Pencils Down

The Massachusetts appliance rebate program went into affect last week. The state gave away over 6 million dollars in a few minutes. Consumers had to register at a government run web site for a coupon and later go to a store to use their coupon. The site crashed within minutes of opening. Call center volumes were in the many thousands.

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.

We have an architect on the project.  The architect makes no decisions, judgement calls, directives, etc…  Everything is up for grabs by developers from the basic class syntax all the way up to authentication.

Again, this is a longer term employee that appears to be following the company path.  Maybe there is enough history that people who have done so get hammered for making decisions that turned out to be ‘bad’.

Well, our fundamental client is the DOD.  I would assume such a bureaucracy is risk averse.  I would further guess that changes downstream on a project are treated very badly.  Lots of huffing and puffing.

Now, you have some lower level line manager that should be making calls.  They should be doing so.  But I guess everyone around them is saying don’t do that.  Don’t make a decision.  Investigate further.  Take your time.

How can an industry like this encourage risk taking?

Our group is composed of mostly non-Java developers.  We have recently started looking at error messages that have to bubble up to the ui.  The natural course is a resource/property file.

However, the implementation pattern we are to follow involves using a wrapper that has enum’s of every message (to avoid collision) which we must access to get to a resource.  So, every time we add a message we are also changing source code.

It seems to happen a lot in this company (and another defense co): we keep deciding that we can do something better than an off-the-shelf solution.  So, we put a wrapper around good, solid functionality that drops features and usually adds noise to the system for no other reason.

And further, the incumbent players will argue to death that wrapping is a good idea.

Just painful.

Talking to a number of companies that are looking for software people.  I guess the first thing to notice is: there are quite a few postings out there these days.  Take a glance at craigslist for your area, guaranteed at least a hundred jobs per day.

Secondly, talking to a small shop in town they are turning down work below a certain $N,000.  Talking further, the bigger shops in town are turning down work for less than $N0,000.

It really feels like the press has been so caught up with the stupidness of banks lending money to people that could never pay.  The result is they are ignoring the apparent large scale demand for services, at least for technical people.

Third hit point was a survey run by a pretty good outfit that should only have gone to hiring managers.  The number one question was “how are you dealing with the shortage of technical pool?”.

I guess things are still in pretty good shape (for s/w companies anyway).