The Dashboard Director

In a bustling tech company named Innovatech, there was a Director of Engineering named Greg. Now, in most stories about Engineering Directors, you'd expect our protagonist to be the sort of visionary who looks towards the future, imagining a thriving environment of scalable systems and efficient platforms. You know, the kind of leader who thinks in big ideas, not just individual tasks. But no—Greg was different.

Instead of looking at the big picture, Greg preferred staring at... dashboards. Dashboards filled with glorious numbers: commit counts, bug tickets closed, lines of code written. Why bother with things like "strategic improvements" or "long-term vision" when you could measure someone's worth by how many lines they typed in a week? Lines were easy, lines were measurable, and Greg loved the quantifiable simplicity of lines. If it wasn't in the dashboard, it wasn't worth discussing.

Now, there were some senior engineers in Greg's team—we'll call them Alex, Priya, and Jordan—who dared suggest that perhaps, just perhaps, the company could benefit from a few more strategic investments. Maybe a scalable platform, they proposed, could help the engineers at Innovatech deliver future projects with greater efficiency and ease. A bold idea, indeed!

But Greg, undeterred by such long-term fantasies, would nod sagely and respond, "Where is the customer impact?"

And of course, Alex, Priya, and Jordan, being both clever and experienced, tried to explain: "Well, Greg, if we invest now, we could make all future projects faster, better, and easier, ultimately benefiting our customers more!"

But Greg remained steadfast. You see, to him, if you couldn't draw a straight line from a line of code to a customer's immediate sigh of relief, it simply didn't matter. After all, dashboards didn't measure "future-proofing" or "strategic investments." They measured now. And Greg was nothing if not a man of the moment.

So, while other tech companies were building platforms and tools to ensure efficiency and scalability for future projects, Greg's engineers were busy fixing bugs, one at a time, each fix logged and counted—proudly displayed on the dashboard.

And thus, Greg's team continued onward, efficiently sprinting from one urgent fix to another, with nary a thought for the future—because, after all, there was no immediate customer impact in building a better platform. And Greg was nothing if not efficient.

The End.