Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves . . . — William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I. Sc. 2 The Programmer finds that the integration chickens have come home to roost . . . I remember when Vignette first arrived at our company and the people who had made the decision to buy it would show up at meetings in their complimentary Vignette polo shirts and explain that the project was going to be delayed just a bit more because they still couldn’t work the bugs out of the Vignette installation — but hey, willya look at these free shirts we got?! Well, we’ve been trying to work the bugs out of it for three months now, and to integrate it with IBM’s WebSphere for a client project. We tried Vignette 5.5 with WebSphere 5.1, which… Read more →
January 2001
BZY CHIC
Dying with the most toys Saw a license plate in the office lot today on a BMW 535i: On the frame, it said “Hey Boys — This Girl Will Die With The Most Toys.” Read more →
Profiles in Management: The Protector
Cast of Characters Manager, the leader of a software project that is floundering because his needlessly complex design cannot actually be implemented. Programmer, a programmer on the project. Manager: Keep working hard, and I will protect you should things break down. Programmer: Protect me from what? That sounds kind of ominous. Manager: Some people may be worried that if the project fails, they may get a bad review, or not get a bonus. But I’m looking at whether or not people are working hard, even if the project isn’t going well. So as long as you’re not goofing off, and you don’t have a bad attitude, you should be all right. A “bad attitude” in these cases is defined as pointing out that 20 people have been working on the project for two months without producing a single working line of code, because they’ve been asked to yoke… Read more →