What Gartner Is Telling Your Boss

Littlewink writes, "Esther Schindler's latest analysis reveals what Gartner is telling your boss at their annual conference. Excerpts: '"The future of application development is not about programmer productivity," said [Gartner analyst] Hoyle during the keynote presentation, "but in assembling functionality from components." [Gartner analyst] Veccio stated "Why would you ever code an app from scratch again? Why would you need to?"' According to Schindler (who does not 'drink the Kool-Aid'), Gartner urges managers to consider better process control and governance, managing 'application portfolios' much as they do stock portfolios. Part of this discipline is 'killing development projects early and often.'"

Comments

I do 'middleware', and I also do 'supercomputers'

[quiberon2]

Asking "Why would you ever code an app from scratch again? Why would you need to?" is like asking "Why would you ever want to have a baby".

Sometimes it's the only way to develop what you need; sometimes it just happens by accident; and sometimes someone gives you one to look after for them.

You don't want to have a baby very often, but it's just as well that some people have them sometimes.

We're thinking about throwing Java out. It has the same problems with 'synchronisation' that C has with 'memory allocation'. You can't get it right all the time, it's too hard.

And Intel are coming up with these 80-Core chips.

A real lot of stuff will have to be rebuilt if we do. Hopefully automatically built from modelling tools. But there will have to be people, to resolve the defects, if it is to support the business.

Re:Your boss is just an object

[aussersterne]

Trouble is, the CEOs who promote this crap can jump from ship to ship-- not all of us can do that.

Seriously. Over the years I've worked in software, networks, and publishing, and I've never had the pleasure of working under any person for longer than about a year. Invariably when I've been hired, I've had the feeling that my new boss wasn't quite on top of things.

But on top of things or not, sure enough, within a couple of months of my being hired there's always an announcement that congratulations are in order because boss will be leaving us for much bigger and better things, or has been promoted to a new and more ridiculous level of abstraction within the organization. Then there's a party and some cake and silly goodbyes.

Then, the new guy comes in. He's always groomed, young-middle-age-ish, clearly an MBA or someone who's read a few too many business books and has been wearing a tie since he was four. He wrings his hands a lot and speaks in a worried-measured-reassuring tone and holds "orientation interviews" (or some variation thereon) with everyone during which he asks a lot of dumb, general, or both questions and says that he'll appreciate help in getting up to speed and he's really excited to have the opportunity to work with everyone.

Within the first two-three months, he'll fuck everything up, miss a pile of obligations or responsibilities, implement a whole slew of unworkable programs, misrepresent nearly everything we're doing in meetings with upper management, and then after a few months, just as everyone gets the feeling that he might finally be having to face the realities of the business, pull his head out of his ass, learn and scale back a little, and roll back some of the stupid changes he made, there will be an announcement... and a goodbye party...

And in will come a new guy, pick up all the old guy's stuff that wasn't quite working anyway, and soon there will be the meetings again... and the initiatives and changes again...

Wash, rinse, repeat as these jackasses earn six figures and get promoted up, up, and away in their beautiful balloons while the people at the bottom do the real work *in spite of* their idiotic tie-speak, with nary a reward year over year.