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Over the years, the Bad Managers stories have struck a chord with programmers, managers and workplace slaves all over the World. Now it's your turn to tell it like it is!
Some suggested topics:
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That was my idea!
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Chained to your desk
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Crazy co-workers
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Wayward programmers
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Good ideas gone bad
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Bizarre management decisions
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Or anything else that's happened to you at the workplace...
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Story Index: What´s best for the vendor, vs. what´s best for the customer
Anonymous person Will The Real Program Stand Up?
Anonymous Fix the Ground, not the Wheel
Anonymous Managers that panic
Anonymous person re: Managers that panic
Andy Stevens
97-page method of a class - or the perils of drag&drop programming.
anotherAnonymous
The Stories: What´s best for the vendor, vs. what´s best for the customer
Here´s one for the Bizarre Management Decisions category:
Our company has forged an alliance (or is that partnership) with BEA - simply because they are the "market leader". This means we HAVE to use WebLogic 5.1 (not 6, mind) for all our consultancy work. Never mind what might be right for the customer. Perhaps they have a low-traffic website that just needs a low-end ecommerce solution. Tomcat and MySQL would be perfect - but no, we have to recommend that they use WebLogic!!
Anonymous person
UK
Mon Oct 08 10:40:23 EDT 2001
Will The Real Program Stand Up?
I was assigned to take over a project that had been running for over two years with very little to show for it. The week before I took it over, the two programmers had given the client a demonstration of the application and the client was very happy, so happy they wanted our company to take it over and make it viable as quickly as possible. Interesting to note that the two programmres where working by themselves and there was no administrator, project manager, etc.
I immediately went looking for documentation...there was none. I talked to the programmers and they were very "close to the chest" on what the program actually did. As I began looking further and further into the applicaiton I found that there was no application. The demonstration was a ´shell´. Everything was hard coded. There was no database. That day both programmers quit without notice, and before I could fire them". Its was then my job to go to the client and explain to them why their $400,000 project was nothing but hard code. That was one of the most interesting visits I´ve ever made to a client.
As an aside, the client was so impressed with our honesty, we were given a 6 million dollar contract over the next three years to "do it the right way".
Anonymous
Tue Oct 09 10:48:02 EDT 2001
Fix the Ground, not the Wheel
Our branch of the company produced course software that installed and ran just fine on its own (save for copy protected versions, but copy protection never works anyway). Head Office branch built an overly ambitious internet course seller/renter that ran the courses (ours and others).
Suddenly, Head Office Branch discovers a bug that occurs if their software runs about 30 of our old courses in a certain way. Head Office Branch orders us to fix the 30 courses.
Our branch points out that since the problem only occurs with their program, shouldn´t they simply fix that one program rather than have us rework 30 of our courses?
Head Office Branch disagrees, stating that the effort needed to change their one program is too great.
Result: programmers of Our branch end up reworking the 30 programs to account for a bug in the Head Office Branch program.
Hanging´s too good for them...
Anonymous
Anytown, Anywhere
Thu Nov 15 11:21:03 EST 2001
Managers that panic
I have had a few of these. The project starts out with best of intentions, processes in place. Suddenly, the project manager twigs that they´ve undercut themselves to get the gig, and worse still there is no chance that the project will be completed by the promised dead-line.
So all good practices go straight out the window - so-called "short cuts" like no testing, no QA, no more designing. Just code, code, code. And suddenly the project ends up taking twice as long, or failing entirely.
Anonymous person
UK
Wed Nov 28 11:37:05 EST 2001
re: Managers that panic
Yep, I´ve had a few of those. I guess every project has been like that. Everyone wants to do things properly - until the pressure is on.
Andy Stevens
UK
Sun Dec 02 12:08:48 EST 2001
97-page method of a class - or the perils of drag&drop programming.
I joined a project that returned the results of the database call in XML, took about 20 seconds for that portion to execute. I was tasked with speeding the thing up. Most obvious thing was to take out what I noticed was MANY active System.out.println statements. One method (this is in VAJ, so one can edit by method rather than by class) looked a little long to scan thru by eye, so I clicked on ´print´. After a long time (and some glares from my co-workers) the printer finally stopped - 97 pages! Removing some of the System.out.println statements got the execution speed down under 0.1 seconds. By the way, the guy who wrote this code (actually a nice guy) still thinks its great & gets very offended when we call it "the hundred page method". Complains we´re exaggerating! He has some political pull, so we got nowhere claiming we´d have to ´refactor´ a bit. Needless to say, the code only worked under a very limited set of circumstances, and little changes in one place would break the entire article. We spent half-a-million dollars and six months trying to make it work without re-writing it; then the project and division went belly-up.
anotherAnonymous
metro, US
Tue Jan 08 20:23:25 EST 2002
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