Chapter 18
What Got Rewarded
The platform logs showed that every weekday for the last nine months, a single Clinical Platform account had started between six and eight agent sessions at around eleven at night. At about ten past six each morning, the same account began reviewing what they’d produced.
Maya didn’t need Nadia to tell her whose it was. She’d half-guessed a week ago, looking at the four-thousand-pound row, and been nearly sure by Friday. On Tuesday morning of the last week, she let herself into the printworks at twenty to seven, with her visitor’s badge and two coffees, and walked through the dark floor towards the one desk with a light on.
Josh Whitfield was sitting with his coat still on, scrolling through a long column of diffs, his face lit blue by three monitors. He didn’t hear her until she was nearly at his shoulder. When he did, he jumped and swore, then apologised for swearing.
“Sorry. Christ. Sorry. I didn’t think anybody—” He looked at the coffee she was holding out, then at her face, and something in his own face sank. “You know.”
“I know you’re the top row on Nadia’s spreadsheet.”
“Right.” He took the coffee. He didn’t drink it. “Right. Okay.”
She pulled a chair over from the next desk and sat. The floor was empty and very quiet. Through the big windows the canal was beginning to grey with the dawn.
“Can I ask you what you’re doing?”
He gestured at the screens. “Reviewing. The overnight runs.” He scrolled a little, as if to demonstrate. “I set up a load of agent sessions before bed, against the backlog. Tech debt, small features, test coverage, upgrade work. They run overnight. In the morning I come in early and go through what they’ve done, and merge what’s good, and bin what isn’t, before the team gets in. So when everyone arrives at nine, there’s already a day’s worth of progress on the board.” He laughed, without much humour. “It’s why our throughput’s what it is. About a third of it, anyway.”
“Every night?”
“Most nights.”
“How long have you been doing it?”
“Since last summer. Since the budget went up and the caps came off.” He rubbed his eyes. “Felix did a talk at the all-hands about letting our best people go further. Somebody had built an overnight agent loop and he put it on a slide as an example of the culture he wanted. I thought, I can do that. I can do that better than that.”
He gave her the defence then, and she let him. He’d plainly prepared it, probably over several sleepless nights, and she’d learned from Marcus that people needed to say the prepared thing before they could say anything else.
He’d been told to maximise throughput, so he had. He’d been told to cut spend by thirty percent in Q2, and he’d done that too, by moving the shared Skills to economy, which had worked for nearly everything. He’d declined Ruth’s request to be a mandatory reviewer because the team was being measured on cycle time, and a single human reviewer on a module under active modernisation would have added days. Ruth was brilliant but slow, and the whole team had complained about it. Coverage on Escalation had been eighty-four percent. Every decision he’d made, he’d made for reasons he could explain and would make again, mostly.
“I was just doing what got rewarded,” he said. “I know how that sounds. I know it sounds like an excuse. But it’s true. Everything I did, I did because it was what the organisation said it wanted. They put my dashboards up at the board. I got a bonus last year, a big one. Felix told me I was the model for what Clinical Platform should look like.” His voice cracked slightly. “We’ve got a mortgage that’s honestly terrifying, and two kids under six, and my wife’s gone back part-time. When the organisation tells you what it rewards, you do it. You don’t sit there wondering whether it’s the right thing to reward. You do it, and you hope.”
“I know,” Maya said.
“Do you?”
“I think so.”
He looked at the screen, at the endless column of overnight changes.
“I’m not even across most of this,” he said, almost absently, scrolling. “I haven’t actually opened Escalation’s code myself in about two years. I don’t need to. That’s the point, isn’t it.” He gave a brief, tired laugh and moved on before she could reply. “Anyway. The point is I’m not going to pretend I didn’t make those calls. I made them. If they need someone, it should be me, not Sam.”
It was the sentence. Maya felt it go past, the way she’d felt Sam’s go past in Fleming on the first Thursday, and Tariq’s behind the fern. It was unprepared, and he’d tossed it away because he didn’t think it mattered.
She didn’t pick it up straight away. She asked a couple of ordinary questions about the overnight runs, how many changes he merged on a typical morning and how many he binned, and let him answer them. She let the prepared version finish completely. Then, when there was a pause, she went back to it.
“You said you haven’t opened Escalation’s code yourself in two years,” she said. “Can you tell me about that?”
Josh looked at her, startled. Then something crossed his face that she recognised from the towpath: a brief, suspicious flicker, as if he’d heard a familiar tune and couldn’t place it.
“That’s—” he began, then stopped. “It’s just a thing I said.”
She didn’t answer. She held the coffee and looked at him, and let the silence go on. It was very hard. Every instinct she had, every habit of nine years of interviewing, wanted to fill it with something kind or clever or reassuring. She thought of Marcus by the heron with his hands in his pockets, not filling it. She didn’t fill it.
The silence went on for a long time. The light outside grew. Somewhere in the building a lift hummed.
“I used to love this job,” Josh said.
He said it quietly, to the screen, not to her.
“When I started. I was a backend engineer at a fintech, then here. I loved knowing how things worked. I ran four services when I first became a lead and I knew every line of all of them. Not because I had to. Because I wanted to. Someone would come to me with a bug and I’d know where it was before they’d finished describing it. It was like—” he searched for it “—like being a mechanic who can hear what’s wrong with a car from across the garage. I was proud of that. It was the bit of the job that was mine.”
