XYZ services salesman sells ABC company a "system" that "allows forward thinking businesses autonomous connections to all their systems"
PHB buys the system for tons of money
PHB talks to his own IT staff about it, and they discover it will mean extra work for them anyway
They also realize they could have done the same thing easily through web services/xml for a fraction of the cost
XYZ company's "system" turns out to be a java developer who will require most of the analysis on ABC company's requirements to be done by the ABC company's IT staff while XYZ is billing
The "system" goes over budget and time, and the deliverable is nothing more than trading of flat files between current systems
XYZ gets lots of money, and ABC's IT staff get's additional work in supporting the "system"
I've seen it happen many times over the last 12 years. Each year they come in with a new buzzword or catchphrase for the same old crap. I've threatened to walk into someones office with a competing system for SAP for a fraction of the cost.
"In this one box, I have a system that will handle every piece of business your company does, all in one repository. All it will require is for you to hire some of our developers for too much money, and have them write some custom code to shape it into your business needs. It's called DB2 (or SQL Server, or Oracle, or...)."
she would rather see engineers clocking billable hours on boring/pointless/mismanaged client projects than doing R&D do improve our software or discussing business/technology strategy, which we all know is the job of the CIOs, not the developers/engineers
I've seen more of that in my career than I'd care to mention too. On that SMTP project, we could have beat the deadline and come in WAY under budget. After all, the cisco "system" was nothing more than software. What do these companies think developers are paid to do? If written in house, there are no middlemen in the form of salesmen and project managers, nor is there any markup to keep someone elses building's lights on.
I hope someone else has a different experience, but the developer role in corporations seems to lean closer and closer to that of system support.
You ought to be modded +5 Insightful on that one. As a professional developer, I'm sick of PHB's buying into the white-shoed-salesman jargon. At JPMorgan Chase, my PHB bought a $200,000 "system" from Cisco for handling customer service team e-mails. When it failed miserably, I and another developer wrote an SMTP front end in a matter of weeks (our time cost JMPC $7200) and it had more features.
Our manager asked why we didn't mention we could do that before, which shocked me. My response was that he never mentioned this new "system" until it was already paid for. We were his programmers, and this was a programming issue. In the future he should consider talking to his programmers before he spent massive sums on ideas.
Too true. As a matter of fact, he responded with that specific answer twice, and vaguely a few times. Just another guy in white shoes and matching belt that left his chin out for ths reporter.
It was an enjoyable read, simply because I hate the white shoe types.
Coffee is made by boiling ground coffee beans in (surprise!) boiling water.
Actually, at most restaurants (McDonald's included) it's made by steam. Water is boiled, the steam is collected and when it condenses it drips through the coffee grounds. By the time it's servable, it can have cooled to quite a lower temperature than the 212 F required to boil the water in the first place.
A simple test was done to compare coffee temperatures, and nobody came within 20 degrees F of the 180 McDonald's kept theirs.
She never asked for $3MM, the jury awarded her that amount because of McDonald's stance on the issue. That large amount was a punishment for McDonald's having received numerous complaints and not doing anything about it.
Nice post! I made a (only slightly) similar post yesterday. Yours, however, was MUCH better detailed, and I thought the punitives were only one day of coffee sales.
The media (always a target) seems to be the blame for the urban legend part of this. When the story broke, the details were limited, and the world only heard "Woman gets $3MM for spilled coffee." I kept up a bit and leared the details as the story went on, but had to really dig for them.
I'll have to keep those details around if you don't mind, as her story seems to keep coming up.
If by connection you mean Paul Allen, then yes, I did the research (I'll take the higher ground on name calling here). Paul Allen has been out of MS since 1983. That's research. Other than Paul Allen, there isn't a connection between the two. I'm just stating the facts, rather than making accusations.
Actually, this is in 8i, and admittedly, I have no experience with 9i or 10g (we'll never need the 10g power here, at least not in my careerspan). I posted a longer commentary here regarding the manual processing we have to do, and Oracle's recommended practice.
I understand your comment, but to me it's both a feature and a nuisance. Oracle, out of the box, seems to require an in depth knowledge that you shouldn't need just to get a small database rolling. In the past, they weren't concerned with small DB users, but that's a market they've decided they wanted to break into in the last couple of years.
