Reply to: Death March projects

[jamesbrown]

that I call fake agile

Not a code monkey, but so-called "fragile" is definitely a thing - see it everywhere in orgs that formerly (read: still) used waterfall and, at some point, thought it might be a good idea to improve things, but couldn't be fecked to understand what or why.

[CoolCat]

I am in exactly the same position as you! Indian devs all ready to go, they have started in fact, and the spec isn't even half way ready! I've been chasing the a-hole who is writing the spec for months and he kept promising I would have it next monday morning, next monday morning. I think he has actually made a start on it now. Project MUST be delivered end of Sept. Senior stakeholders making a BIG FUSS. Funny thing is, we needed the senior stakehodlers to do some actual work the other day, to get us some info on the clients to set them up with accounts, and they could not be arsed and tried to fob it off on me! Well, it is sunny at the moment, the poor buggers need to WFH and sit in the garden enjoying a lemonade most likely.

Just heard they want to extend my contract as it runs out in about 8 weeks. I switched my mic off I was laughing so hard. Haven't told them where to stick it yet! What a farce.

sounds like network rail, or the MOD, or ...

[willendure]

2 weeks to go. In some ways things are in a lot better shape now, we have a spec that covers a decent amount of future work, and things have settled down a bit in terms of time demands that completely short circuited the design process. The development work has largely been succesfull, just followed a very messy process, and lots of rework from testing. In that sense, the work should be a bit easier going forward, but I somehow don't trust this client to ever give me a straightforward ride! The main issue is that this client runs what I call fake agile - they pretend to be agile, but really do waterfall, but things never work out to allow the steps of the waterfall to complete. Often my step has been in negative time, development work starts before the spec is decided and ready for technical design.

Extension is up in 2 weeks, and AFAIK they still need somebody, but I need a rest.

Main skills are AWS design, and ability to deal with lots of unknowns and lots of patience. There is probably someone out there that might even enjoy this kind of work and be able to do it much better than me. Around the 500/day mark. When I tell the agency I am not interested in any extension, they will ask if I know anyone that might be interested, and if that is you, drop me a PM and I can tell you more and forward the job description and agency details and so on.

Death march - but its a job, init? In this market thats still worth something!

[krytonsheep]

No one lost their job and the super genius responsible left for a better job soon after.

I've seen that time and time again. You'll get someone who is very outspoken, but lacking in any deep technical understanding. Managers listen to them, waste a gazillion pounds. The guy leaves, will put on his CV he did the equivalent of building a SpaceX rocket single handedly, and gets a ridiculously good job because people buy into the bulltulip.

The things I've seen people won't believe. The best analogy I can give is like someone makes a text input box in Javascript for a payment system, writes on their CV they made Stripe, and then gets a job as the governor of the BoE.

[willendure]

It taught me that after a point you have to stop caring and just take the money. I also got loads of cool trips to the US out of it so it was still a win for me.

Indeed. Sometimes you find yourself in these situations and its not your fault and there is nothing you can really do about it, and even trying to sort things out is just going to make your life miserable. Current contract, the hiring manager that interviewed me was hopeless and did not really give any indication of what I was really letting myself in for. Perhaps deliberately. So yeah - gimme the cash and I will see what comes up next! Worst case scenario it will be equally bad, so I've nothing to lose.

[TheDude]

I joined a project for a large US firm. The plan was to replace all of it's huge data silos with a huge data lake.

So far, so good.

They also wanted to add a frontend so that legacy SQL developers could write queries that would be transformed into Apache Spark jobs. The plan being retain business knowledge whilst allowing legacy devs to be productive on a distributed computing platform.

Not do good. Spark has a very different execution model to Oracle, Sybase etc. Simply porting legacy stored procs is a recipe for disaster however this wasn't a fatal flaw - with some training users could write efficient jobs even though such training negated one of primary benefits of the new ssystem.

The absulte killer was the front end required users to manually link the 'functions' they had written. Modify a function and every job that uses it has to be manually re-linked. A one line change to a function could literally require days of manual re-linking.

The thing is that the person that proposed the system was regarded as an untouchable super genius and he had the buy in of several influential managers.

I explained all of these issues in great detail, provided calculations that even automating the re-linking task involved traversing huge dependency graphs and would still be slow. I also proposed a package based dependency solution that would eliminate linking.

Of course I was ignored but I was also absolutely correct and the project was canned six months later at a cost of tens of millions. No one lost their job and the super genius responsible left for a better job soon after.

It taught me that after a point you have to stop caring and just take the money. I also got loads of cool trips to the US out of it so it was still a win for me.

[BlueSharp]

The penny is dropping that I was not talking out of my rear (for a change).

The business processes I warned them about being not fit for purpose are turning out to be, well not fit for purpose. Either way the team is delivering again, even if the business process is not working. But the work at risk was signed off, so arse is covered.

But in the great contractor scheme of things thats not my problem.

41 days to go.

[willendure]

I hope you argued the case that's the PM's responsibility, and he failed to get additional resources to recover the project slipage.

I actually made my case 2 months ago because I could see where things were headed. This time around I just nodded and smiled - 4 weeks to go!

[willendure]

The funniest thing I've seen this year is a PM who off shored work to India to support a team in the UK. Doing daily video standups, helping with testing etc. Everything was going ok, until they found out the PM was actually the CEO of the company they were out sourcing to in India. He got fired and they stopped using his company.

This happened on a major Scottish Government project - Indian manager working in the project as some kind of PM used his contracting Ltd to bring in a load of them on T2 visas, all working through his company and he was taking a big cut too. He actually made millions out of it.

[BlueSharp]

Got the serious pep talk from the PM today. Things we cannot afford to let slip. Says the man who let the whole thing slip for about 2 months landing us all in the this pile of tulip. Genius.

I hope you argued the case that's the PM's responsibility, and he failed to get additional resources to recover the project slipage.

[BlueSharp]

The funniest thing I've seen this year is a PM who off shored work to India to support a team in the UK. Doing daily video standups, helping with testing etc. Everything was going ok, until they found out the PM was actually the CEO of the company they were out sourcing to in India. He got fired and they stopped using his company.

That is an outstanding lack of oversight from senior leadership.

[krytonsheep]

The funniest thing I've seen this year is a PM who off shored work to India to support a team in the UK. Doing daily video standups, helping with testing etc. Everything was going ok, until they found out the PM was actually the CEO of the company they were out sourcing to in India. He got fired and they stopped using his company.

[willendure]

Got the serious pep talk from the PM today. Things we cannot afford to let slip. Says the man who let the whole thing slip for about 2 months landing us all in the this pile of tulip. Genius.

[willendure]

Developers started work about a month ago without a proper spec - the idea of "agile" was floated as an excuse for this lack of preparation.

Today, the message finally got through to project management that the various pieces of the project do not align. There are fundamental misconceptions between the various sides that we are integrating on how they identify things, and at what level. What the person who failed to write the spec had assumed was going to be a simple first implementation has turned out to be a complete mess. Crawling through it all now on various calls, accross multiple language barriers to try and make sense of things that really needed to be made sense of about 2 months ago.

If it had somehow gelled together without much thought I could actually see us making the delivery deadline. No chance now!

[willendure]

This just gets crazier.

So I heard rumours that Client Co has already done this integration project previously in some form. Given current difficulties I asked about it as there might be some useful info there. I found references to an older decommissioned project. Turns out Client Co has done this project before. Badly. Kinda failed on it. So this is actually Death March II - The Repeat. Archeology has uncovered the site of the battle of Death March I - The Defeat.




Everybody getting quite narky today. They threw one guy under a bus and gave him a hard time.