Project Fear

by dcminter • 4 years ago

81 42 4 years ago

dcminter11• 4 years ago

In truth, this was a good while ago and I'm certainly mis-remembering some of it, but it still entertains me and I thought it might bring out a few war stories from the crowd here!

saiya-jin• 4 years ago

Its a bit too extreme to trump it. But in big corporations, especially in some small branch that can't make the processes and restriction of big corp work with limited resources, its normal to wait for computer for 1 week. You can't do much, since any studying of internal stuff requires... computer.

Its not so nice when you see an external guy burn through 10k$ budget in a week and all he can do is watch his phone for 8 hours a day.

The rest, just wow, 1-guy subversion via usb sounds like a bad story from 1999. Anything non-trivial would be impossible to ship in any reasonable quality, ever. Normally management is not that comically incompetent (and worse).

trashtester• 4 years ago

There are still plenty of people not using any kind of source controll system at all. Particularly among data scientists, DBA's, etc.

dcminter11• 4 years ago

No single element of it was really unusual at the time. It was the lunacy of everything simultaneously that made it truly memorable.

I do think we have it pretty good these days. In particular, the dev-ops movement has pretty much put an end to the days of waiting for a server to be made available to a new project.

The rest, just wow, 1-guy subversion via usb sounds like a bad story from 1999.

Heh. According to Wikipedia USB sticks went on the market around 2000. But yeah, zip drives or something. But there'd have been reams of printed documentation in binders (or badly stapled realistically) and JIRA wouldn't have been a thing, so perhaps a net win :)

My first gig after university we moved all the files around on 3½" floppy disk and I'm retrospectively embarrassed by my resistance to a colleague's insistence that we start using a CVS server instead!

jimmygrapes• 4 years ago

I have never worked in an official capacity in any tech related thing; I have always just been the guy who is "good with computers" and "can fix your excel" and such. And, you know, maybe I'm just a masochist, but what you describe sounds like fun to me.

dcminter11• 4 years ago

I remember it, in the moment, being immensely frustrating. I couldn't get any useful work done because everything went through the horrible mangling process and I was powerless to change it.

If it was mere cluelessness and I could have introduced a bit of sane process to the project I think I'd have had a blast!

a_c2• 4 years ago

Is the company still around? What is everyone doing nowadays?

dcminter11• 4 years ago

The individuals I couldn't tell you. The small good consultancy got bought by another one and carried on doing good work. The (huge) bodyshop and the multinational are not of a scale to be affected by one such project. They're still around. I had a colleague on a sister project to this one in another arm of the multinational and that went well, so I think the dysfunction was not widespread.

a_c2• 4 years ago

I am always curious whether the bureaucracy ubiquitous to big corps a feature or a bug. If the big corp in your experience is doing fine nowadays, then perhaps it is more of a feature?

In my experience, the existence of bureaucracy always started from someone wanting to bring process in place. Either the process was not necessary in the first place, or somewhere down the road the reason for process no longer valid. Instead of removing the useless process, it lingers on. But the existence of bureaucracy never directly impact the business that there is no incentive to refactor it out of operation

HeckFeck• 4 years ago

I've often wondered what it is like to inhabit a company stifled by bureaucracy, and that's one of the most grating examples I've read. You'd have to shut down your brain just to survivie. Well dome for making it out alive.

Have you considered sending it into El Reg? They print these tales of woe all the time.

dcminter11• 4 years ago

Eh, I mostly hang out reading HN so I submitted it here. I'm not a big fan of El Reg or TheDailyWTF (believe it or not I find them both overly cynical).

bazmattaz2• 4 years ago

Having worked in large companies like this I can tell you it’s grim if you’re the type of person who likes to get things done and make a big impact. Lots of these companies are very slow moving and infested with lifers - people who’ll never leave the company because they have a sweet deal. They also love the bureaucracy - they’re fine with laptops taking a few months to be delivered. It’s a joke

bsenftner• 4 years ago

I need to write a book. I was at EA during the "original EA Spouse" era. (Seems like there has been a repeat during the early '00's. There was an earlier "EA Spouse" controversy during the mid '90's too. Very similar: wife of an EA staffer complaining publicly how the company is ruining her husband's health and sanity.) ANYWAY, that EA Spouse story is only the tip of how bad the video game industry was during the 90's.

