Chapter CXXXIII

CXXXIII

And the colleagues who did sign. I will not let them stand as villains, because they are the same as everyone else in this book and I have already refused that move eleven times.

There is a man at the next desk who learned, quickly, correctly, that signing is the job.

He is not stupid. He read the situation faster than anyone. He saw that the metric was throughput, that the reviewer's name is a formality, that nobody upstream reads the diff, that the incident, if there is one, arrives in a different quarter under a different manager, and is attributed to complexity.

So he approves. Quickly. Cheerfully. In volume. He is rated highly. He is not lying to anybody. He is responding, rationally, to the only signal he receives.

And here is what has happened to him, and he knows it, and does not say it out loud:

he has not read a piece of code with real attention in two years.

The faculty is going. It goes the way any faculty goes when unused. And he is thirty-eight, and he has another twenty-five years to work, and he has begun to suspect that if the arrangement ever changes he will not be able to change with it, because what he had was not knowledge, it was practice, and practice does not survive being unpractised.

He is not the villain of this chapter. He is its second casualty, and he is doing well, and that is the part I want recorded.

The arrangement rewards him precisely for the thing that is destroying his capacity, and it will go on rewarding him right up until it does not, and there will be no warning, because there is no instrument that measures what he has lost either.