So, they hired a designer on their own.  After selection I talked with the guy to make sure it wouldn’t just be a PSD as the output: he agreed.  Once the design was agreed upon he didn’t just give me the PSD, he gave me a bunch of PNG files that he cut from the PSD.  How nice.

Now we are going into week two of the process trying to get HTML and CSS out of him.  I don’t think he has ever done this before.  He is good at coming up with nice pictures with the right color schemes and fonts and the like, probably an art background.  He is just lost coming up with the parts of the design you need to actually develop a web site – HTML, CSS and Javascript for any widgets/special effects in the design (there are a few).

Maybe I am expecting too much?  Every other designer I have worked with has produced the initial HTML… layouts.  Maybe I have  just been lucky?

I have seen this happen many times. The “worst” was a 20 year systems engineer at a big DOD contractor was allowed to retire early otherwise his pension would have decreased kind of per day he stayed on. Again, quite the accountant’s ideal – nice little annuity math that can be produced in a spreadsheet instantly.

My first inclination is that, no, they won’t really do that. How can the company recapture the knowledge that is sitting in these people’s brains? All the big and little nuances about how the company runs, works, operates, gets things done. Gone in the time it takes to sign the closing NDA. I don’t think reading about reincarnation lately has made me feel better about the loss.

Afterwards started to think like the Sherlock Holme’s approach (quite mangled): “After eliminating the possibilities, whatever is left must be true”. I think this means the companies have a kind of planned obsolescence to their business model. They WANT to re-evaluate, start again, rethink, redevelop.

Seems like a gutsy plan. Who am I to argue? The current company just celebrated 150 years. The DOD contractor has been around about 50 years. Just seems inhuman(e).

I heard a speech by the chairman of Kyoto Ceramic where a student asked about being the best in their industry.  The person looked confused once the question was translated.  After some discussion the translator finally came back with “Kyoto is not interested in being the best, they want to be perfect”.  

Imagine having that as the goal for your company, product, service, software.   What would you do different?  Why aren’t you doing those things now?

Instead I see an environment full of fear and hesitation:

• Companies have avoided doing lots of work for some time that has to be done or they may go out of business
• New product development deadlines are approaching that must be done or vc’s, funding sources, etc… will pull out leaving the entity at risk of surviving

Given the pressures to get something done there is a constant stringing along of candidates for budgeted work.  First contact a week out.  Initial meetings scheduled in another week.  Decision time possibly in another week.

I think these projects are funded.  So, money is not the issue – they will try to bargain, but that is the norm for everything.

There are candidates available to do the work with the skill set.  So, a dearth of prospects is not the issue.  I know job postings are getting swamped.

There is a definite timetable for producing the product, feature.  Hiring managers have the experience to know how long the pieces will take.

There are specs on what has to be done.  There isn’t much vagueness involved.  Gone are the days of napkin idea products.

There was a quote from the lead singer of the Fine Young Cannibals (yes I am that old and yes I really liked the band’s music) to the effect not making a decision is making a decision.  In other words the companies that are delaying projects are effectively deciding to go out of business.

It’s not rational, but fear isn’t rational.  It’s emotional.  I think mixing emotions with business is a disaster.

But, how many of you have been on projects where the exact opposite occurs?  As deadlines are pushed the tendency for all layers of management is to push more bodies onto the scene.  Even worse there have been times where some of the people added on don’t even have the skill set needed so that you would not have hired them way back months ago even if you had the chance.

The most extreme for me has been where interested parties start throwing out technical jargon they read or heard about somewhere.  On a big project we had a problem with software performance.  I was surprised by someone who had no idea how the application worked suggested switching to Oracle as a database server, that will fix everything.  What random nerve firings connected for that suggestion?

What has your experience been?

