On Fri, Jun 06, 2014 at 01:24:20PM +0000, Dejan Lekic via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...] > A typical scenario is when (top-level) manager (M) want thing > yesterday, and tell senior engineer (SE) > > M: How long will it take? > SE: Well, we did not even analyse the requirements for this feature. > Let's spend some time brainstorming this first, and then I will be > able to do better estimation. > M: We have no time for that, and I think you already have all you > need. > SE: OK, 3 days. > M: What??? We need this thing yesterday! > SE: Well, I could do a quick hack... It will take 1 day, but we will > not have time to test, no time for code quality, etc. > M: DO IT!!! > (that "quick hack" code stays there because next week another urgent > thing came, and SE never had time to make the code better) > > Moral of the story: it is not SE whom we have to blame for bad code, > it can easily be the management who made deliberate decision for > that... [...]
Yeah that sounds very familiar. A typical situation at my job goes something like this: Customer: I want feature X! Sales rep: OK, we'll implement X in 1 month. Customer: No, I want it by last month! Sales rep: OK, and we'll throw in feature Y too, at no extra charge. (Later) Sales rep (to coders): Here's a new project for you: implement X and Y. Coders: That sounds really complicated! It will take us 2 months. Sales rep: What?! We don't have 2 months! They want this by *last* month! Coders: That's impossible. Even the quickest hack we can do will take 1 month. Sales rep: This is a huge customer and it's going to cost us a billion dollar deal! You have to *make* it work! Coders: sigh... OK, 3 weeks. Sales rep: No, yesterday. Coders: Fine, tomorrow we'll make a paper-n-glue model. Sales rep: Today. Coders: Sigh... T -- Gone Chopin. Bach in a minuet.