While MS SQL Server isn't the best option for VLDB's (although it's getting there), nor is Sybase anything, it (as well as DB2) doesn't just automate the table EXTENTS for you, but manages cleanup automatically. Oracle's filesystem, IMHO, was a mistake on their part. When you remove data from tables, the extents are still there. The other players in workstation/enterprise RDBMS's handle that for you automatically, and while Oracle allows for extents to be defaulted, there is no way to clean up the mess left behind a DELETE query.
Oracle's standard practice for cleaning that up is to remove all of the data, wipe the DB, rebuild it, and copy the data back in. That's just preposterous if you ask me. And regarding defaulted EXTENTS, we had to default but the initial table size and extents to the same number (which was around 1MB because of the initial table size) to ensure not having to manually clean up the DB from time to time. So our 2GB database takes 7GB of space on the HD. Not a big deal, but it's still silly that we have to do that.
Now, if he ever thinks he can stop making the payments, the house of cards is gonna colapse. Then the credit card will realize they're trying to collect from a dead person, and that'll start them looking...
I know we've gotten way offtopic here... but I think that's his eventual intent, which will be nice. I like hearing about smug people who get slapped with something like that.
Actually it's his father (incidentally, his mother is in on it too), so either way, he'll wind up with the egged face. It was just remarkable to me that the bank wouldn't spend any time looking into it. I'd heard before that they get lists from DHHS, and it seems all they would have to do is check against it for the SSN.
My original point was (and having current experience with this) all the perfect systems can be in place, but if they're not using that system, it does no good. Now tell that to my users who complain the data isn't in the system, when in fact it's because they didn't put the data in the system.... ugh.
Well, it was the first mention I found, so maybe they do wait on manufacturing to get cheaper and start to recoup the costs. The mention is about 2/3 down, and it says
Boosting production is a double-edged sword for Sony because the company loses money on each of the 128-bit game machines it produces. Still, it must satisfy a long list of game developers, who are counting on the console to sell well. Revenue from high-margin game software is also a major source of earnings for Sony, maker of the Grand Turismo series of racing games.
That sounds like a handy system. However, I have first hand experience that that does not always occur. My fiance's ex-husband, the typical try-to-get-tons-of-money-without-working-for-it type (he actually sent money in a Nigerian scam more than once) has quite a few credit cards in his dead (over 10 years now) father's name. In a fit of spite, she called the credit card companies, who said that if she could not provide a death certificate, they weren't willing to do anything about it.
Systems only work when those that use them actually use them.
It's my understanding (of course IANAL) that those documents won't hold up in court, and are merely a scare tactic a la SCO. I saw them fail first hand when I was in the Finance industry, although they were applied to money managers rather than programmers.
I knew three different people who left to work for another company, although their employee agreement strictly forbade them from immediately taking work with a competing firm. All three fought it in court and won their cases. That didn't keep the unnamed mutual fund company from keeping that in their employee agreement, probably because more often than not, people aren't willing to go to court over it.
True, but Nintendo isn't playing for the top position lately. Sony, however, has been hard at work to stay on top with their new PS3 (both PS3 and XBox2 are due to release in 2005-2006). Everything is still a rumor with both companies, but it appears that Sony is going to fight every bit as hard as MS is in the gaming console business.
I did find this though that says Sony is losing $$ on each sale of a PS2, so you're right on with that one. The good news is games benefit from such fierce competition, no matter what their preference (we have both a PS2 and an XBox at home.. no gamecube).
It's the same M$ model as with the gaming consoles. They sold the xBox at a loss simply to compete with Sony and Nintendo. The idea (and it failed with xBox) was to gain marketshare, then do as they wished, just like with OS's.
You're right on. I was in the music industry in Nashville for some time, and still have friends that are professional songwriters. None of them have seen a dime for the RIAA's "efforts." The funny thing about it is they're all gung-ho behind the RIAA. My assumption is that's because it's their publishing companies' corporate line.
And one of these days they'll figure out how to keep from fragging the ORacle DB filesystem when tables are refreshed... man, setting EXTENTS is ludicrous!
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Two! Two words! And fear! Three words! Oh bugger... I'll come back....
I couldn't agree more. What burns me is this...
