Re: Roll your own!

[jdtoronto]

A former client of mine had that attitude. When I started consulting to the company they were largely a Linux and HP/UX outfit doing large scale WEB projects. But this new guy purchased the outfit. Decided that open-source systems were too vulnerable and so he swung all the work over to .NET, lost most of his clients over the next 12 months as delays increased and deadlines went past, productivity went into the toilet, quality went down the drain and most of the staff went out the door while they could still get paid!

But then I could tell you about the guy who purchased a publishing house that was very succesful using MAC's. He decided MAC's were too expensive, so he went all PC. I used to be a big client of his, but last week he rang to ask why I don't use him any more? He expects not to make payroll next month. Nice Christmas present for his staff eh?

The world is littered with stories like these. Far too many competent programmers/engineers/scientist are ignored to satisfy the ego of managers who are often in those positions because they were not competent programmers/engineers/scientists and believed the rhetoric when they were told that management or marketing are the places to be. If I were you AM, I would be out of there pretty darned soon.

jdtoronto

[Anonymous Monk]

Far too many competent programmers/engineers/scientist are ignored to satisfy the ego of managers

And far too many competent managers are ignored to satisfy the ego of programmers. I see this happen just as often, Programmer says 'we have to do this using x and y' but the company is already standardized (which has many benefits) on a technology with all the advantages of x and y. Programmer throws a hissy fit and ends up quitting or getting fired a few weeks later.

And before you ask, the two companies I'm thinking of are still very profitable, and would have tanked if they went with the programmer's advice. So it applies both ways, but since this is a 'developer' site, you'll usually only hear one side of it.

[jdtoronto]

Entirely so!

In my 30 years of working I have been a researcher/developer by preference, but I have also managed companies for 20 of those years and continue to do so today. Stupidity knows no bounds and respects nobody. And right now, in this all Perl/MySQL/mod_perl shop I have a guy hired as an HTML coder who insista on performing valiadation using only client-side JS, swears by PHP and won't use templating in any little jobs he gets to code. But he is good at graphics and HTML which I hate loath and detest. At least I know I have subjected my opinons to rigorous analysis and I can give you a clear argument for the decisions I have made.

So I quarantine this guys work. When he works on a project of mine it is purely to generate templates, and he doesn't get to do any of the validation code because I have a module that generates the JS and matches it to the parameters that will be used when the Perl does the same validation server side.

My experience over 30 years is that managers are far too quick to discount the opinions of the engineers/developers and programmers. But they have to learn to argue cogently for their opinion, not just complain. However the ability to communicate, rigorously analyse and argue a case seems to be a dieing skill, not only amongst the managers, but for the programmers etc. as well.

jdtoronto