Bartholomew L. Bartholomew | Hacker News Reader

Bartholomew L. Bartholomew

masqueandspectacle.com

72 pointsdhosek25 comments

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.

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

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?

Background: http://www.bartleby.com/129/ 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.

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).

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.

In the dark theme of Firefox's Reader View, it's white on black; it seemed like a significant improvement.

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.

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.

Narrator, not author

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

Bartholomew, the Programmer

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?

It is fiction, a short story. That's all.

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

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.

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

(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.)

This is a modern reimagining of Herman Melville's story _Bartleby the Scrivener_. It's not as easy to read and Bartleby is less toxic and more just annoying, but it's still a great read and plausible, especially in larger companies.

"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!

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