I worked on the 3D0 operating system, and that was the shit show of cascading shit shows. All that fancy graphics hardware the 3D0 supposedly had, almost none of it worked. The promises, the missing milestones, the finger pointing, the extremely young and poor communicating staff. Electronic Arts was a brain damaging out of control nonsense place for quite a while. And printing money at the same time with their EA Sports group.

dcminter11• 4 years ago

For what it's worth I'd probably buy that book :)

gbro3n2• 4 years ago

"shit show of cascading shit shows" ... When you come across a phrase that decribes a feeling so perfectly ...I will be using this!

gbro3n2• 4 years ago

"shit show of cascading shit shows" ... When you come across a phrase that decribes a feeling so perfectly ...I will be using this!

ClumsyPilot2• 4 years ago

I would be very much interested in such a book :)

the extremely young and poor communicating staff

That's is a huge issue in our industry

I am by no means any kind of expert in this. One thing I often see, is a developer offering management a choice, A and B, and then being unhappy that they chose wrong, agianst his advice.

That's fundamentally wrong - your proffeshional duty is to present to non-experts options that make sence, if option B doesn't make sence, don't present it at all. Present A as a technical nessesity, and if they can't handle it, they will let you know. Like Yes Prime minister discussion of the foreign office.

https://youtu.be/VOdnISwLkSs?t=127

ClumsyPilot2• 4 years ago

Oh nice, this should be turned into like a bingo card, let's see:

I could not order a corporate laptop until I joined the project. Corporate laptops were backed up with a minimum of 2 months to deliver one.

Huh, that's some softball right there! The worst I've seen is 7 months!

To get the code into the repository it had to be sent via the project manager on a USB stick by copying the entirety of your source code onto it

okay that's scary

Did I mention that any copying of files off of a corporate laptop was forbidden?

Doesn't that contradict the USB process? Otherwise that's 'standard'

In the sprint planning meeting the scrum master would demand that we “commit to the sprint.” The bodyshop minions would all meekly agree

Seems minions know their protests will be ignored, just like the author's were, so why even bother. I have seen 'minion-esque' behaviour a lot, but not the degree of brain-dead behaviour from management described there.

Also these days I avoid any project where I won’t be in a position to help steer things before they can go that superluminally off-track.

Neat!

madaxe_again• 4 years ago

Most of this stinks of ISO27001 “by the book”, using some horribly rigid off the shelf ISMS to gain certification rather than creating something compliant that actually works for the org.

Been there, done that, red swingline stapler.

dcminter11• 4 years ago

Huh, that's some softball right there! The worst I've seen is 7 months!

That's the special kind of impressive.

Doesn't that contradict the USB process? Otherwise that's 'standard'

Yeah, I thought I might not have made that clear. They were allowed to copy files onto the laptops, just not off them.

So with the wild cut&paste integration situation it meant that none of the actual developers could be aligned with the code that was actually being compiled because we could never update to the master copy.

The moment I realised that the terrible PM was doing diff by eye instead of, you know, using the diff tool, was when I should have walked away. I stuck it out way too long in retrospect.

cmeacham98• 4 years ago

How did you ever get the codebase in the first place to work on? Or was your part writing something completely from scratch?

havblue• 4 years ago

It's surprising how well Agile can be used to disguise the fact that a project isn't moving forward. Maybe consider it a feature you can use to cya while you jump ship. Sure you can point to a weak manager here but ultimately you have to blame upper management as well.

I'm not sure why people can't just expect that they can explain in two or three sentences, what they're trying to accomplish and what's preventing them from getting there. No sense in a daily scrum if you can't do that.

rpastuszak• 4 years ago

I remember a PM who was not able to tell us what the main priority for the given sprint was, yet at the same meeting he'd instantly tell you that feature A would come before B because A was #82 on his RICE log whereas B was the item #87. Amazing!

lmc• 4 years ago

My favourite moment of corporate dystopia was during my first job after finishing my undergrad...

December 18th, they asked us to put up a Christmas tree.

To ensure an efficient return after the Christmas break, they made us take the tree down on December 23rd. :-)

dcminter11• 4 years ago

Love it. I can see the logic, but it's so Scroogey!

memorable• 4 years ago

So. What's your worst project?

The Python project I just deleted a few moments ago. It's intended as a search engine for exported bookmark files, but it goes horribly wrong. The code is dirty and unorganized. Everything is wired together in the most messy way possible, and it takes forever to debug.

ilaksh• 4 years ago

Can't trump that but I do remember making a presentation about some kind of agile principles or something and it seemed to be well received by the PM and lead.

