Subj : Re: advice To : comp.programming From : Randy Howard Date : Wed Aug 31 2005 07:23 pm Randy wrote (in article ): > If you're results oriented, major in IS or MIS or business and then plan > on getting something like an MBA. Was I the only one that found this statement hilarious? > That way you can focus on the bottom > line and the means of achieving it through organizing the efforts of > others, and NOT get mired in the details yourself. I've never known an IS/MIS person to do anything besides attend meetings and make excuses for why your request is number 3,214 on the "hot list" of requests, and that without an additional 13 million dollars in funding, it can't possibly happen before the next millennium. I remember one particular example from about 10 years ago. I am not making any of this up, although it may seem too hard to believe. 'Fortune 50' company. Painful meeting to argue about changing something which was 'owned' by IT instead of engineering, despite any rational reasons, which meant getting something out the door was going to be impossible without them making a change to broken piece of software between me and the other end of the manufacturing line. So, me and a co-worker, (today we would have been called 'a pair programming team' or some such BS) go to a meeting, along without about 15 people from the 'dark side'. After about 30 minutes of watching their pointless powerpoint presentation on how overworked they are, I finally get to interrupt long enough to walk to a whiteboard, and clearly outline the one-line change, literally, to a piece of software that had been very poorly designed, and implemented even worse. "Well, you see Randy, that's going to be very difficult to correct, because the person that originally wrote that is now vacationing in the Amazon jungle with some indians and will not be back for three months. Fred over here, he is responsible for maintaining it, but as you can see from these lovely charts, he is terribly overworked right now and can't do it anytime this year, unless you can get your food chain to convince my food chain that they'll help us fund another 3 headcount." My response was "Well, I certainly understand that you are overworked. Fortunately for us all, Mike and I here, we can literally make zero forward progress on our project until this is resolved. So, since we have nothing else to do, and since you so obviously have so many important things to work on, just give me access to the source tree for code in question, and I'll fix it before lunch is over, and we can sit down with you all and have a review of the single character change which I intend to check into the tree to resolve it. Failing that, if you let me have write access to the binary on the factory control server, I'll patch the byte in question in a matter of seconds, so my product can ship today, and we can argue about making the permanent change later. If you prefer, I can send you a program to make the patch for you, since your expert is in the jungle." You would have though I dropped a box of rattlesnakes on the table. Huge uproar, how dare I even begin to entertain the notion of modifying such incredibly complicated code, etc. In actual fact, it was a trivial piece of crap control module that had an obvious, easily corrected error in it, and it should probably have been a bash script instead of a binary anyway. I made this point, in a slightly more diplomatic fashion, then basically snapped as I proceeded to unload the heavy artillery. "Fine, this is what's going to happen. Either you fix it today, using whatever precious 'resources' you choose, or you let me fix it today, or I will march into the CEO's office (who hired me btw) and explain to him why this product which has already been announced to the public will not make it out on time, and then he can come ask you to explain it to him, which you will not enjoy, I can assure you." Suddenly, all barriers were removed, it's "priority" was raised several thousand places on the altar of the "Change Request Queue" and the problem was fixed, despite its 'incredible complexity' less than 30 minutes later. -- Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR) .