Good article on programming vs management problems

[jcstille]

I thought this was a good article on bad programming might not be the problem behind all of the software problems, rather bad implementation and management.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/biztech....ap/index.html

[crackers]

Yeah, read that with interest. Unfortunately, it hit very close to home.

Scary book title of the week: "How to Survive Deathmarch Projects." Just reading the synopsis, I figured I'd already survived enough of them to have practical experience over a $50US book...

[Ug]

God I'm glad i'm not going into computing for a career...

[Dog-One]

Reminds me of a time when I went to work late one night. Employeed by the City of Little Rock, AR, I finished dinner and drove to the office to do some more work on my Public Works scheduling system. When I got there, I expected to see only the mainframe operator. But on this night, the Unix guy was there with the three telephones set to hands-free. After listening for a bit, I asked if I could help. Come to find out the 911 system was down--three failing drives in the RAID arrays. The primary system was completely down and the backup system was close to being down. The Unix guy was knowledgable in AIX but not the DEC Ultrix the systems were running on. The DEC maintanance contract had expired two years ago and there wasn't enough money in the budget to have them come in and repair the system. The outsourced 911 system developers were trying to help as much as they could over the phone, but didn't seem to want to work for free (who could blame them). Besides, once they got the gist that it was a hardware problem, they were quite willing to sit on their hands.

I managed to scrape up some drives from other machines, get them installed, partitioned, formatted and get as much data as I could moved over. Finally, got the primary machine back online around 4am. Being pretty burnt out, I left a note on the boss' desk and headed for bed. At around 8am the phone rang and I proceeded to get a butt chewing from the boss for not being at work and for taking a disk drive from the developers SQL server (who had quit two weeks prior, BTW). I bowed my head and took it like a man and began writing my resignation when I got to work around 9am.

That incident really showed the true colors of the management I worked for. It surprised me to say the least. I would have thought that someone in my boss' position would have been more professional in the matter, but the evidence to the contrary was overwheling.

[jcstille]

Dog-One, this is something you need to give to all your manager. http://www.plethora.net/~seebs/faqs/hacker.html

And everyone should read that. It is another good article. Although some of it is humorous a lot of it comes true. Management just doesn't understand it, and they are going to have to.

[pigpen]

Originally Posted by jcstille

http://www.plethora.net/~seebs/faqs/hacker.html ... everyone should read that. It is another good article. Although some of it is humorous a lot of it comes true. Management just doesn't understand it, and they are going to have to.

This is really a great article. Now I know for sure: I'm a hacker, too. There's nothing more boring than repetitve work. And there's nothing more intriguing than a diffcult task. Makes me forget to sleep.

[Dog-One]

Originally Posted by jcstille

Dog-One, this is something you need to give to all your manager. http://www.plethora.net/~seebs/faqs/hacker.html

And everyone should read that. It is another good article. Although some of it is humorous a lot of it comes true. Management just doesn't understand it, and they are going to have to.

Good read, though I'd didn't feel like a hacker at the time. I just didn't want some poor old guy dying of a heart attack while the responsible folks sat on their duff. I think my Grandfather told me once, "Those that CAN, DO."

[jcstille]

See I hold the same opinion of this article, and I fit into these categories for the most part.

[Ug]

I really don't fit into the "hacker" category. I'm more of a techno-literate person.