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Story: “It would be career limiting..."

doomedprojects.com

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Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#211

Post by PaulHoule »

vaidhy wrote: post #199
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive my ignorance of "Enterprise" software, but what does "implementing Peoplesoft" involve, exactly? Isn't it like SAP where it's a base system with some predefined starter templates that you customize? And to "customize" means just adding custom fields and data-entry forms, and wire it all up to an ERP and something like Biztalk? How does that add-up to $100m?

By the time you come to a size where you would consider SAP or PeopleSoft, you are already a mid to large size company. You have developed internal process and workflows. You would have policies put in place that are crazy, contradicting each other and different across divisions, business lines and roles. You are trying to model all of this in a software that was not organically grown in your company. This is what im…

My understanding is that Peoplesoft worked out OK for most corporations but it went notoriously wrong in higher ed. Australia tried to roll it out over numerous universities in a huge project which went terribly wrong.

I had my own personal Peoplesoft story which was that they cut n' pasted a Javascript random number generator I wrote into their home page before Javascript had a built in RNG and so my email was embedded in a comment in their page. It's one reason why my email got spammed so much in the 1990s (later on I found out my email was the most spammed at my Uni).

Another amusing story is that David Duffield, founder of Peoplesoft, got pushed out of Peoplesoft when Oracle took it over and he founded Workday which turned out to be much more successful for higher ed institutions.

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#212

Post by bumby »

acheron wrote: post #112
duped wrote: post #47

I mean this story is cathartic, but I don't get what the "rabble rousers" expected to happen. You don't go into a meeting like that to present problems, but to present solutions. And a 12 month delay on a $60 million contract isn't a solution, it's another problem for the sales/client success people. And doing it in front of a group of management, no less - that's like firing a shot across the bow, declaring that the…

And that's how the Challenger blew up. Sometimes one side is right, and the other side is wrong, and it doesn't matter if they didn't "communicate and strategize" or "read the room". Obviously this guy is probably writing about a Javascript photo-sharing app or something and it doesn't actually matter, but it's the same principle. The managers who went ahead here would have gone ahead with launching the shuttle for t…

I don't think its the same.

In the article, risk was known. "It would be career limiting." The managers knew the risk was to themselves because they weren't offering up a solution.

The Challenger was different. There wasn't hard data that characterized the risk. That was the main problem; there was an absence of known risk because the operational parameters were outside the testing scope. It was more like "We don't know what the risk is, if there is one." That's a very different animal because you're dealing with uncertainty and low probability events. Those risks tend to show up in hindsight. (same with Columbia for that matter).

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#213

Post by P_I_Staker »

lovich wrote: post #119
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Granted, “it would be career limiting” is an ambiguous statement. We can reasonably assume that the story as written omits various context clues, additional communications, body language, and other ensuing events that gave the author a more complete understanding of what the manager meant when they said that.

It’s only ambiguous if you haven’t been exposed to corporatese. It’s as ambiguous as the phrase “as per my last email”. He was directly told he was done getting promotions/raises if that information ever made it to the client

We have a manager that says "like I said" a ton. Pretty sure almost all of them are benign. I don't know that these things are always obvious.

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#214

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

blitz_skull wrote: post #127
acheron wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's how the Challenger blew up. Sometimes one side is right, and the other side is wrong, and it doesn't matter if they didn't "communicate and strategize" or "read the room". Obviously this guy is probably writing about a Javascript photo-sharing app or something and it doesn't actually matter, but it's the same principle. The managers who went ahead here would have gone ahead with launching the shuttle for t…

I think your comment actually supports the original comment. If what's at stake is a $60M javascript photo-sharing app, then you gotta decide how much you care to massage egos and play the game. If you're literally putting human lives at risk and you think there's a real chance of death, what a petty thing to say, "Oh well they should've just listened! It's a high-stakes game!" Do be clear, this doesn't shift the res…

The original comment says "a 12 month delay isn't a solution, it's a problem."

But sometimes there is no solution other than recognizing that it will take longer.

Or at least not with the current team.

And yes, that means telling everyone involved up to and including the CEO if necessary. The only other "solution" was clearly to quit, which they did.

A $60M project with 200 people on it isn't going to be able to pivot to creating that photo-sharing app (or whatever) 12 months faster. It's unethical of the entire management team to not immediately go to the client and tell them that the project is seriously behind expectations, in fact, "career limiting move" or not.

