Stufo.devEinstein Never Worked in IT.
15/09/2026
Tags: Just another day , Stufo Dev , Einstein , Management
A friend recently told me a story from his company, This comapny has been developing the ther product for the past six years.
Six years of code, new modules, dependencies, configurations, and all the other things that eventually make a software system resemble an old Italian town: you more or less know where the centre is, but you’d better not knock down a random wall because you have no idea what might be resting on it.
Monday
The manager walks into the office.
As usual, he has a brilliant, innovative idea.
“Let’s make our application open source!”
Sounds great.
There’s just one tiny detail: the company still wants to sell the product to its clients.
So, open source.
Just not too open.
My friend asks the obvious question:
“But how?”
The manager’s answer is beautifully simple:
“We’ll just cut some things out.”
He says it without a moment’s hesitation.
There is, however, a minor technical inconvenience.
The application hasn’t been built over the past six years as a neat collection of independent Lego bricks that you can simply take out of the box. The modules live in the core and are enabled or disabled through configuration.
But that’s just a technical detail.
And technical details have this nasty habit of getting in the way of brilliant ideas.
My friend, apparently still naive enough to believe that a software developer’s opinion might be relevant when discussing software, raises a few concerns.
He asks for a meeting with everyone involved.
Tuesday
At the meeting, my friend explains the technical problems, risks, and consequences of the decision.
A complete waste of time.
The idea is brilliant, after all.
And once an idea has been officially declared brilliant, technical arguments can only get in its way.
After some discussion, they finally reach a compromise.
Instead of cutting pieces out of the current product, they will take a version from about two years ago, extract the front-end part, clean up the code, and prepare it for publication on a government open-source platform.
“We have three weeks to do it.”
Reasonable.
They need to find the old code, check whether it still works, clean it up, prepare the repository and documentation, publish it on GitHub, and complete all the formalities required to submit the project to the government catalogue.
Three weeks.
Perfectly manageable.
Wednesday morning
My friend opens his email.
There’s a message from the manager:
“It has to be ready by Friday.”
And this is where we discover one of the greatest achievements of modern project management:
On Tuesday, three weeks can, without the slightest difficulty, become three days by Wednesday.
Einstein predicted time dilation at speeds approaching the speed of light.
What he failed to predict was management.
So my friend gets to work.
First, he has to figure out whether two-year-old code even still works.
Then clean it up.
Prepare it for publication.
GitHub.
Documentation.
Formalities.
And somehow, he manages to get it done.
Friday
It’s ready.
The project is published as open source.
And since Friday, it has been sitting happily on the government platform with the status:
“Pending verification.”
Nothing much has happened to it since.
But that’s not important.
What matters is that on Wednesday, for reasons apparently connected to the continued survival of the planet, it was absolutely, unquestionably, critically necessary...
to have it ready by Friday.
My friend is now waiting for the next brilliant idea.
Because in IT, you can refactor code.
It’s a shame that management is much harder to refactor.