But then I went ahead and started adding some unit and functional tests and the tech lead deleted them the next day. I don't remember what he said exactly but he didn't see the point.

To be honest I often don't usually feel like a lot of automated tests are really necessary. But the thing I was working on really needed some kind of automated tests.

Eventually I realized that the only thing anyone had taken from my agile talk was that we would just go faster. They did not understand the testing part or direct communication with users or anything else I said. They only heard me say we would go faster.

For some reason eventually the PM did decide to take me to visit the site. Once, well after they had wasted all of the money. There was a lady there doing data entry. Due to some bugs and problems which I had never been informed about, the data entry process (which supposedly was to be done on Toughbooks in the field incrementally, but for some reason was instead all hand written and left for her to do) was literally driving her crazy. The PM never had any comment about it.

Oh. Almost forgot. At the same visit I got to see the code I had been working on throw an error and found out (after months) that it could not possibly be working since apparently the lead decided to add a LIMIT clause when the production database took too long to query. The way he did it completely broke the logic. Not sure how any of it really worked with that. No one ever told me. I found out two months later when it popped up on the user's screen (as apparently was normal).

This was also a place where four or five civil engineers had spent the majority of the funds creating hundreds of pages of documentation and UI designs (about literally 5 times more complex than warranted).

gumby4• 4 years ago

I could not order a corporate laptop until I joined the project. Corporate laptops were backed up with a minimum of 2 months to deliver one

At least at a defense contractor you can get hired and then get paid while waiting for the security clearance (just watching some unclassified training and such I guess).

I related this part of the post to my gf and she said at her place it’s HR that’s backed up. They have a bunch of contractors they want to convert to FT but if their contract ends and they can’t get paid they’ll go work somewhere else. Meanwhile the company is trying to hire like crazy.

imadethis2• 4 years ago

I interned at a large insurance agency on their corporate security team. My task for the summer was to setup a third party service that integrated with their Jira install. This was all done in their test environment, with nothing touching prod.

Week 1: met the team, requested access to a VM and a service account for Jira.

Week 8: the VM was provisioned. I installed the application in about 2 minutes.

Week 10: I was granted access to a service account. I entered the credential into the application and confirmed it worked.

Week 11: I presented to the team the installed and working service.

Week 12: the internship was done.

All in all I did maybe 30 min of actual work across the 12 weeks. They extended me a comfortable job offer as they were pleased with my performance, which I declined.

AmericanJedi0002• 4 years ago

This is utterly insane to me! I work in a lumber yard (yeah, physical labor <SHUDDER!!!>) where doing 30 minutes of actual work in a _12_hour_day_ would get a person fired, much less in _12_weeks_! I'm stunned that this sort of thing is fairly commonplace in the tech industry. Utterly atrocious productivity as measured by productive man-hours (pardon me-- person-hours^), yet billions upon billions of dollars get thrown at companies with the faintest of business propositions. No wonder our economy is fucked! But thanks for the highly entertaining stories, y'all! It makes me thankful to work for a (mostly) sane company, in a (mostly) sane industry, even if I have to bust my ass to make a living.

^ I am a proud East Texan, where we don't put a whole lot of stock in all the woke bullshit. No offense meant if you're about that life, but from our perspective, y'all are fuckin' crazy people. ;-) Love ya anyway, because we're all one big, dysfunctional American family, right? Hell, I've got family members who are batshit crazy, but I still love 'em. Anyway, /tangent

throwoutway2• 4 years ago

What makes it worse is the incompetent or lazy people making $300k often complain about compensation

imadethis2• 4 years ago

In response to your tangent, I’ll note that this took place in one of the reddest states in the US. This isn’t endemic in the tech industry so much as it is in large corporations. Check the back office of your largest suppliers and you’ll hear similar stories.

bazmattaz2• 4 years ago

I worked for a well known charity as a project manager and we would routinely log into the prod server and copy over some other persons code on to it. Then just force a reboot of the sql server. That was bananas. I personally couldn’t write a single line of code

throwoutway2• 4 years ago

I was nodding along with this, “been there; done that; yup; wow; sounds about right”

But I lost it at this and started laughing

To get the code into the repository it had to be sent via the project manager on a USB stick by copying the entirety of your source code onto it

Truly unbelievable

Project Fear

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