So, this whole “exhicion” thing they had us do. Sounds grand, doesn’t it? For me, it was less of a showcase and more like wading through mud, uphill, both ways.
They announced it like it was the next big thing for the company. “A chance to display our innovations!” they chirped. My part? I got voluntold to stitch together the main presentation piece. Great. I started by just trying to get the old code, the stuff everyone forgot existed, to even run. That alone took me the better part of a week. Just me, a lukewarm coffee, and a computer screen that seemed to mock me.
Then came the “integration” part. We had to make our little project talk to systems built by other teams. You’d think in a tech company, this would be straightforward. Wrong. It was like every team spoke a different language and refused to use a translator. I’d send out emails asking for how their stuff worked, and I’d get crickets, or worse, some super vague answer three days later when I was already knee-deep in another problem.
And the requirements for this “exhicion”! Oh boy. They changed. Every. Single. Day. One manager would walk by and say, “Make it more dynamic!” Another would say, “It needs to be more robust!” What does that even mean when the foundation is shaky to begin with? I just nodded and tried to keep my sanity.
I remember spending ages trying to get this one visual element to work. The original developer had left, of course. No notes, no documentation. Just a pile of code that looked like spaghetti. I dug through it, line by line, trying to figure out the logic. It felt less like engineering and more like archaeology.
We weren’t exactly given the best tools either. Everything felt outdated or clunky. We were basically patching things up with digital sticky tape and hoping for the best. I’d see other companies with sleek processes, and then I’d look at our setup. It was… humbling, let’s put it that way.
The day of the “exhicion” finally came. We managed to get something on the screen. It mostly worked. A few bigwigs came by, looked at it for five minutes, asked a couple of surface-level questions, and then moved on. All those late nights, all that stress, for a five-minute nod.
And after? Poof. Nothing. No big celebrations, no real feedback on what we built. Just straight onto the next urgent fire that needed putting out. That whole “exhicion” circus just faded into the background. It really made me think, you know? About what we were actually doing there. Felt like we were just hamsters on a wheel, running hard but not really going anywhere special.
It’s experiences like that “exhicion” that stick with you. Not because it was some grand achievement, but because it showed you the cracks in the pavement. Made me realize that a lot of what goes on in these big places isn’t about innovation or excellence, but just keeping the lights on and looking busy. I started to pay more attention after that, not to the fancy announcements, but to how things actually got done, or didn’t. It changes your perspective, for sure.