XYZ services salesman sells ABC company a "system" that "allows forward thinking businesses autonomous connections to all their systems"
PHB buys the system for tons of money
PHB talks to his own IT staff about it, and they discover it will mean extra work for them anyway
They also realize they could have done the same thing easily through web services/xml for a fraction of the cost
XYZ company's "system" turns out to be a java developer who will require most of the analysis on ABC company's requirements to be done by the ABC company's IT staff while XYZ is billing
The "system" goes over budget and time, and the deliverable is nothing more than trading of flat files between current systems
XYZ gets lots of money, and ABC's IT staff get's additional work in supporting the "system"
I've seen it happen many times over the last 12 years. Each year they come in with a new buzzword or catchphrase for the same old crap. I've threatened to walk into someones office with a competing system for SAP for a fraction of the cost.
"In this one box, I have a system that will handle every piece of business your company does, all in one repository. All it will require is for you to hire some of our developers for too much money, and have them write some custom code to shape it into your business needs. It's called DB2 (or SQL Server, or Oracle, or...)."
she would rather see engineers clocking billable hours on boring/pointless/mismanaged client projects than doing R&D do improve our software or discussing business/technology strategy, which we all know is the job of the CIOs, not the developers/engineers
I've seen more of that in my career than I'd care to mention too. On that SMTP project, we could have beat the deadline and come in WAY under budget. After all, the cisco "system" was nothing more than software. What do these companies think developers are paid to do? If written in house, there are no middlemen in the form of salesmen and project managers, nor is there any markup to keep someone elses building's lights on.
I hope someone else has a different experience, but the developer role in corporations seems to lean closer and closer to that of system support.
Eventually both. That team I was on was replaced by much more expensive ABAPers.... seems the new manager wasn't so bright either.
You ought to be modded +5 Insightful on that one. As a professional developer, I'm sick of PHB's buying into the white-shoed-salesman jargon. At JPMorgan Chase, my PHB bought a $200,000 "system" from Cisco for handling customer service team e-mails. When it failed miserably, I and another developer wrote an SMTP front end in a matter of weeks (our time cost JMPC $7200) and it had more features.
Our manager asked why we didn't mention we could do that before, which shocked me. My response was that he never mentioned this new "system" until it was already paid for. We were his programmers, and this was a programming issue. In the future he should consider talking to his programmers before he spent massive sums on ideas.
He's since been fired.
Too true. As a matter of fact, he responded with that specific answer twice, and vaguely a few times. Just another guy in white shoes and matching belt that left his chin out for ths reporter.
It was an enjoyable read, simply because I hate the white shoe types.
Coffee is made by boiling ground coffee beans in (surprise!) boiling water.
Actually, at most restaurants (McDonald's included) it's made by steam. Water is boiled, the steam is collected and when it condenses it drips through the coffee grounds. By the time it's servable, it can have cooled to quite a lower temperature than the 212 F required to boil the water in the first place.
A simple test was done to compare coffee temperatures, and nobody came within 20 degrees F of the 180 McDonald's kept theirs.
She never asked for $3MM, the jury awarded her that amount because of McDonald's stance on the issue. That large amount was a punishment for McDonald's having received numerous complaints and not doing anything about it.
Nice post! I made a (only slightly) similar post yesterday. Yours, however, was MUCH better detailed, and I thought the punitives were only one day of coffee sales.
The media (always a target) seems to be the blame for the urban legend part of this. When the story broke, the details were limited, and the world only heard "Woman gets $3MM for spilled coffee." I kept up a bit and leared the details as the story went on, but had to really dig for them.
I'll have to keep those details around if you don't mind, as her story seems to keep coming up.
If by connection you mean Paul Allen, then yes, I did the research (I'll take the higher ground on name calling here). Paul Allen has been out of MS since 1983. That's research. Other than Paul Allen, there isn't a connection between the two. I'm just stating the facts, rather than making accusations.
Actually, this is in 8i, and admittedly, I have no experience with 9i or 10g (we'll never need the 10g power here, at least not in my careerspan). I posted a longer commentary here regarding the manual processing we have to do, and Oracle's recommended practice.
I understand your comment, but to me it's both a feature and a nuisance. Oracle, out of the box, seems to require an in depth knowledge that you shouldn't need just to get a small database rolling. In the past, they weren't concerned with small DB users, but that's a market they've decided they wanted to break into in the last couple of years.
While MS SQL Server isn't the best option for VLDB's (although it's getting there), nor is Sybase anything, it (as well as DB2) doesn't just automate the table EXTENTS for you, but manages cleanup automatically. Oracle's filesystem, IMHO, was a mistake on their part. When you remove data from tables, the extents are still there. The other players in workstation/enterprise RDBMS's handle that for you automatically, and while Oracle allows for extents to be defaulted, there is no way to clean up the mess left behind a DELETE query.
