No offense to the original poster, but I will bet a pound to a penny I know what will happen next.
He will take the estimate of the dude who says "seven months".
He won't bother absorbing the other 7000 words of Slashdotters' input.
He will take this quote to his professor.
The professor will then give him a good grade and praise him for thinking out-of-the-box.
This positive reinforcement then makes him not bother to understand the deeper concepts at work in Software Engineering. But what the heck, he has an MBA and an assured future!
OK, I got laid off in September. It took me six weeks to find something new. When I did, I had two offers on the table. I admit, one was with the help of a friend but things did not seem toooooo bad (BTW, I am from the UK, too).
However, the problem is this: we put up with this crap. Coders need to be less timid and more proactive.
I have been working on a project with some suits who simply did not know what they were doing. I swear this is true: one of them kept making stupid mistakes and asked me to look over his shoulder while he programmed.
I told my management in no uncertain terms and with easy to understand metaphors that this consultancy were simply not up to the job and I showed them why. The result was that in-house programmers have now been given more respect.
Though this story ended happilly, there were some of my fellow programmers during the project who fatalistically told me not to bother management as things would never change.
The moral is that we should stop bitching about the suits and start doing something. If you don't, you have only yourself to blame.
You say:
"They have an incredible aptitude for detail and complexity."
Then, you list all the things they are bad at (programming to standards, managing common libraries, UI consistency, working to business and functional specifications, documentation, etc, etc..)
So, you are saying "they're great programmers except when they program".
Dude, are you a manager with no experience of coding by any chance?
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't we bring these people into America?
I know we cannot stop progress but why don't we use India for managers?
I'm not being facetious. Managers are the most expensive part of an organisation and management is the easiest skill to learn.
No offense to the original poster, but I will bet a pound to a penny I know what will happen next.
He will take the estimate of the dude who says "seven months".
He won't bother absorbing the other 7000 words of Slashdotters' input.
He will take this quote to his professor.
The professor will then give him a good grade and praise him for thinking out-of-the-box.
This positive reinforcement then makes him not bother to understand the deeper concepts at work in Software Engineering. But what the heck, he has an MBA and an assured future!
(BTW, My tongue is most certainly in my cheek!)
Leave, you idiot.
OK, I got laid off in September. It took me six weeks to find something new. When I did, I had two offers on the table. I admit, one was with the help of a friend but things did not seem toooooo bad (BTW, I am from the UK, too).
However, the problem is this: we put up with this crap. Coders need to be less timid and more proactive.
I have been working on a project with some suits who simply did not know what they were doing. I swear this is true: one of them kept making stupid mistakes and asked me to look over his shoulder while he programmed.
I told my management in no uncertain terms and with easy to understand metaphors that this consultancy were simply not up to the job and I showed them why. The result was that in-house programmers have now been given more respect.
Though this story ended happilly, there were some of my fellow programmers during the project who fatalistically told me not to bother management as things would never change.
The moral is that we should stop bitching about the suits and start doing something. If you don't, you have only yourself to blame.
You say:
"They have an incredible aptitude for detail and complexity."
Then, you list all the things they are bad at (programming to standards, managing common libraries, UI consistency, working to business and functional specifications, documentation, etc, etc..)
So, you are saying "they're great programmers except when they program".
Dude, are you a manager with no experience of coding by any chance?
They brought in a few Indian programmers who were so poor that I had to get my boss to defer payment untill they fixed their botch-job.
If this is my competition, then I am not too worried about the future of my livelihood.
Dude, those were very selective analogies you chose.
Why did you choose car manufacturing as your analogy rather than, say, the legal profession?
Making cars may have been automated but making legal contracts has not been.
Why do you think that programming will go the same way as car manufacturing rather than, say, the legal profession.
If you disagree then please tell me why your comparison of professions is so great and mine is not.
Let them go and save the money. If they were so good in the first place, the company would not be in the trouble it is.
Where is the free market?
If these executives destroyed the company, why are they being asked to stay?
> a certain lack of detailed knowledge about what
> is possible and what is not might be the key to
> successful project management
So you are saying that ignorance is an asset in management?
Well, I had always suspected this to be true!
Phill