He scrolled the column of diffs, slowly, not reading them.
“Now I run nine services. I’ve got fourteen people and probably twenty agents running at any one time, including mine overnight. Every morning I come in and look at the dashboard and everything’s green, and I merge forty changes I’ve skimmed, and the throughput goes up. And I don’t know what any of it does any more.” His voice was steady but very low. “I know my systems are green. I don’t know what’s in them. I haven’t known for about two years. I read the summaries. I trust the tests. I trust the agents, because they’re usually right, and I don’t have time not to. And every so often, maybe once a week, I get this feeling. Like the floor’s not really there. Like I’m the person who’s supposed to know, and I don’t, and nobody’s noticed yet.” He stopped scrolling. “And then I come in at six the next morning and do it again, because what’s the alternative? Tell Felix I’d like to go slower so I can feel like I understand things?”
“Did you ever tell anyone?”
“Who? My team? They’d think I’d lost it.” He laughed. It sounded close to breaking. “Somebody tried, actually. In a retro, about a year ago. One of the seniors said something like does anyone else feel like we don’t really know our own code any more? And someone made a joke about Luddites, and everyone laughed, including me. And that was that. It never came up again.” He looked at Maya for the first time since he’d started. “I thought it was just me. Getting older. Losing my edge. I thought that was what being a lead felt like now. You stop knowing things and start managing numbers about things. Everyone said it was a promotion.”
Maya didn’t say anything for a moment. She was thinking of three pages in her notebook, three sentences in three different handwritings of memory.
I read every line. I just never really know, with any of it, whether I actually know.
Half the time I’m not sure I know what I know any more.
I know my systems are green. I don’t know what’s in them.
“Josh,” she said, “Sam said almost exactly that to me. The first time I met him.”
He stared at her.
“Sam?”
“He said he read every line and never knew whether he actually knew. He thought that feeling was normal. He thought it was what the job feels like now.” She paused. “So did Tariq, more or less. He said it in passing and then told me to ignore him.”
Josh sat very still.
“Sam’s twenty-four,” he said. “He’s been here fourteen months.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been doing this for sixteen years.”
“Yes.”
“And it’s the same—” He stopped. He put the coffee down very carefully on the desk, as though he were afraid of spilling it. “Oh, God.”
They sat for a while in the growing light. The first of the cleaners was moving along the far end of the floor with a trolley.
“I’m not going to tell you it wasn’t your fault,” Maya said eventually. “You made a decision when you closed Ruth’s PR. It was the wrong decision, and it mattered. If you’d said yes, she’d have seen #4471 the day it was raised, and she’d have known exactly what normaliseRef was, because she wrote it down two years ago. Mr Hale wouldn’t have arrested. Neither of us can pretend otherwise.”
Josh nodded. He didn’t look away.
“But you didn’t make that decision because you’re careless or because you didn’t care,” she went on. “You made it because the organisation had built a world where the person who knew the most about the risk was measured as the slowest person on the team, and the person who generated the most change was put on a slide at the all-hands. You were rewarded for not knowing. Sam was hired into a job where not knowing was the normal feeling. Tariq is running a graph on his own time that nobody asked for, because nobody else knows either. Ruth knew, and they moved her. Everyone in this building has been carrying the same feeling around, and every one of them thought it was just them, because there wasn’t anyone to tell.” She took her glasses off. “That’s not your fault, Josh. But it is the finding.”
He was quiet for a long time.
“There’s a director on the board,” he said eventually. “Strand. He wants my name, doesn’t he? Felix said there might be—”
“He asked for it yesterday. I didn’t give it to him.”
Josh looked at her in disbelief.
“Why not?”
“Because if I give him your name, he’ll fire you. Then he’ll hire someone exactly like you, who’ll be measured on exactly the same dashboard, and in two years they’ll be sitting here at six in the morning merging forty changes they haven’t read.” She put her glasses back on. “And because I’m going to ask you to do something harder than being fired.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Maya said honestly. “Something with a much smaller team. I’ll know by Thursday.”
When Marcus came in at eight, with his canvas bag and his thermos, Maya was sitting in their corner by the canal window with her notebook open at the page with the three sentences on it. She’d added a fourth, in very small writing, at the bottom.
I thought it was just me.
Marcus read it over her shoulder. He didn’t say anything for a while.
“Josh?” he said eventually.
“Josh. He’s the overnight runs. He’s also the one who hasn’t opened his own code in two years, and he thought it was just him getting old.” She looked up. “It’s not a junior problem. It never was. Sam just said it first, because he hadn’t been there long enough to learn not to. Everybody here has been feeling it for years. Josh, Tariq, Callum probably, and the senior who brought it up in a retro and got laughed at. The whole function’s been running on it, and nobody had permission to say it out loud.”
“How did you get it out of him?”
“I asked about the sentence. Not the facts. And then I shut up.” She paused. “It was horrible. It went on for about a minute and a half.”
Marcus sat down beside her, slowly, and unscrewed his thermos.
“Well done,” he said. He sounded as though he meant it more than he usually let himself mean things. “That’s the hardest part. Most people never learn to do it.”
“I didn’t enjoy it.”
“No. You shouldn’t.” He poured the tea. “If you ever start enjoying it, come and tell me, and I’ll make you stop.”