Oracle's standard practice for cleaning that up is to remove all of the data, wipe the DB, rebuild it, and copy the data back in. That's just preposterous if you ask me. And regarding defaulted EXTENTS, we had to default but the initial table size and extents to the same number (which was around 1MB because of the initial table size) to ensure not having to manually clean up the DB from time to time. So our 2GB database takes 7GB of space on the HD. Not a big deal, but it's still silly that we have to do that.
Now, if he ever thinks he can stop making the payments, the house of cards is gonna colapse. Then the credit card will realize they're trying to collect from a dead person, and that'll start them looking...
I know we've gotten way offtopic here... but I think that's his eventual intent, which will be nice. I like hearing about smug people who get slapped with something like that.
And bill at a much higher rate because you still have to manually do (EXTENTS) everything that most other RDBMS providers handle automatically.
Actually it's his father (incidentally, his mother is in on it too), so either way, he'll wind up with the egged face. It was just remarkable to me that the bank wouldn't spend any time looking into it. I'd heard before that they get lists from DHHS, and it seems all they would have to do is check against it for the SSN.
My original point was (and having current experience with this) all the perfect systems can be in place, but if they're not using that system, it does no good. Now tell that to my users who complain the data isn't in the system, when in fact it's because they didn't put the data in the system.... ugh.
Well, it was the first mention I found, so maybe they do wait on manufacturing to get cheaper and start to recoup the costs. The mention is about 2/3 down, and it says
Boosting production is a double-edged sword for Sony because the company loses money on each of the 128-bit game machines it produces. Still, it must satisfy a long list of game developers, who are counting on the console to sell well. Revenue from high-margin game software is also a major source of earnings for Sony, maker of the Grand Turismo series of racing games.
That sounds like a handy system. However, I have first hand experience that that does not always occur. My fiance's ex-husband, the typical try-to-get-tons-of-money-without-working-for-it type (he actually sent money in a Nigerian scam more than once) has quite a few credit cards in his dead (over 10 years now) father's name. In a fit of spite, she called the credit card companies, who said that if she could not provide a death certificate, they weren't willing to do anything about it.
Systems only work when those that use them actually use them.
It's my understanding (of course IANAL) that those documents won't hold up in court, and are merely a scare tactic a la SCO. I saw them fail first hand when I was in the Finance industry, although they were applied to money managers rather than programmers.
I knew three different people who left to work for another company, although their employee agreement strictly forbade them from immediately taking work with a competing firm. All three fought it in court and won their cases. That didn't keep the unnamed mutual fund company from keeping that in their employee agreement, probably because more often than not, people aren't willing to go to court over it.
True, but Nintendo isn't playing for the top position lately. Sony, however, has been hard at work to stay on top with their new PS3 (both PS3 and XBox2 are due to release in 2005-2006). Everything is still a rumor with both companies, but it appears that Sony is going to fight every bit as hard as MS is in the gaming console business.
I did find this though that says Sony is losing $$ on each sale of a PS2, so you're right on with that one. The good news is games benefit from such fierce competition, no matter what their preference (we have both a PS2 and an XBox at home.. no gamecube).
Could be... maybe I should have researched more... M$ was the only one that I remember hearing about though.
Thanks. As a non_Apple_owner (obviously) I didn't pay much attention to the news a few weeks ago.
It's the same M$ model as with the gaming consoles. They sold the xBox at a loss simply to compete with Sony and Nintendo. The idea (and it failed with xBox) was to gain marketshare, then do as they wished, just like with OS's.
isn't this yet another blatant violation of the suit they settled not so long ago
What is the blatant violation you're speaking of? This is a market that MS hasn't screwed up... I mean, entered yet.
The violation wouldn't be blatant until the product ships, and if MS were to build it so that it would disable any other song purchasing package.
Didn't Apple just get accused of that? Or was it the other way around, and someone's software broke Apple's iTunes?
You're right on. I was in the music industry in Nashville for some time, and still have friends that are professional songwriters. None of them have seen a dime for the RIAA's "efforts." The funny thing about it is they're all gung-ho behind the RIAA. My assumption is that's because it's their publishing companies' corporate line.
My own personal experience with H1B workers has been that they live as cheaply as possible here in the US and ship the rest of their money back home.
And one of these days they'll figure out how to keep from fragging the ORacle DB filesystem when tables are refreshed... man, setting EXTENTS is ludicrous!