Isn't it great to have a boss with faith in you?

It's 1990, and this programmer pilot fish has two years of C and Unix under her belt -- and a new job on a hospital's special IT project team.

"It's relational SQL, touchscreen and object-oriented programming in its infancy, so I'm jazzed to be on board," says fish. "During the interview, I'm told no overtime will be necessary, hours are flexible and the project's confidentiality agreement precludes the team from taking any work offsite."

An exciting project that also has sane hours? That sounds too good to be true.

It is. At the first team meeting fish attends, the VP in charge says the project is so behind schedule that unpaid overtime will be required from everyone.

And vacations are indefinitely prohibited.

And one more thing: "Your briefcase is an extension of your office, so feel free to take work home with you."

A few months go by, and fish and her colleagues tell the IT VP that architecture issues must be addressed for the project to have any chance of meeting contractual performance requirements. VP says he has faith in the team's ability to code past that.

A few more months go by, and the team loses key players one by one. Fortunately, there's a breakthrough -- for fish at least, when she finds a new job. She submits her resignation during the week between Christmas and New Year's. "Just one more rat deserting the sinking ship," she sighs.

"The VP comes into the office -- he was on vacation! -- to tell the team not to worry about another resigning team member. The reason? The project was canceled the week before, but he didn't want to bring us down at Christmas time.

"And don't worry about your jobs, he says, because he has faith that everyone remaining, after a little COBOL training, will make fine maintenance programmers for the hospital mainframe system!"

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