Re: Development at the speed of thought.

[BlueBlazerRegular]

atcroft has it right. I would add one other item - you mentioned:

I had a business development/project manager guy come to my cubicle and ask me for a ‘favor’

Watch out for this. Having people who aren't in your chain of command give you work that negatively impacts your progress on your 'official' work will most likely upset your boss. And when your boss gets upset - well, if you are lucky, he yells at the favor asker, if your aren't lucky, he yells at you.

And what do you get from the 'favor asker'? A heartfelt thanks (maybe) and a reputation as being an IT guy who can handle these little jobs. So they come and ask for help on this new thing they are working on. Worse yet, they tell their friends, who also now come to you. Of course, one of the reasons they are coming to you is that IT has told them that it'll take 6 months before they get their report due to the layoffs, hiring freezes, and not coincidently - the fact that half your time is now spent working on these side issues.

And since Perl is a great tool for these little programs (or not so little programs), the Perl programmer gets the reputation (for good or ill).

One way to handle these things is to make them go through your boss for everything. Say that you're swamped with these other tasks (which you are) and that everything now has to go through him/her. You'll need your boss's agreement (which they should be happy to give, since it gets you back to working on the real work). And it may upset a few, but remember who does your evaluations and determines raises...


Pat

[vagnerr]

One way to handle these things is to make them go through your boss for everything.

I had this kind of problem where I used to work. I was one of the managers in question and we told our staff to do exactly that. What happened was we had two types of staff. Those that were too timid to say no and those that "liked to impress" and would say yes to everything anyway. It was hard work trying to beat off other department heads to try and get control of the dapartment. We would have them activly sneeking in when you were out of the room in order to give your staff work.

---If it doesn't fit use a bigger hammer