2. Frederick

Chapter 2

Frederick

Almost two hours into the quarterly business review and they were finally getting to me in the last five minutes.

The VP of engineering was about to wrap up but then seemed to remember I existed. “Frederick, any updates on the BillForce side?”

“Yes, thank you.” I cleared my throat and adjusted my headset so I could hear if anybody had questions over our video call. “Unfortunately, I lost two more engineers this month, so I’ll be working the current bug list myself. I hope to bring in someone to help with one of the more urgent integrations that I’m not gonna be able to get to for a while, but it’s been hard to attract quality candidates when the roadmap is?—”

“Freddy, if I may.” Ralph, our CEO, raised his hand to interrupt me. “I’ve been meaning to get in touch with you. My nephew just graduated with a BSE, and he’s looking for a job. I think he’ll be perfect for your team.”

“Oh, thank you, sir. I’d love to take a look at his résumé. It might not be the most exciting technology for a new college grad, but I’ll take any help I can get.”

“Excellent. I’ll have HR work on his starting paperwork, and you can figure out what projects he should start on.”

Wait, what? What happened to the “looking at resumes and having an interview” portion of the hiring process? “Um, let’s not jump the gun. As I mentioned, unless we’re adding some major features, it’s not the most attractive product for newcomers. That’s why I’ve lost my whole team. They keep getting recruited by other departments or companies because they’re bored. I’d hate to bring in your nephew and have him leave after just a few months.”

“Nonsense. All experience is good experience, and it sounds like you have room on your team to bring him on for now, and if he gets bored, we’ll find a different group for him.”

My jaw dropped, but I remembered I was on a video call, so I closed it and plastered on a fake smile. “That sounds great. Thank you, sir.”

Before I could give the standard rundown of the roadmap that all the other product lines were allowed to give, Ralph moved on to his final remarks, and my moment was over.

That was par for the course.

When I started at Floom Ware Industries five years ago, BillForce was in its heyday. But after a few acquisitions and various other pet projects, BillForce had lost its shine and was now the lowest-funded product in our portfolio.

In fact, if we didn’t have such a strong list of customers who loved it and were constantly asking me for updates, the product would’ve been discontinued years ago. I’d managed to keep it alive and hoped to keep it going for as long as possible, but it was getting hard to ignore the writing on the wall. Everyone else in the company had moved on, but if I had at least a few competent people to help, we could really do something great with it. I had plans for it.

Unfortunately, competency wasn’t easy to come by when you were competing with companies working on sexy technologies like AI or self-driving vehicles. Billing software was just about as unsexy as one could get.

That was probably why I enjoyed my work so much.

I, too, was about as unsexy as someone could get. Not that I was particularly bad-looking. I was just uninterested in most things sexual.

But I’d seen enough resumes from younger applicants to know they weren’t looking to join a product team that was nearing end of life. A sunsetting project was not one that earned big bonuses or corporate accolades, and most kids these days were looking for both.

I needed to find someone studious and self-fulfilled, who cared about taking care of customers and wasn’t worried about prestige and glory. Someone like myself, who would do the work without complaint and put the customers’ needs first, not their career ambitions.

Okay, even in my head, that sounded bad. It wasn’t that I didn’t have career ambitions myself, I just didn’t need to be called out on the all-hands for another record-breaking year. Granted, having more than two minutes at the end of a call and the chance to make my own hiring decisions would have been a nice start, but I wasn’t one to complain.

We were all on the same team at Floom Ware Industries. I started my career at that company and would probably retire from it, assuming they kept me that long. Every time my performance review came around, I expected to be told to start thinking about what I wanted to do next. We’d gotten close to that point a few times, but I always managed to impress a current customer and expand their contracts just enough to buy myself another year. But without a team beyond myself and some hotshot nepo-hire, my chances of surviving the next downsizing were slim.

At least I could say I went down fighting. Not actually fighting, just not giving up. As long as there were customers willing to pay us for BillForce, I was going to give them the best darn product I could. Even if I had to single-handedly code every feature, bug fix, and update myself.

And with my current attrition numbers, I probably would be doing it all myself.

Unless, by some miracle, the boss's nephew wasn’t a complete idiot.

By the end of the day, HR had sent the guy’s resume, a headshot because he apparently thought this was a modeling gig, and a note that said his laptop would be delivered to my office on Monday.

As in, the Monday that was coming in three days.

It was amazing how fast the hiring process could be when zero vetting was involved.