missed a deadline. In fact most of the times I had all tested a day before the deadline. And on top of that I'm a smoker, so every other hour I take a break to the veranda to have a little me time with my suicidal side, and other people started to join me for a chat. You see the problem arising? I didn't. And I still don't think that a break every so often to clear your mind of a problem and get you ready for the next one does any harm to any job. I also allows knowledge to be disseminated as the chat tend to wander into work related issues. Even so if you work typing all day... A few minutes away, do a tendon stretch and you'll never suffer from job related illnesses.

So last week, on a friday I get this head of development screaming at me that I wasn't fit to be part of the team. That I took too many cigarette breaks, was disrupting other people's work, that I wasn't doing my job and that I should stop helping the programmers at the programming pool as they considered it slacking. And I'm there seated thinking, hey I saved this company over 100,000 dollars, I'm teaching people how to better do their job, I'm meeting all deadlines... Just wait a second here! I'm doing more than I'm being asked for and I'm getting a lecture over it?

At the same time there are people at my workplace that don't get up from their chairs all day, save for bathroom, coffee and water; that don't have half my productivity, in fact there is one that is still owing me a program since May/2005, and they don't get any kind of ### chewing... You couldn't imagine how furious I got, but I remained calm, and started a test.

This week I rarely stood from my chair to help the programming pool guys, timed and reduced my smoke breaks, almost zeroed my social interactions to hellos, how are yous and goodbyes, reduced my productivity and when I had nothing to do or I needed a buffer cleansing break, I read an e-book on my handheld. And what did I got? A smiling head of development saying "Oh, if you want to leave earlier this friday you can since you have some overtime from the last few days."

Oh go to hell! If a good employee is one that stays seated all day doing half of what he can do and slacking some of the time, then I want to be a bad employee!

And still I'm spending time helping the other programmers, but now I do it on lunch break or after work, hence the extra hours (I'm still working, ain't I?).

But this got my attention... There is a great error in place here, and it is the same one that we do when we look at a person and assume they are a no-good, a wino, a criminal... Judging people by their appearance. Simple. If you look busy at your desk, you're working. But if you are on another people's desk talking about some wonder coding that will solve the question for the answer about the life, the universe, and everything that is 42, you're slacking...

So now we workers have to take care not only on how we present ourselves, but how do we look while we're working... And this is completely bogus as we all know that creative minds can't work properly when confined, they need stimuli, they need to wonder about other completely different stuff in order to realign their line of thought...

Or maybe we just need a new head of development that is studied on administration or psychology...