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Project from Hell (2008)

projectfailures.wordpress.com

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Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#21

Post by baud147258 »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #14

> It is forbidden to come to work after 9am. One day, the site manager stayed behind the main gates and fired on the spot every person who came in after 9.01am, including a number of managers and sales. This surprised me. I thought it was extremely difficult to fire people in France.

From another post in the blog:

"Among the many comments, some surprised me. Seems lots of people cannot believe you can be fired in France for being 1 minute late at work. Sorry to burst your bubble, mates, but this is what SSIIs (contractor companies) were invented for. You don’t lose your job, you immediately lose the contract you are working on (no justification needed, this is what contractors are for)"

So they were not really employees, but consultants.

Still, he also wrote:

"For people who have a direct contract with the company, same story. Nothing prevents the company from saying you have committed a major blunder, fire you on the spot, and see you a couple of years later in court (Prud’hommes). Yes, that will cost them money if people choose to sue (I hope they all did). When you are unemployed, are you really looking forward to two years of battle with your former employer, even though you know you will win?"

Link to the post: https://projectfailures.wordpress.com/2018/03/24/follow-up-o...

Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#22

Post by hinkley »

msla wrote: post #12
mpweiher wrote: post #4

And there are people who claim performance doesn't matter, only correctness does. Hmm.. Also: we chose C++, because it is fast.

> And there are people who claim performance doesn't matter, only correctness does. Hmm.. Performance is meaningless if the code is not correct. After all, I can make the code arbitrarily fast if I'm not going to be held to any standard of correctness: It always returns "FOOBAR". Done, and very, very fast. > Also: we chose C++, because it is fast. That is a bit naive. C++ is a standard, so how fast is a stack of pape…

There’s a great phrase for this I stole a long time ago: faster than possible.

When your code is only fast because it does the wrong thing, and fixing the problem takes much more overhead.

Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#23

Post by maxxxxx »

baud147258 wrote: post #10

Regarding this part: "they had to pay soon for Free Software. None of them ever mentions ‘Software Libre’, but they all know about ‘Software Gratuit’. " In French, we have two word for Free: Libre is for free as in free speech and gratuit is for free as in free beer.

Same in German. It's a quirk of English that free as in freedom and free as in no cost are the same word.

Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#24

Post by corrigible »

VMG wrote: post #3

> Versioning is simple. Old software is version 1, today’s software is version 2, software in the future is version 3. Nobody can actually tell which version has been delivered to the customer. Many such cases

Sounds like they invented Continuous Delivery ;-)

Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#25

Post by jmull »

I would guess the project was (is?) running pretty much just as the people in charge wanted it to run.

10 years in and they were still billing -- more than ever -- for a project that would have completed 7-8 years previously if things had been done according to plan.

All the seemingly massively stupid and counter productive decisions made make sense if the goal is to confuse matters to make it seem like progress has been made or reforms instituted or bold corrective actions taken while actually keeping the project hopelessly mired.

It's like the Producers. (Though without the ironic twist... in reality it surely must be impossible to accidentally complete a software project successfully. No doubt, without the laughs either.)

Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#26

Post by ido »

mpweiher wrote: post #9
rhapsodic wrote: post #5

>Average turn-over for the newcomers: 3 months, the legal time to leave your job in France. Can someone explain the meaning of this? I think something got lost in translation.

That would be the notice period. Germany is similar, it tends to be 6 weeks to the end of the quarter, and it generally applies to both employee and employer. Though it often isn't quite as applicable to the employee...what are they going to do if you don't show up, fire you?

I've never had a job in Germany where the Probezeit wasn't exactly 6 months (the maximum allowed).

Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#27

Post by mrybczyn »

maxxxxx wrote: post #23
baud147258 wrote: post #10

Regarding this part: "they had to pay soon for Free Software. None of them ever mentions ‘Software Libre’, but they all know about ‘Software Gratuit’. " In French, we have two word for Free: Libre is for free as in free speech and gratuit is for free as in free beer.

Same in German. It's a quirk of English that free as in freedom and free as in no cost are the same word.

But then you get the great quip that 'freedom isn't free'...

Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#28

Post by ryandrake »

I love how the first thing complained about was the use of C++ for the project. Compared to the lack of sane source control and release management, inexperience of the team, dozens of layers of abstraction, management bureaucracy, toxic culture, basic facilities like toilets being inoperative...

I think using C++ was literally the least of their concerns.

Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#29

Post by ryandrake »

jmull wrote: post #25

I would guess the project was (is?) running pretty much just as the people in charge wanted it to run. 10 years in and they were still billing -- more than ever -- for a project that would have completed 7-8 years previously if things had been done according to plan. All the seemingly massively stupid and counter productive decisions made make sense if the goal is to confuse matters to make it seem like progress has…

What did the demotivational poster say? Consultants don’t make money with solutions, they make money by prolonging the problem.
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