That's the question plaguing literally thousands, perhaps millions of loyal readers of this senseless diatribe...
I was "lucky" enough to be sitting in an all day meeting, from 8:30 AM to like 4:15PM. Yeah, it was a blast. Our little development group is embarking (allegedly) on a major Phase II development arc on a series of internal applications..the ones that we just spent more than two years working on. Some of the development will be changing stuff that wasn't quite right, some will be adding functionality, and lastly some will be new from the ground up. We got to sit in this meeting as a group because our boss (who is brand new with the company) has a plan. A vision if you will.
His first order of business being the new guy was to sit down one on one with us old guys to find out what's going on. Good idea. 11 out of the 12 developers here all described a crazy duct taped and marinara drenched pile of spagetti code that this near billion dollar enterprise runs on. The one hold out is a guy that feels that his code is nearly sacred and that there is no way anything could be better. He's also a numb nut too. But what was interesting is that probably 5 of the 11 have "their" solution. I say do this, this and this, get rid of this and buy this and problem solved. Somebody else said do something different, keep this and buy these three things. Needless to say, the new guy was a bit confused. Nobody got personal (well at least I didn't) but it was clear that we've got a problem, just no consensus on how to solve it. So the solution: lock everybody in a room and let's hammer this all out.
Now I'm rather cynical about this whole process. I firmly support the new guy, what he's doing will be good for my company, my department and me. But the company is going to come roaring back and bite him, bite him hard. This is a management team that thinks development should take days, not years. They envisioned a complete overhaul and rewrite of our merchant accounting systems, had nothing but requirements scratched out on napkins, selected a critical piece of 3rd party code that wasn't done (and actually still isn't) and gave the dev group 4 months to get it done. We're 2.3 years later and it still isn't done. So what we're going to do because we're so much smarter now and have a department manager that has worked in the big leagues, we're going to tell the bosses that what they just spent 2.3 years and like 8 million dollars needs to be shelled, plus that other major piece of internal application that wan't developed will need to be rebuilt. Oh yeah, one other thing, we need to have full resources on the new stuff, so all of the old stuff will have to suffice until we're done in a couple of years
Again, call me crazy, but I just don't see that happening.
I was "lucky" enough to be sitting in an all day meeting, from 8:30 AM to like 4:15PM. Yeah, it was a blast. Our little development group is embarking (allegedly) on a major Phase II development arc on a series of internal applications..the ones that we just spent more than two years working on. Some of the development will be changing stuff that wasn't quite right, some will be adding functionality, and lastly some will be new from the ground up. We got to sit in this meeting as a group because our boss (who is brand new with the company) has a plan. A vision if you will.
His first order of business being the new guy was to sit down one on one with us old guys to find out what's going on. Good idea. 11 out of the 12 developers here all described a crazy duct taped and marinara drenched pile of spagetti code that this near billion dollar enterprise runs on. The one hold out is a guy that feels that his code is nearly sacred and that there is no way anything could be better. He's also a numb nut too. But what was interesting is that probably 5 of the 11 have "their" solution. I say do this, this and this, get rid of this and buy this and problem solved. Somebody else said do something different, keep this and buy these three things. Needless to say, the new guy was a bit confused. Nobody got personal (well at least I didn't) but it was clear that we've got a problem, just no consensus on how to solve it. So the solution: lock everybody in a room and let's hammer this all out.
Now I'm rather cynical about this whole process. I firmly support the new guy, what he's doing will be good for my company, my department and me. But the company is going to come roaring back and bite him, bite him hard. This is a management team that thinks development should take days, not years. They envisioned a complete overhaul and rewrite of our merchant accounting systems, had nothing but requirements scratched out on napkins, selected a critical piece of 3rd party code that wasn't done (and actually still isn't) and gave the dev group 4 months to get it done. We're 2.3 years later and it still isn't done. So what we're going to do because we're so much smarter now and have a department manager that has worked in the big leagues, we're going to tell the bosses that what they just spent 2.3 years and like 8 million dollars needs to be shelled, plus that other major piece of internal application that wan't developed will need to be rebuilt. Oh yeah, one other thing, we need to have full resources on the new stuff, so all of the old stuff will have to suffice until we're done in a couple of years
Again, call me crazy, but I just don't see that happening.