RoxxSoft Development Blog
Posts tagged leaders
A wrong approach to outsourcing and how corruption can earn a good place in business. Part #1
Sep 3rd
A wrong approach to outsourcing and how corruption can earn a good place in business. Part #1
The last company i worked on, had a very wrong approach to outsourcing, apparently someone thought a good idea to send the project leaders on site, sometimes at the other side of the globe, in different time zones, while the developers and testers remained on our offices, this caused so many communication and trust issues that projects started to die all over the place.
A case i remember very vividly happened like this, we had to build a new installer our project, since we had just recently added a few components that required a windows restart and several modifications to the system, so i assigned a task to one of our guys, he started working on the installer, and while he was testing, he had to restart his own system each time he made big changes to the installer code, just because, you know, we didn’t have a testing machine, we only had our workstations for testing (yes, management was that cheap), so as it happens, our project leader goes online and sees our guy is offline, he immediately contacts me through IM and asks what’s going on, why isn’t he online? i explain the situation, he says, well OK, let me know when he will be back online as i need to know the status of that task.
After ending our chat, he goes and starts asking several team members about our guy, he goes even as far as saying that this guy hasn’t been on the office for two days or more, and that we are hiding his absence and helping in cheating our project leader, this was so comical, that we asked our guy to come online and end this situation, but of course that wasn’t enough, project leader simply said “you just got to the office didn’t you? you are going to get fired, you are lazy and have been missing because i have tried to contact you today and you didn’t show up”.
In a team where what the project leaders stated had to be taken as final, what chance we had to explain this was a mistake? the project leader was so disconnected from our team, that he didn’t even knew most of the new guys, and only through phone calls and chats we could get organized and have status meetings, which by the way, were awful, long and prone to mistakes and misunderstandings.
After a while, it became obvious this approach was terrible, so a few developers were tasked with local management issues and as bridges between the ‘real management’ on site and the developers, this caused even more trouble, since we talked directly to our local ‘leaders’, which most of the time, could not actually understand the issues and in turn they delivered wrong status reports to the on site leaders, this caused trouble and people started to fight each other for any reason at all, projects started to fall behind, the client didn’t knew what was going on, as management had a policy of silence and what happens on our offices stays on our offices, at the end, management had another idea, instead of sending the project leader to the client site, they created a new position on our side, a project leader that was going to handle all development and testing activities, as well as talking to the developers for any personal issues, meanwhile, the ‘fake’ project leader on site was supposed to continue working with the client as if he actually was the project leader, this caused still more disconnection and lack of trust from the developers, as we felt we didn’t have a voice since there were many layers between the client and ourselves, and we “knew too much” so we weren’t allowed to talk directly to the client, less we would bring the truth out by mistake..
It has been almost a full year since i left, and from what i have heard from friends and coworkers, things are still the same, and the company is still being listed among the best places to work, and receiving awards and creating a very good name for itself, while on the dungeons someone does the dirty work, someone up there receives an award for an excellent leadership..
That goes to show that on this industry, eye candy will always be valued more than actual content or features, and so it goes the same for software than for PR and the clients.
Have you seen that SSL port?
Aug 24th
Have you seen that SSL port?
Back in the day when i was still a zombie developer in some big crappy company :P, we were asked to implement SSL support in our main project, as always, our clueless leader made a really big deal out of it, went to wikipedia and read a few blog posts about SSL and the problems that we could face, then screwed what should have been a very simple operation.
Armed with all the gained knowledge he got from the web, he asked if there were some of us who knew what SSL was, after some of us came forward and say yes, he gave us the usual talk, recommended us to look at some very good sites on the web were we could learn all about SSL and finally, gave us the url for ‘a very good site were you can find a lot of things SSL related: http://www.openssl.org’
Finally, he doubted we could handle the project so he recommended to hire another developer just for this task, a ‘SSL expert’ was hired, it took one week for him to research what was supposed we should do, at the end of the week, he came to me and said, have you done some code already? i took a deep look at him and asked, why? have you? and he went white and said, well yeah i downloaded a few samples from the web, but i can’t compile, i get linker errors and can’t fix them, he spend all the week playing with some very old code he downloaded from the web!
At the end, i had to add SSL support in two days, since the guy burned all the time we had, two week delivery remember, lets use ‘Agile development’ and surprise the client and make miracles! that’s the spirit yeah! management, as always, was clueless, they asked him what was the result of the week he spent ‘researching’ and he simply said ‘i wrote the SSL support and one of your developers is integrating everything’, and of course nobody asked me what really went on, project leaders don’t make mistakes do they?
But anyway, after that, another issue came forward, the big boss didn’t understood a word about SSL or sockets (or anything at all) so he asked, do we have SSL support for this release cycle? and the answer was yes, then he asked for details, and we, as inocent developers we were, gave them away, and that’s were all hell broke lo0se :P, he simply could not understand how the same port number we were using before for simple sockets was now the ‘SSL port’, since we didn’t preserved support for simple sockets and instead used the same port for SSL, after the meeting ended, we got a call from our project leader, completely freaked out asking what the hell was going on and what had we done with the ‘SSL port’ and the ‘old port’, they couldn’t understand that SSL was just encrypting the data over the same port, there had to be a “SSL port” as if it was a physical port, the joke went on for months after that, we even had an idea of printing some milk carton with an ad for the missing ‘port’..
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