On Friday, 6 June 2014 at 14:39:03 UTC, H. S. Teoh via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
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
That's why I love being a manager AND a coder!
;-)
---
Paolo
