The Mushroom Farm

Lyrics © 1986 Stephen Savitzky. CC-by-nc-sa. To the tune of ``The Fireship'' (traditional)

Lyrics [pdf] [txt] [cho]

C F C G F G
  When I sent out my resu me  to  further my  car eer
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I thought that I would  like to  be  software en gin eer
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  I signed up with  an  firm, not thinking an harm,
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But  little did I know that  it  was  just  mush room  farm. 
C G
  You keep them in the dark, and  feed them lots of bullshit,
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And  that's how the mush rooms grow on  Silicon Val ley  farms.
Our president was aptly named, we called him Dr. Sack;
He made it clear that he was here to keep us in the black.
So when the times were getting hard and sales were getting slow,
The next song that we heard him sing was ``let my people go.''

Now Marketing was in a state of massive disarray
Their plans were wild and wonderful, and changed from day to day.
We engineers tried teaching them, but found to our surprise,
No sooner did they learn their jobs than they'd reorganize.

The finance types were MBA's; I've met that kind before:
They know the price of everything and don't care what it's for.
They think that they can manage what they haven't even seen;
They wouldn't know an IC from a kind of jellybean.

Well, here's to mushroom management and mushroom engineers;
I wish that I could leave this farm; I'm fed up to the ears.
I'd like to take up poetry and trade my code for verse,
But jobs are scarce for poets now, and the pay's a whole lot worse.

I really was laid off by a company president named Dr. Edwin Sack.