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

doomedprojects.com

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

#31

Post by kweingar »

pmoriarty wrote: post #4

I 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.

> careers/jobs were just a necessary evil because it's almost impossible to survive without money

I don’t think this is incompatible with caring about your career.

My perspective is that I am very fortunate to have a job as a software developer, and that someday my luck may run out (bad economy, unexpected expenses, decreased demand for my skills, etc). My goal isn’t to be rich and live in luxury, my goal is to insulate myself from bad luck.

So at least for now, I would like to “advance my career” (especially since I’m in an entry-level role), just to give myself a bit of extra security.

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

#32

Post by btilly »

This story reminds me of https://despair.com/products/consulting.

Also law 23 from https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html seems appropriate: The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it.

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

#33

Post by duxup »

pmoriarty wrote: post #4

I 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.

I do the right thing and care about my projects.

But make no mistake my family and I come first. If a doomed project is not my fault and I can’t fix it…. I’m still taking that paycheck and finishing tasks….

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

#34

Post by giantg2 »

saghm wrote: post #26
giantg2 wrote: post #12

Ah, 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 i…

I'm not sure what's more depressing, that they didn't think that someone exfiltrating the data was an issue as long as they didn't lose it, or the fact that even if customer data was stolen, they probably were correct that there wouldn't be any ramifications for the negligence.

Oh, to be fair I should mention that it was an internal system. External threat actors were not a major concern. However, we had trading desk developers with access to the prd system and their own development space. The major concern in my mind is an absent minded copy/paste of a drop table, maybe a disgruntled employee.

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

#35

Post by dropit_sphere »

SevenNation wrote: post #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'…

caveat emptor...

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

#37

Post by NikolaNovak »

abeppu wrote: post #6

> 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…

I wasn't in the room, and a lot of it depends on the vibe, facial expression, atmosphere, personalities, etc.

But agreed - as read, my initial interpretation was not even remotely as one of the threat. Perhaps advice, or conclusion, or discussion. It depends hugely what else was said though - I doubt it was truly "and that was the end of that" in the sense that those words were the only ones spoken at that meeting, or outside of that meeting.

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

#38

Post by vouaobrasil »

pmoriarty wrote: post #4

I 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.

A career can be meaningful or meaningless. It can be meaningful if you are making money doing something you feel it's important to do in the world: for example, nature conservation work. I am working on that, and in that realm I care about the work I do. But I also have a corporate job, where I'm just hired to do something for someone else. In that case, it's only about money and I just satisfy the job description without putting anything more into it. In that case I'm just using it to make enough money to support my future projects and I don't plan on staying here much longer.

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

#40

Post by donatj »

> I spent about 18 months working on a doomed project. For a lot of that time, I thought I was the only one who realized it was doomed.

I had a similar feeling about a project once. I thought "Boy is this stupid. No one in their right mind is going to pay for this. Why are we building this." Let me manager know my feelings. Stayed and built it.

Thing is a huge success. One of our best selling products. Boy do I still feel dumb. Very humbling, honestly. Shows what little I actually know about what people want.

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