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Archive of Your Stories - Page 1 Index of Stories on This Page:
What´s best for the vendor, vs. what´s best for the customer Will The Real Program Stand Up? Fix the Ground, not the Wheel Managers that panic re: Managers that panic 97-page method of a class - or the perils of drag&drop programming. Careful what you ask for! 5 years of wisdom Developers at the bottom of the totem poll The Stories:
What´s best for the vendor, vs. what´s best for the customer Here´s one for the Bizarre Management Decisions category: Our company has forged an alliance (or is that partnership) with BEA - simply because they are the "market leader". This means we HAVE to use WebLogic 5.1 (not 6, mind) for all our consultancy work. Never mind what might be right for the customer. Perhaps they have a low-traffic website that just needs a low-end ecommerce solution. Tomcat and MySQL would be perfect - but no, we have to recommend that they use WebLogic!! Anonymous person UK Mon Oct 08 10:40:23 EDT 2001 Will The Real Program Stand Up? I was assigned to take over a project that had been running for over two years with very little to show for it. The week before I took it over, the two programmers had given the client a demonstration of the application and the client was very happy, so happy they wanted our company to take it over and make it viable as quickly as possible. Interesting to note that the two programmres where working by themselves and there was no administrator, project manager, etc. I immediately went looking for documentation...there was none. I talked to the programmers and they were very "close to the chest" on what the program actually did. As I began looking further and further into the applicaiton I found that there was no application. The demonstration was a ´shell´. Everything was hard coded. There was no database. That day both programmers quit without notice, and before I could fire them". Its was then my job to go to the client and explain to them why their $400,000 project was nothing but hard code. That was one of the most interesting visits I´ve ever made to a client. As an aside, the client was so impressed with our honesty, we were given a 6 million dollar contract over the next three years to "do it the right way". Anonymous Tue Oct 09 10:48:02 EDT 2001 Fix the Ground, not the Wheel Our branch of the company produced course software that installed and ran just fine on its own (save for copy protected versions, but copy protection never works anyway). Head Office branch built an overly ambitious internet course seller/renter that ran the courses (ours and others). Suddenly, Head Office Branch discovers a bug that occurs if their software runs about 30 of our old courses in a certain way. Head Office Branch orders us to fix the 30 courses. Our branch points out that since the problem only occurs with their program, shouldn´t they simply fix that one program rather than have us rework 30 of our courses? Head Office Branch disagrees, stating that the effort needed to change their one program is too great. Result: programmers of Our branch end up reworking the 30 programs to account for a bug in the Head Office Branch program. Hanging´s too good for them... Anonymous Anytown, Anywhere Thu Nov 15 11:21:03 EST 2001 Managers that panic I have had a few of these. The project starts out with best of intentions, processes in place. Suddenly, the project manager twigs that they´ve undercut themselves to get the gig, and worse still there is no chance that the project will be completed by the promised dead-line. So all good practices go straight out the window - so-called "short cuts" like no testing, no QA, no more designing. Just code, code, code. And suddenly the project ends up taking twice as long, or failing entirely. Anonymous person UK Wed Nov 28 11:37:05 EST 2001 re: Managers that panic Yep, I´ve had a few of those. I guess every project has been like that. Everyone wants to do things properly - until the pressure is on. Andy Stevens UK Sun Dec 02 12:08:48 EST 2001 97-page method of a class - or the perils of drag&drop programming. I joined a project that returned the results of the database call in XML, took about 20 seconds for that portion to execute. I was tasked with speeding the thing up. Most obvious thing was to take out what I noticed was MANY active System.out.println statements. One method (this is in VAJ, so one can edit by method rather than by class) looked a little long to scan thru by eye, so I clicked on ´print´. After a long time (and some glares from my co-workers) the printer finally stopped - 97 pages! Removing some of the System.out.println statements got the execution speed down under 0.1 seconds. By the way, the guy who wrote this code (actually a nice guy) still thinks its great & gets very offended when we call it "the hundred page method". Complains we´re exaggerating! He has some political pull, so we got nowhere claiming we´d have to ´refactor´ a bit. Needless to say, the code only worked under a very limited set of circumstances, and little changes in one place would break the entire article. We spent half-a-million dollars and six months trying to make it work without re-writing it; then