Re: Enterprise development: Its ok to say No!

[DrHyde]

But I've come to the conclusion that its only the profi that I want to be and work with

I want to be and work with people who are a mixture of all three of your types.

As a professional I like to think of what I do as engineering as opposed to a craft or a pure art - and yes, just like with the engineer who designs and builds railways, maintainability, extensibility and scalability are important.

However, I need to keep the customer (internal or external) happy because that keeps my boss happy and that keeps me in well-paid employment. Confrontation and criticism are just fine, provided that they are reasoned and polite. As an example, I've just today done a code freeze on one of my projects so it can have a few weeks of testing before the inevitable bug-fixing, and then deployment. If I hadn't said "no" to some of the features that were requested, I'd still have another few months of development to go. By saying "no" a few times I could give the customers 90% of what they wanted in a third of the time it would have taken to give them everything. I designed the system so that I can add their extra whizzy features later, although I'll bet a small sum that they find out that they don't really need them. And throughout development, I've kept the customers informed of progress. That's gratification.

But there are also times when I just need to get something - anything - done. A few months ago, two of the people in my group were spending an age doing repetitive data entry when their expensive time was better spent doing other stuff. So I automated it for them, after perhaps fifteen minutes of discussion. The requirement was simple, and I implemented it in maybe another fifteen minutes. Then I tested it on some sample data, it appeared to work, so we deployed it. And it has continued to work for some months now, freeing up a lot of time and making the group more productive. When I did the quick and dirty hack, I made it perfectly clear that what I was doing was ugly and unmaintainable, and that if the requirements changed it would have to be treated as a whole new project and properly specced out and planned that time. Everyone's happy with that.

So keeping the customer happy is fine provided it is a result of good work and good communication rather than kowtowing. JGID is fine, provided you are prepared to also say "no", draw a line in the sand and say "ugly hacks go this far and no further".