Injection Rejection

Matthias Winkelmann's company decided to go the ole' outsourcing route and hand off all development work for a fixed-bid project to a certain overseas company. As it turned out, the hourly rate for certain overseas programmers were less than half that of the in-house folks, so management did the math and figured they could profit that much more. The in-house programmers were told to spend "only a little bit of time" on the project -- no technical advice, no coding assistance, and no even looking at the code. They were only to assist testers in "effectively communicating technical issues" to the overseas team. As it turned out, there were a lot of technical issues, and a lot of issues communicating the technical issues, so that job ended up taking quite a bit more than "only a little bit of time."

Injection Rejection

Matthias Winkelmann's company decided to go the ole' outsourcing route and hand off all development work for a fixed-bid project to a certain overseas company. As it turned out, the hourly rate for certain overseas programmers were less than half that of the in-house folks, so management did the math and figured they could profit that much more. The in-house programmers were told to spend "only a little bit of time" on the project -- no technical advice, no coding assistance, and no even looking at the code. They were only to assist testers in "effectively communicating technical issues" to the overseas team. As it turned out, there were a lot of technical issues, and a lot of issues communicating the technical issues, so that job ended up taking quite a bit more than "only a little bit of time."

ITAPPMONROBOT

At the turn of the 21st century, Initrode Global's server infrastructure began showing cracks. Anyone that had been in the server room could immediately tell that its growth had been organic. Rackmounted servers sat next to recommissioned workstations, with cables barely secured by cable ties. Clearly there had been some effort to clean things up a bit, but whoever put forth that effort gave up halfway through. It wasn't pretty, but it worked for years. As time passed, though, a proprietary gateway server to communicate with credit processing agencies would crash more and more frequently. And these were bad crashes, too — the kind of crashes where the server wouldn't respond to ping and would have to be restarted manually. It wasn't really a big deal for the admin, Erik, to hit the restart button on the server when he was there, but that was only 40 hours a week. The credit union needed it to be active 24/7, but was unwilling to hire 24 hour staff in the datacenter. The problem kept getting worse and worse, so the IT manager called up a meeting.

Tomorrow

It's only a day away! Punctual Robert F. never procrastinates. But I think now would be a good time for a change. He worries that "I better do something quick, before my 31,295 year deadline arrives."

Check Your Email

Branon's boss, Steve, came storming into his cube. From the look of panic on his face, it was clear that this was a full hair-on-fire emergency. "Did we change anything this weekend?"

Classic WTF: The Complicator's Gloves

It's a particularly busy week for me: on top of a few looming deadlines, I'll be at Business of Software 2008 in Boston. So, I figured it'd be the perfect opportunity to revisit some classics. The Complicator's Gloves was originally published on January 16th, 2007. Another fun, tangentially related article is The Complicator's Bicycle.

The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

No, We Need a Neural Network

M.A. is one of the world's foremost experts on neural networks. His undergraduate specialty was artificial intelligence, his master's thesis was about genetic algorithms, and his doctoral dissertation covered evolutionary programming. Such an extensive computer science education opened up a wide range of career options, ranging from a professor at a university to ... a professor at another university. When someone outside of academia sought out his expertise for a project, he jumped at the opportunity.The company that wanted to hire M.A. was a small programming firm that developed and maintained software used by the Bureau of Water Management. They were recently awarded a large contract to redo a rather inefficient part of the system and were convinced that implementing a neural network was the way to go. After the initial interview, M.A. told them that a neural network was the wrong tool for the job and that they should use a traditional approach. Management disagreed with his assessment and insisted that he come aboard to help rebuild the system. Had they not offered such a generous salary, he might have recognized this as a first warning sign.