the project and division went belly-up. anotherAnonymous metro, US Tue Jan 08 20:23:25 EST 2002 Careful what you ask for! About 3 years ago we had a manager who was the classic case of the peter principal, at 27 years old he had all of the admin and engineering staff for a company of 14,000 reporting to him. He really wanted to micromanage, as he had done to his marine squad, bad idea. One day he got on a kick about dialup usage, we had MS RAS servers, and a package that provided some reporting. He said that he wanted "All of the detail on usage for the last month for each server", there were 3 servers. The person in question told him that would be a LOT of info, did he want summary data? "I want ALL the detail!" hee hee hee. Monday morning came around, the poor SOB who had spent much of the weekend doing reports carried a case of paper into this PHB´s office, and dropped it on his desk, "Here´s the detail from the first server, let me know when you want the next one" ;´) He never did ask for the second or third server reports. A little while later he wanted "Every page that someone who works for him gets" to be sent to him too. Another BAD idea. We had some system monitoring running, but no event correlation, if one network switch burped, and they did often, lots of systems would be paged out. On Monday this PHB came in saying "Make it stop, I didn´t sleep all weekend" 2.5 years went by, at another job, the first lesson giver now works with this same PHB, but not for him. Apparently he came by for a refresher course, he asked for detailed accounting on a topic. All that had to be said was, "Remember the RAS reports?" He walked away muttering, "never mind" Careful what you ask for, you just might get it. Kevin kevin@flanagannc.net North Carolina, USA Tue Feb 19 06:44:44 EST 2002 5 years of wisdom TRUE STORY I walked in to a firm owned by a telco. My manager it seems came from a very well known distributed systems vendor.There was also a technical director The company had very stiff deadlines that noone thought could be met. But of course people who thought so did not seem to have huge amounts of experience neither extreme bluechip cvs So... My manager hired consultants . Consultants promised the moon of course and were very very savvy. Six months after - this was when the product is supposed to be finished it dawned on managers what was plain to people like me ( not extremely blue chip and genuine 5 years experience) - the consultants did not even understand basic concept of distributed systems forget knowledge of ejb etc. Bear in mind both managers and consultants had over 15 years experience apparently and my manager had previusly worked it seems with a distributed systems vendor(very well known) This firm had a previous distributed systems project of which this manager was the manager. But this one was done by genuine contractors - the ones who had hired me but then had left. The manager then hired 2 more guys who claimed 2 years c++ experience but did not have debugging concepts What happenned next was even more interesting. People like me not accustomed to resume fudging were laid off. Top management was totally lied to. The firm has managed to patent this product (it seems u can patent anything) and the management is waiting for a buyout. My tips for hiring people 1. Roles can be misleading - if u have performed a role - well what have u learnt from it 2.Trust the quality of experience and not the quantity 3.Trust guys whose resumes demonstrate ability to learn , growth of technology ie some old some new techologies, dont seem to fit 100% etc 4.Avoid managers who dont understand importance of teams etc 5.Consultants who impress too much are not always the ones who perform 6. Avoid guys who ask too much about design patterns etc to someone who has 2 years of experience in an interview 7. Avoid resumes that say something like "designed and developed " and nothing else 8. Ask whether the guy who claims to have 2 years of experience about version control , debugging , sql 9. Avoid outsourcers who tell u in the third world u get loads of people. I have worked in third world myself - the salary ratio is better if u consider cost of living in terms of average permanent salary in Europe. Outsourcers routinely fudge resume and u never get what u pay for.U think u get it cheap.All u get is more mature and better paid and far more technical project managers. Talent is never cheap. 10. Of course with a 100% genuine resume it is hard to get jobs as recruiters dont like u and neither do recruitment managers bademployee Mon Mar 04 13:18:38 EST 2002 Developers at the bottom of the totem poll An example of developer standing at our company. Our release control manager convinced the development manager that restructuring SourceSafe for the automated build would make the build quicker and more efficient. It didn´t matter that a dozen developers would have their productivity impacted for the benefit of an automated process. I argued but to no evail. Another example of undue influence and priorities gone haywire. Kevin kevjv@hotmail.com Tue Mar 05 18:14:12 EST 2002 Page 1 (earliest) Page 2 << Back to the Forum (Latest Stories) |
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