This is why outsourcing gets such a bad name. It's frequently run by unethical scammers who are just there to milk money out of clients.

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#215

Post by jacobsenscott »

Lol all the people in this thread - "if you reduce scope..." "if you presented a solution...". This is a 200 person multi-million dollar project, you can't turn the ship in less than 12 months. You've already hit the iceberg, you just haven't felt it yet.

You have two choices here - keep your head down and collect your paycheck until the client cancels the project, or go out in a blaze of glory. The second choice is the right choice in our industry, where anyone with even middling skill can get a new job in a week.

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#216

Post by invig »

lumost wrote: post #58

There is also another way of looking at this doomed project. 1. A client didn't know what they wanted, had 60 million to spend on figuring it out, and hired a firm that would let them spend 60 million. 2. The firm was incentivized to provide a nice looking underestimate and then adapt as new work was discovered. 3. The firm continued getting paid as long as the client was happy. 4. The client did not want to be told…

Two wrongs make a right?

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#217

Post by jimmaswell »

peteradio wrote: post #160
blitz_skull wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your comment actually supports the original comment. If what's at stake is a $60M javascript photo-sharing app, then you gotta decide how much you care to massage egos and play the game. If you're literally putting human lives at risk and you think there's a real chance of death, what a petty thing to say, "Oh well they should've just listened! It's a high-stakes game!" Do be clear, this doesn't shift the res…

What a horrible truth, hate to upvote but you may be right. But why is it engineers who must rise to the political occasion?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

STEM people will naturally succeed at this task immediately, while an average person, like a koala unable to understand a leaf is food unless it's put on a tree, can only answer the logic problem if it's phrased in terms of social rules.

The STEM people's brains tended to develop in a way that intuitively understands logic in a more abstract way, better able to understand reality, not just monkey hierarchies.

So they will be averse to politics because it's boring, frustrating, disingenuous monkey shit flinging. But they're the most qualified, because they're more likely to put truth and fairness above tribal enrichment and games.

If engineers more often made the sacrifice to waste their brainpower dive into that swamp, we'd have colonized space and solved hunger etc. by now. But I can't blame them for not wanting to deal with it.

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#218

Post by jacobr1 »

peteradio wrote: post #152
sillysaurusx wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think they could have done more. But the conclusion of the story is to heroically drive off a cliff, and say “it’s all I could do.” That’s where I disagree. If it were me, I would have privately (emphasis on private) worked my way up the chain of command, trying to alert more and more people that there was a serious problem brewing. The meeting in the story was obviously going to be a fai…

I don't understand how the deputized team drove off the cliff. At the very least they surfaced the set of problems which would need to be addressed to meet the contract.

The 12 month extension was going to get the managers who proposed it fired. So they couldn't actually propose it - thus the cliff.

Instead they needed an alternative. Of course a better discussion would have been a frank reevaluation with the client, with several options and points of trade-off to consider.

But really the best way - presuming everyone is working toward the same ends (NOT a given) - is to identify some kind of MVP/pilot that can been delivered and evaluated and iterated upon. That way you have _some_ kind of success to build upon with the client. This is failure of every badly run waterfall project. Even presuming the original design could be built on time ... how would it know it was actually useful? You also need the more limited success to rebuild trust - otherwise your new estimates will be questioned and looked upon with suspicion. If some tells me an 18 month project is going to take another 12 months, I need to assume the same incompetence really means that the new estimate is behind the curve as well ... not to mention changing requirements in the meantime continuing to push thing things out.

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#220

Post by vaidhy »

More than half of this thread sounds like we are all just sociopaths and the scary thing is that I see myself 10 years ago in the answers. I would like to correct 2 perceptions that I see as common threads:

1. It is management's job to find the solution. No.. it is the management job to make a decision. They would have their own opinions on how things ought to be and a good management would listen to everyone, consider possible alternatives and make a decision. A bad management would just make a decision. However, they cannot come up with solutions to everything. Why hire anyone else, if that were true?

2. Politics is bad. - I had this in my mind for a long time. Then read something in a scifi book that went like "You get politics when you have two people talk". Then I realized it is not politics that is bad.. We play politics all the time - posting this comment is politics. I am trying to convince you of something by appealing to logic and rhetoric. We tend to think politics is only when you lie and cheat and deceive people.. but that is just not true. The alternative to politics is to live in a world where might makes right. It is still true, but the concept of might is different.

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