Reply to: IT people are overly wedded to logic

[MarillionFan]

12 out of 50. Not autistic. It day say I looked gorgeous though.

[RetSet]

Your score was 30 out of a possible 50.

Scores in the 26 - 32 range indicate some Autistic traits (Aspergers Syndrome).


Mmm... Tasty Windows...

[Scrag Meister]

I got 8.

I win, Yey!!!

[eek]

Your score was 14 out of a possible 50.

I got 8.

[Scrag Meister]

Ah yes. Remember this:

Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ)

Your score was 14 out of a possible 50.

Edit
Also tried MB/Jung test

And I am an ESTJ.

Which is exactly what I thought when I read the thread.

[doodab]

Reason: error

My sort of error message

[oscarose]

Of course! We spend most of our working hours getting what we can out of a machine that only deals in 0s and 1s.

[vetran]

+ 100. Cannot stress on this enough. Business often has a way to oversimplify things, because they never understand what goes into making it work from a technical perspective.
...
but the biggest hurdle for IT is to get the business moving and make them understand what the roadblock is in a particulr requirement! Which probably explains why some IT guys become managers, to bridge the gap between non-IT managers and IT, which leads to them shouting "quality" (and take things in a completely different direction ) SDLC process is pretty immature alright

Let me make this clear I agree with Doodab & Tranceporter

[tranceporter]

While I agree with the second sentence, I have to say that the perception that IT "overcomplicate" things invariably comes from the fact that in order to "really understand the goal" and build a system to support it one has to dig into all of the complex details that the business have ignored, omitted or simply not bothered to share until that point. In general they have grossly oversimplified the goal and have only a vague concept of what they are trying to achieve. Usually this takes the form of a catchy name (Next Generation Platform, Corporate Spine, yada yada yada) that sounds good and evokes all sorts of expectations about the magic that might happen, coupled to a complete lack of actual detail about what it actually does.

+ 100. Cannot stress on this enough. Business often has a way to oversimplify things, because they never understand what goes into making it work from a technical perspective. While adding "extra insured items" to the insurance quote page as an afterthought might seem like a straightforward task to them, technically it might be difficult due to the representation of insurance quote page already being tied to various other places in the backend, which would need changing. Now this is a contrived example, but QA (oh this label placement is not intuitive), and the business (is this how we decided to design the page? Oh that won't work, let's re-design it completely) just do the developer's head in, and make him feel like throwing away the whole thing and starting again. Business also are a serious bottleneck when clarifying requirements, especially in AGILE. Case in point, in a big organization, when we were re-writing the home insurance website in MVC, their quote generation engine would always throw up, when we supplied a specific criteria of property type, number of lodgers, and value of the property. Now the website could not be pushed to prod until we got the exact business rule for this criteria, and we finally had to push that requirement to product backlog, because the business could not respond in 2 weeks. Most of the time they were in "meetings", or had taken half day and left office early, or out of office, and could not be arsed to respond to e-mails. There also usually is a huge chain of command in big organizations, where no single business person knows the complete answer. This results in a huge chain-email that finally gets forwarded to the dev at the very end, with conflicting pieces to info, which needs to be fed back again in the loop, with a new set of questions. This is usually taken over by a proper BA, but good BA's are hard of come by. Most of them reverse engineer the existing website, and slap together a spreadsheet with business rules, which are woefully inadequate.
I am not saying that developers do not have their faults, but the biggest hurdle for IT is to get the business moving and make them understand what the roadblock is in a particulr requirement! Which probably explains why some IT guys become managers, to bridge the gap between non-IT managers and IT, which leads to them shouting "quality" (and take things in a completely different direction ) SDLC process is pretty immature alright

[vetran]

Is that where the systems stay alive by sucking the life out of people?

Its stagnation of the slowest, those who don't jump out of legacy systems get sucked into the whirlpool of legacy support.

[MarillionFan]

or you can go the other way, managers who move support staff around and expect them to support systems by osmosis.

I was accused yesterday of assuming everyone else I worked with is stupid. I stated that it wasnt an assumption.

[doodab]

or you can go the other way, managers who move support staff around and expect them to support systems by osmosis.

Is that where the systems stay alive by sucking the life out of people?

[vetran]

And another thing managers have to deal with is IT people who build up a proprietary knowledge of a system and keep it to themselves and then use this knowledge to enhance their own standing and obstruct anything that they do not like.

or you can go the other way, managers who move support staff around and expect them to support systems by osmosis.

[vetran]

Many such systems are cobbled together by a bunch of cowboys and work perfectly fine yet all I hear on this board are cries about quality when most likely your version of quality is not required.
The trouble is that most of you think that managers are simply there to stand in the way of what you want to do when they have a system to deliver at a budget that has severe limitations. In the meantime they have to deal with a bunch of fleck wits who have no comprehension of what is really required.

Sorry DA you can't argue with experience.

If you start a project and I say - I need a ledger to charge the project startup costs to up front (as per standard company practice) they say how much will it cost?
So I say well to look into it and give a firm cost < $5K
No they say how much will the whole undefined project cost?
Well I guess it will be less than the $150,000 you were expecting to spend with an external vendor .
No we want an exact price now.
I reply well lets have the exact specifications now.
Oh no they say we can't do that its too complicated. What will it cost?

so you invent a figure.

they grudgingly give you a ledger then they spend weeks arguing about every cross charge even if they explicitly approved it before.

You write 50 pages of specifications with pictures. You show them a limited prototype built on an old test system in a weekend.

You directly negotiate an agreement with the works councils to allow you to use this new technology the first time it has happened (they have refused other similar technologies).

you run through it 7-8 times and vote at the gate. You explain as per company policy once they vote yes they are sealing the design.

They vote yes after 10 reminders.

they complain its taking too long, you point out that 3 weeks to press yes on an email is a big part of the delay.

Also the risk you identified at the start that the only resource in the business who was allowed to do part X was busy for 6 months of their choosing but you have a meeting on the evening of the 22nd June at 9pm to kick off as that was the first time they were free. They have approx 2 months work to do this is publicised.

They phone you every day from the 1st of February to ask why isn't it moving forward and complain to your boss that you are going slowly. He agrees with them


At the beginning of August the managers start complaining why isn't it moving faster?


You get the chap to put together a functioning prototype in the actual official system and show it to them, they say you know we want A,B,C and T changed. You point out they voted on the design, the boss over rules you. Oh by the way the the deadline has moved forward.

They then complain about the hours charged.

You know you will deliver it and they will complain about the cost which is less than the figure you agreed, functionality which you set in the beginning but they changed at last minute and time - yes you guessed it it was agreed at the start and you are 2 hours over.

As for quality when you have to meet legal or statutory restrictions then you have to pass them, just pretending they pass isn't enough.

My personal recommendation was to use an external supplier that was a third of the original cost and could have been expanded to deal with other requirements easily but the managers didn't have an external budget to use. It would have taken half the time to market, would have been provably safe and been a better solution. I was over ruled by Managers!

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Personally I'm quite happy to just do it, I have three projects recently that just depended on me to do the work and they finished on time. Its the others and the politics that hack me off.

[doodab]

Give me an example.. There that should keep you quiet for a few weeks.

I can't be arsed to trawl back through your posts. I'll just wait for you to do it again.