Richard said:
(e-mail address removed) wrote...
Your "goofy, expensive project" is somebody else's "business critical
application that provides us with a huge competitive advantage by
addressing new opportunities and changes in the marketplace."
If it's so damn critical, why are they always a(n) 0xCF?
That's the kind of stuff that gives senior management its woody, and
you aren't gonna change that by calling it goofy. You'll just get
yourself labelled as another antisocial programmer who is not a team
player. (Guess who gets laid off?)
In my usual employment scenario, I have
to be conversant with the business case for the project. If it's
goofy, I call it that and we fix it. I don't usually do
internal projects. I've done a couple, more or less on a
spare time basis. Never had much trouble with 'em - 30 minutes
worth of whiteboard, whap whap whap. These are usually
manufacturing utilities or data-gatherers one-off for
somebody.
Almost everything I ever developed was for sale to end customers,
so I really don't have a first hand view of internal projects,
although I've read enough horror stories...
If behaving as a fully functioning professional, with opinions
about strategy and tactics and "how to" is wrong, well, I'll
be wrong a good bit then. It has worked immensely well for me
for a long time. They hear "I'll take care of it" and it's
taken care of.
I do understand - the movement of the industry is away from this.
And things don't work as well as they used to, do they?
Are you Board-level management? No, I'd guess.
Nope.
<SPEAKING GENERALLY>
It isn't about chasing false economy. It's about getting cost
numbers on an operations budget to go down. MBE (Management by
Excel).
If the model lies to you, it is false economy.
See, Board-level management neither reads nor understands "the
literature." It does, however, understand the difference between
about $150 an hour, all told, for each BSCS in the USA vs. $30 an
hour, all told, for each MSCS offshore.
Look, this isn't original with me. There are a half-to-two dozen
old warhorse texts on the subject - by DeMarco, Brooks, others.
The money goes away because We Don't Understand What We're Doing
In This Enterprise, And We'd Like To Keep It That Away. Same
as in the "Reengineering" books - the secret is process analysis,
and process analysis is extremely politicially risky.
Couple in broken forms of measurement for projects, and you
get what you get.
It is like old school medicine before the French Revolution,
when the patient was in charge and the physician was servile.
If and when there's an IT "French Revolution"*, then
the IT people will truly be professionals and all this
will go away. And this does not mean that the doctor-patient
communications will be less important, just that the doctor
will be in charge.
*Meaning some event which will have the effect that the rise of
surgery in medicine had on medicine.
It also understands how to interpret the ROI of money pumped into
internal development projects vs. what it generally gets in return.
You will apparently be surprised to learn that a huge portion of the
money lost in internal projects represents direct cost of labor--
i.e., programmer costs. (Hardware purchased can be re-assigned.)
No, since you've made the distinction for "internal" projects, I'd
have to back off. For some reason, those don't work out as well as
when you're building products for consumption in the marketplace.
DeMarco et al have hypotheses and case studies, but it always looks
to me like these things are generally tribal warfare problems - in
which case outsourcing makes beacoup sense.
Pick up nearly any Harvard Business Review of the past 25 or 30
years. (That's what the Board reads.)
Heh. In addition to goat entrails and tea leaves? I don't
have to reiterate the abysmal state of board
governance in the U.S., do I? The ability of boards to deal
*especially* with IT issues is dramatically truncated.
I got 18 years of on-time-under-budget-and-works ( with
the odd exception ) under my belt. I get the facts and
make it so. It is not hard.
If U.S. corporate governance is an insoluble problem, then
we're all hosed. Hope it isn't, but I'm *extremely* skeptical.
But self-delusion is pretty easy to do. Corporate governance
is a symptom of a weakness in culture of the whole country,
and it is a profound weakness, principally reflect in the
dismal state of earnings.
Yeah, and people tried to keep various forms of aircraft off the
ground until somebody worked it out. Et cetera. Plain old dumb
determination is one of our species' stronger points.
To wit: IBM is trying it again.
Woohoo!
Their business-customer-support call centers? That's hardly an
equivalent example. You've got Sally in Des Moines trying to get a
problem solved by talking directly to Anuj in New Delhi, who's
politely and patiently following the troubleshooting script out of
his support book.
It's relevant in that it shows that there's at least one case that
round-tripped. This is yet another bubble, with the trade papers
proclaiming the fashion of the month and all the consultants
seeking receipts implmenting it.
Again, we've been-there-done-that. It's been about a generation.
I've interacted with some of those offshore software engineers. In
my experience, they're extremely competent (plus polite and patient,
which you can't always say the same about for US and European SEs).
I've had mixed experience with all the above. And it's not the
quality of the staff that is the main risk with offshoring.
It's the same dern problem as with internal projects - those
who ask for something don't understand how to ask the question.
Or worse - in order to sell the project, it must be underfunded
to slip the budget.
It's the medical practice thing again - people used to tell
physicians what to do. When the physicians stopped taking orders,
medicine started working.
This ignores completely the fact that some management teams are
sociopathic theives who will never produce working systems
no matter what is done to them. But so long as sociopaths
have a relative advantage in corporations, we'll see this.
I doubt you've really thought about it, frankly.
I have quite a bit.
I don't even have to write my own rebuttal. Just go re-read "Brave
New World"
They keep that in the fiction section for a reason.
and then describe how technology alleviated the forms of
tyranny depicted in that story.
It didn't. In that story. In our collected experience, there's
all manner of counterexamples to that.
I think you'll find that, instead,
technology was the means by which tyranny was effected.
To the looms then, Cap'n Ned.
