"200+ person project" being contracted. I can't imagine any successful big software (assuming) projects like this not done in-house. Anyone seen any?
Story: “It would be career limiting..."
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Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#12Ah, that freeing feeling. I had that once.
I was a new security champion for a team. The product had schema owner SQL injection vulnerabilities on every page we developed. I had a meeting with the department head and explained the whole situation and two remediation options. He chose the third option - do nothing. According to him we have a realtime DB backup. Has it ever been tested? No. Do you have procedures for it? No. How long will it take (15 minutes is the end of the world for this system to be down)? No idea.
I walked out with a clear answer in my head and that free feeling. I left for another team. Not my problem.
Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#13> we hadn’t even received all of the specifications from the customer that we would need to complete the project > And then one of them said “It would be career limiting if the client were to hear this.” > I’d met my responsibility to the company – and the company had threatened me as a result. The author interprets that they were threatened. But really, for whom would it be career limiting? Perhaps I'm being too cha…
Tbh, I sometimes wonder if it is a question of engagement. I just finished a project. Major clusterfuck. And it is a part of a much bigger overhaul. Tons of people are involved and there is maybe one person hidden somewhere that understands how it all fits together ( but my real fear is that the project is so big that no one really knows what this monstrosity is supposed to do, how it is supposed to behave or even how it actually behaves ).
People are engaged ( the ones doing the work anyway ), but there is just too many cooks and too many layers to information to be translated from English to English and from English to w/e contractors are from.
Probably, but based on my experience, there is near zero accountability in manager's circle. It is usually the sacrificial scape goat that gets all the blame and limited career opportunities.
Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#14At Sun Microsystems this notion was so common that there was a TLA for it: CLM = "career limiting move"
Microsoft used this TLA as well.
Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#15> we hadn’t even received all of the specifications from the customer that we would need to complete the project > And then one of them said “It would be career limiting if the client were to hear this.” > I’d met my responsibility to the company – and the company had threatened me as a result. The author interprets that they were threatened. But really, for whom would it be career limiting? Perhaps I'm being too cha…
As a contractor, I was definitely on some big projects where, from the perspective of an IC in the trenches, it didn't seem like anyone was in charge, or that the people in charge didn't care about it succeeding.
In the two examples I'm thinking of, it's been that the client stakeholder has a lot of pull, but not a lot of experience. For example, the top Sales guy decides they want to run a little tech startup inside the company, but they've never actually launched software before. Or, someone in a load bearing role, like the head of product, knows they are out the door (usually moving up in a different, more glamorous organization) and doesn't really care to devote 60 hours a week to this dumb old company anymore.
Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#16> Two years later, the client canceled the two-years-late project before it ever launched. They ate a $60M loss.
You could say that the customer got exactly what they paid for. The customer lacked the ability pay in terms of specifications, so what they got was what $60M and a half-hearted attempt to articulate what they needed could buy.
On the other hand, the customer never knows what they want. You could say that's the job of the software company - to slog through the mountain of feature requests disguised as specifications to arrive at a system that will actually solve the customer's real problem.
Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#17If accurate, realistic project schedules are considered a "career limiting move" then obviously the company was never a good place to advance your career anyway. As evidenced in this anecdote, this mentality doesn't produce good results for those companies.
Looking back at the places I've worked, I'm having a hard time thinking of any examples of people committing singular "career limiting moves". Most tech companies I've worked for have been extremely forgiving of anyone with tech talent, to the point that some people were given countless extra chances despite longstanding patterns of misbehavior or failure to deliver.
The only true incidents I can think of that fit the "career limiting move" description either resulted in getting fired, or doing unnecessarily vindictive/petty things when disagreeing with management.
Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#18I could never relate to people who care about their career, "success", getting ahead, or climbing the corporate ladder. For me virtually everything else in life has been more important, and careers/jobs were just a necessary evil because it's almost impossible to survive without money.
Some people thrive on their work and on problem solving. Not every employer is this malicious or incompetent. Given the necessity of work, I would rather enjoy my work and excel at it than sluff off.
"Given the necessity of work, I would rather enjoy my work and excel at it than sluff off."
True, but from my perspective the career oriented people don't actually care about that stuff or solving problems. In my mind, the people I would label as career oriented are usually pretentious assholes preoccupied by the "status" of someday being in the C suite and driving the most expensive BMW/Tesla.
On the other side, you can have fun, perform well, and solve problems yet have a stagnant career. You would have to play the politics to leverage those into career advancement.
Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#19I could never relate to people who care about their career, "success", getting ahead, or climbing the corporate ladder. For me virtually everything else in life has been more important, and careers/jobs were just a necessary evil because it's almost impossible to survive without money.
For some, a creer is a means to something else. For example, if you want to retire early, making more money is the best way to save more. Progressing in your acreer can be a great way to increase your income. Therefore progressing your career can be your best option to reach a goal outside of your career.
Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#20I'm seeing a cloudflare error; is the page down now?
> Web server is returning an unknown error (Error code 520)