It’s excruciating because you know you could do it faster:

• they can barely type
• they have little experience using computer apps (how does someone do that in this age)
• they try to read some manual to figure it out.  ‘Manual’ is prosaic for the xeroxed pages wrapped in plastic
• looking over their shoulder a couple of times it’s sooooooooo obvious what they need to do.  You have to try hard not to just start using the keyboard.
• When I suggest anything, even spelling corrections, they get completely flustered

The normal progression is the suit can’t figure it out, eventually gives up and calls the real CSR.

You normally hear what you can’t do (“you don’t know to interface with XYZZY”) or aren’t doing fast enough (“why is your task so late”), so being in a situation where you clearly excel, but can’t apply your skills is frustrating.

• How long in business? profitable?
• How popular is the product?
• Size of company?
• Release schedule?
• Bugs/issues?  How quickly resolved?

But in these times it is likely that an open-sourced product does what you need.  There are likely even several versions from different vendors available.  Some vendors very large and well known, others one-man shows.  You search on google for the product and get 500,000 hits.  What do you do now?

The idea is still to eliminate risk.  I think you have different concerns though:

• How long in business? profitable? – don’t really care.  there are plenty of people out there working in this solution, you have the source, you can get someone else to fix it.
• How popular is the product? – probably not an issue.  yes, this particular vendors implementation varies, but quite a number of people have experience working on this
• Size of company? – a question of long-term ability.  again, there are quite a number of other people out there who can help
• Release schedule? – it would be great if you saw a steady stream of development, but this is unlikely.  the spec defining the open-source tool has probably been around for a while and there really shouldn’t be much of a need for updates
• Bugs/issues?  How quickly resolved? – probably when first released there was some furious coding, but after a while it should be stabilized

So, how do you do this?

I think you can look at it like hiring a remote contractor:  You need someone to help out with implementing a well-known solution and want them really to go away afterward.  Maybe call them once in a while if you turn on some other feature in your product and don’t remember what steps are needed.

As such, some concerns you want to know:

• Responsiveness
• Experience in the area
• How much other (not in the product you care about) work do they have?
• Any skills matching up to your developers (Java, C#, database, etc…)?
• Are they using the open-source code in a retail product they are selling?  Self-interest is always the best motivator

How do you evaluate open source software?

I am concerned with long-term affects on other web sites.   A large part of my income for several years has been involved with writing applications that expect wide access to the Internet.  If for some reason the company involved didn’t get along with Google, what happens?  Do users find their site?  Do pages just timeout, esp when accessing some neato graphic or Flash/Flex page or download?

If things get bad enough does Google develop a ‘preferred’ developer/company list that limits who gets quality of service over the line?  How does a small company/developer compete to get on that list?

A local radio station, WAAF, with a particularly Republican bent went on air lambasting the whole process. Included in the rambling was mention that:

• The government employees involved should have been able to better guage the resp0nse.
• The web programmer(s) involved will probably not be held accountable
• They developed a back-door website which could be used during failover, but did not publicize it’s existence

The station really appeals to working class, blue collars in the eastern Massachusetts area.  Several callers dialed in their similar belief of the points above.

I think this episode marks some common perceptions of (web) programmers:

• They can accurately measure/estimate web usage
• They have the tools and know-how to make a site like this work
• Scale is not really a factor – they could have made this work
• Putting in a back door is just another hacking incident – they expected the site to fail, but wanted a way to provide access to selected insiders

Overall, it makes programmers sound very sinister; lacking morals; careless about the effects of their craft.

I wonder if the people that did this have any idea how badly they have maligned the industry.

Then I talked to a manager at another company.  The manager thinks they are ‘just’ setting up the subcontractor on the project to take a fall.  The upper management view of the project is that everything is rosy, on-time, on-budget, happy people.  But the bad subcontractor is not producing on time, budget, quality level per contract.  Yes, technically, the sub has been amiss.  Guess where all the fingers will be pointing when the delivery time slides on by without anything to show?  Once the sub is replaced then everything can be re-scheduled, budgeted, aligned, etc… 

I wonder how many times you can do that before upper management figures out where the problem really is?