A pretty normal co-worker of mine once told me of a software engineer he had worked with at a previous company. This engineer would write software and during the debugging process hold a conversation with his hand concerning the problem at hand. The best part was, his hand (he) would talk back to himself in the voice of Donald Duck.
The same guy was also said to have hit a deer with his car on the way to work one morning. The next day he came to work with a home-made "cow catcher" like contraption (imagine the front of locomotive) welded to the front of his car to avoid any further damage due to auto-deer collisions. The big problem with this "solution" was that the contraption was so heavy, every time his car hit a bump in the road, the front end would scrape the pavement and send off sparks.
There's something similar at the company I work for. IT runs Exchange servers, and everyone has to use M$ Outlook to get their email: I personally think this sucks. I feel that using a POP3 mail server and allowing all users to access their mail through their chosen email client is the way to go.
On the topic of uneducated users, about every email client in the world is easier to configure than Outlook. There's also the possible element of expense: if not all members of your user community have Outlook, you'll have to purchase copies of the software (or at least get a big site license).
You've got the possibility to piss off a large number of users by forcing them to use Outlook instead of the programs they already know and love.
One of the companies I had worked for did this on a project, not overseas, but in the US. What we ended up with were
- missed deadlines,
- hacks/cluges instead of well designed code,
- next to no documentation,
- poor support when the inevitable problems arose.
We ended up putting lot's of man-months on fixing the things they gave us that were supposed to work. In the end we'd have done just as well, if not better to have written it all ourselves. I say better not b/c we could have done the job faster, but we most definately would have produced a higher quality product.
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A pretty normal co-worker of mine once told me of a software engineer he had worked with at a previous company. This engineer would write software and during the debugging process hold a conversation with his hand concerning the problem at hand. The best part was, his hand (he) would talk back to himself in the voice of Donald Duck.
The same guy was also said to have hit a deer with his car on the way to work one morning. The next day he came to work with a home-made "cow catcher" like contraption (imagine the front of locomotive) welded to the front of his car to avoid any further damage due to auto-deer collisions. The big problem with this "solution" was that the contraption was so heavy, every time his car hit a bump in the road, the front end would scrape the pavement and send off sparks.
Anyone have weird co-worker stories to share?
There's something similar at the company I work for. IT runs Exchange servers, and everyone has to use M$ Outlook to get their email: I personally think this sucks. I feel that using a POP3 mail server and allowing all users to access their mail through their chosen email client is the way to go.
On the topic of uneducated users, about every email client in the world is easier to configure than Outlook. There's also the possible element of expense: if not all members of your user community have Outlook, you'll have to purchase copies of the software (or at least get a big site license).
You've got the possibility to piss off a large number of users by forcing them to use Outlook instead of the programs they already know and love.
lynx?
but isn't letting Jon Katz post stories here carrying it all just a little too far?
One of the companies I had worked for did this on a project, not overseas, but in the US. What we ended up with were
- missed deadlines,
- hacks/cluges instead of well designed code,
- next to no documentation,
- poor support when the inevitable problems arose.
We ended up putting lot's of man-months on fixing the things they gave us that were supposed to work. In the end we'd have done just as well, if not better to have written it all ourselves. I say better not b/c we could have done the job faster, but we most definately would have produced a higher quality product.
Don't give in to the unreasonable requests of a poor-quality-producing monopoly such as Mirco$oft.
One of my coworkers has a birthday today. Poor girl just turned seven and she already has to work for a living.