Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Entertainment at the Enterprise

The things I like about working on a 50 million project:

Spending an hour on what floor the developers will sit on
Spending two hours on what to label the boxes on a whiteboard
Spending a week figuring out the conflicting "visions" of the VPs

These are my favorite things. Sometimes it would just be better to stay at home.

Sad but true but I'm just one of several software architects on a 50 million dollar project. It's amazing how much cash these huge projects burn and on what little gets accomplished.

For example, can you imagine spending an hour arguing over the building and floor location for the developers. Why? Who cares? Because the perception is, the Director they sit next to, gets more respect and power. Think about it. If the core team sits next to you, you are perceived as having more control and power over what they do on the project. But an hour?

Since there are conflicting views on what we are supposed to do with the big bucks, we spend an inordinate amount of time on variants of the solution. Without a project charter no one really knows what the high level requirements are. But that's no matter, we plow right ahead. It reminds me of a cartoon of the boss yelling over his shoulder at his gape-mouthed developer: "Start coding, I'll go find out what the requirements are."

Crazy. Just plain crazy.

I could go work for Google. That place sounds very cool.

...dave
Yesterday, is history...
Tomorrow, is a mystery...
Today is a gift...
That's why it's called,
The present...

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