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Ask Slashdot: What Are Some Developer Secrets That Could Sink Your Business?
snydeq writes: In today's tech world, the developer is king -- and we know it. But if you're letting us reign over your app dev strategy, you might be in for some surprises, thanks to what we aren't saying, writes an anonymous developer in a roundup of developer secrets that could sink the business. "The truth is, we developers aren't always straight with you. We have a few secrets we like to keep for ourselves. The fact that we don't tell you everything is understandable. You're the boss, after all. Do you tell your boss everything? If you're the CEO, do you loop in the board on every decision? So don't be so surprised when we do it." What possible damaging programming dirt are you keeping the lid on? Some of the points the developer mentions in his/her report include: "Your technical debt is a lot bigger than you think," "We're infatuated with our own code," and "We'd rather build than maintain." If you can think of any others not mentioned in the report, we're all ears! This may be a good time to check the "Post Anonymously" box before you submit your comment.
Tallest nail gets hammered, keep my mouth shut hoping someone else takes the fall for being late. True story. Some 20 years ago I worked on Globalstar. The software was a good year late, we all knew it, but management a couple layers up didn't. They were launching a bunch of Globalstar satellites on a Russian rocket. There were 4 teams of us, all knew we were a year behind, sitting in a large conference room with a live link to the launch. Some 90 seconds in the rocket plowed into Russian real estate. We all looked at each other, breathed a sigh of relief, looked sad to our manager's managers, and went home knowing we were good with our 50 hour work weeks for another year.
Our server has a backdoor letting you submit arbitrary code that gets compiled and executed. We use it to fix things directly in production since everything is a mess and things break all the time. You don't even need to log in, just hit the right URL and you are in. I can't understand how this hasn't been used by a disgruntled employee to delete the entire DB or something like that. By the way, this is not a worthless startup, it's a hundred million dollar revenue per year operation.
I could do that install of our custom database base remotely, but, sometimes, I like to travel.
I need to be onsite to properly install the patch, but I don't want to miss my kid's birthday. I will "try all day" to install the patch remotely and discover sometime tomorrow that the customer "has a nonstandard configuration," which requires me to be at their site next week (not now).
BTW, for several years I spent about 60% of my time outside of my local city. I was given a generous expense account and put up in decent hotels. Each "day" on a client's site was an automatic 8 billable hours, plus time for pre- and post-visit memos. I did much of my coding on the plane. I always volunteered to "sacrifice" to make the trip so spare others that "hardship." My high billable hours was one factor in getting promoted. The previous person in that position had traveled very little, but the internet came along just in time. I was able to up my travel time to over 80% with corresponding benefits while managing the team through email and rudimentary document sharing. It also enabled me to avoid much of the office politics and bickering. I got to know the clients well (mainly by spending expense account money on them, or letting them spend theirs on me). When the inevitable periodic downsizing purges occurred, no one dared fire me because the clients would be upset.
I left that job to start my own company. My first client was my old bosses who wanted me to do basically what I was doing, but they paid me twice as much as my previous salary in consulting fees for doing even less work.
I am deeply appreciative of the opportunity. I got thrown into troubleshooting the most difficult problems, so, while I usually worked less, sometimes it was quite challenging which kept my skills sharp. I got a chance to see the world, and accrued lots of travel mileage and hotel points which I later used to take the family on vacations I could never have afforded otherwise .I had lots of down time in hotel rooms to study new coding languages, techniques, and time to build my own library of music and digital processing apps, some of which I still use today.