Aardvarked

My coworker-developers and I brought lunch in yesterday and watched the Fog Creek Software internship documentary, Aardvarked: 12 Weeks with Geeks. Due to the subjective nature of reviews and the personal filters we all use, I won't even attempt to make an explicit declaration about whether it was good or bad, worth seeing or not, but I will tell you the reactions it received from our group.

First of all, I have read Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky and visited the website that has something of a cult following: www.joelonsoftware.com . It was interesting to see Joel in person. He has the sort of average-guy appearance reminiscent of a Saturday Night Live player that lacks pretension, and perhaps that has contributed to his popularity.

I ordered the DVD for 19.95 based on nothing more than this short promotional description:

"Four interns are brought into Manhattan and given 12 weeks to design, develop, debug, and ship a program that will change the way computer geeks around the world fix their friends' computers. Boondoggle Films presents a journey through the world of software development from the perspective of a unique upstart, four quirky interns, and the world of The Geek."

What did we expect? Having not previewed the movie before showing it to my group, I hoped it would not include content offensive enough to land me in HR. On that score we were fine, with only one word (used more than once) that might register a blip on the offensive meter...nothing to complain about by film industry standards.

I suppose I had expected a little more in-the-trenches sort of feel, but as they mention in the movie, the film's critics had declared (and I paraphrase): you can't make a decent movie about people sitting in front of computer screens writing code. And they didn't try. At one point the guy to my right said jokingly, "Reckon they'll meet their deadline?" This was on the heels of a rather lengthy segment where the interns were measuring the distance between buildings, trying to determine if they could jump from one to the other if they needed to escape in the event of fire.

Of course my coworker also recalled a rather lengthy discussion we recently had about which limb (arm or leg) we'd rather lose. (The unanimous dismemberment preference was a leg and we conjectured that it was due to our profession and the relative necessity of hands.) The point, of course, is that even hard-working drones who really do code occasionally engage in the off-topic side conversation.

I noted at one point that a staff member closed his eyes for several minutes, but perhaps that was during an acoustic rendition of song that was essentially an ode to tomatoes. (The music was actually what I would describe as soothing and interesting. It was greeted with some enthusiasm due to a coworker of ours being the spirit-twin of the singer. He, too, has written an entire song about tomatoes.) The film used the tomato as something of a metaphor for home-grown software, showing the progress of a tomato plant grown on a balcony to parallel the software development process.

Aardvarked offered glimpses of what it is like to be involved in a technology start-up company and the excitement to be shared in developing and launching a new product. Yet, primarily the film was focused on the interactions and dynamics of a group of interns whose work we only saw in glimpses.

Of course my first thought when I saw the batch of interns they'd selected was, "Where's the token female?" As soon as I said it, I realized the insensitivity of it because there was also no obvious minority representation, for that matter. It just shows how programmed I have become. I like to believe that women and other races were given the opportunity and it just didn't fall out that way this time.

As the final credits rolled, an impromptu discussion of whether we grew up considering ourselves geeks ensued. Most of us did not, but then again, we're not interning in New York City. One person in the movie spoke of the project's critics saying (and I paraphrase again): they're just old guys with regular jobs who wish they had a cool internship like this.

If your expectations are not too high, it's likely you'll find this to be interesting, lightweight, work-related entertainment. Yeah, I know I said I wouldn't rate it, but on second thought, I give it three tomatoes. (You can decide what that means.)