RoxxSoft Development Blog
Posts tagged Management
I’m not going to understand anything, call me..
Sep 8th
I’m not going to understand anything, call me..
I once had a project leader that required special help at all the project status meetings, this does may sound silly, but it is not, once it becomes obvious that he actually was not capable of doing the work he was hired to do, and that he relied on other people’s explanations to understand what he needed to do and how.
He always contacted developers by IM to ask about the progress of certain task, and about a minute or so into the status report, he would give up and say something like “i don’t understand, call me”, and then, after a second or two, “I’m calling, answer the phone”, this started an internal joke between all developers in which he contacted them by IM saying something like “I’m not going to understand anything, call me” and then closed the IM window and waited for the call..
Once in the call, it became required at all times for people to use metaphors to explain the simplest things, otherwise things would go nowhere and the calls usually ended with everyone really angry and frustrated because of their failure at explaining such a simple issue.
What good is a leader that can’t understand the issues of the project? at the end, this lack of competence will result in harm to the project, as people struggle trying to explain why a new feature can’t be added at this time because the current code base is not able to support the new addition until a later phase of the project, we all know the story, about how he will ask what needs to be done and expect it to be done next day, without actually reasoning and understanding the complexity or relevance of the task.
How people like this get to be on management positions? We once interviewed a candidate for a developer position in our team, he presented a wonderful resume, the guy basically knew everything and had worked for everyone since the year he finished college and before, when half of the interview was gone, we already had noticed he wasn’t very good at coding or, well, anything at all, he also knew we had noticed, so he came up with the following: “I know I’m not very good at software development, but I have great leadership skills, I can manage people and I’m very good at delegating tasks to others”, to which we had to put the call on hold and have a really good laugh, and then, one of the interviewers simply asked “so you are very good at delegating tasks to others, how good are you at being delegated a task from someone else?” and then, the call ended..
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.
Slow Leadership blog closes its doors
Sep 2nd
Slow Leadership blog closes its doors
I started reading the slow leadership blog about 4 or 5 years ago, i really liked everything i was reading and I’ve learned a lot from that site, it is a shame that now it has closed, sadly, but it was kind of expected since Carmine Coyote announced he was taking a break about two months ago.
I always wondered how he managed to keep up with both the blog and personal life at the same time, it is actually very hard to find time between work, friends, family, personal hobbies and interests, and then, a web site with hundreds or thousands of readers, i certainly wouldn’t be able to handle it all, that’s why I’ve never really commit to blogging in the first place, so many things to do outside and so little time to do them.
I hope he will be able to enjoy more his life now that he doesn’t have the pressure of managing a popular web site, lets just hope he will keep the site up so that future readers can come and at least learn from what is already there, i guess this is one of the bad things about the web, one moment it is there, the next has gone and can’t be brought back, its harder with books but can also happen, but at least you can go and find a used book in some dark old library, something that on the web, may not be possible at all..
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’..
Agile development not
Aug 24th
Agile development not
About two years ago, while still working on a cubicle for some crappy very big company, i was asked to implement a windows file system filter driver, the project leader, as usual, knew zero about windows drivers or what is required to build them.
So i was asked to take care of everything, from gathering the requirements, creating the work environment, documenting, downloading SDKs, and finally, implementing the driver.
The time allocated for all these tasks, including the driver design, development, testing and bug fixing?
Two weeks.
It appears someone up there in management who liked to read blogs and wikipedia entries as if they were highly technical documents, actually believed Agile development meant 15 days deliveries, not of product features or fixes, but of complete products, fully tested software releases, all features included and without any bugs left, starting on day zero with no code at all, then 15 days later, a full solution was to be delivered, no bugs, one week development, one week testing, no more, second week Friday didn’t count, as we had a demo with the clients early in the morning.
So, after barely getting some sleep for two weeks, i finally managed to include most of the required features, although the code was not really release quality, it actually worked, and finally, with a lot of pressure, i managed to release it after three weeks.
Two weeks later, when some obscure bug came up and XP machines were crashing randomly, he asked what was up, how could this be if we had time for testing and bug fixing? when confronted with the truth that a Windows driver can’t and won’t be implemented in two weeks even if you have 20 developers, and when asked for more time for debugging and testing, his answer was a simple one, “this development ended two weeks ago, we can’t use more time for that task”
A few more weeks went by, i was asked to continue working on other projects and features, and at the same time, to work on the driver on extra time or free time, or at home, when things didn’t improve and the crashes were still happening, the big boss canceled the driver project (actually the entire main project was canned, but that’s a very big and different story for a future post), we couldn’t deliver the promised results, of course it was not to blame on bad Agile development understanding or extremely delusional leaders, but in the developers and their lack of skills, we had a good laugh at all these ‘facts’ as we got the honor of hearing them directly from the big boss.
Priceless
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