@paul_ipv6 posted about #project managers, fanciful #schedules, and his response involving a Magic 8-Ball. It reminded me of a story I've told about one place I worked. I've never told it here.
I was working at a small-to-medium-sized IT/#software company that had a few internal products, but mostly did outsourced R&D work for a behemoth company - one of the largest on the planet at the time.
It was classic #waterfall planning. HugeCo's R&D department would send us a high-level #spec.
You're right; you can abuse any development methodology. Even accidentally 😜
The whole tech-going-obsolete-during-project thing was what killed HugeCo. We'd finish an R&D prototype that did amazing things, years ahead of the rest of the industry. Their R&D department would hand it over to product, who would essentially start over (treating the prototype as just a demo model). Product wouldn't be ready for 2 or 3 years - at which point industry had caught up. Sayonara, HugeCo!
knew some of the folks at DECWRL back in the day. were doing cutting edge stuff that DEC never shipped. and DEC wound up dying and turning into just a brand of another company. always sad to see the work and passion of smart folks pissed away.
Our #president and the #VP of #engineering would break our company's share of the work into #blocks or #modules, those would flow out to individual #team leads. Teams would break it down into tasks, and then come up with #estimates for each #task. There would be hundreds of tickets overall; projects generally lasted 6 months to a year.
Then the president and VP would go into the #boardroom with hundreds of these tasks on #PostIt notes and #stick them all over 3 #walls.
From this, they would come up with the #critical#path, and then #extrapolate the project #completion date. They would then write it up, and send it to HugeCo for approval.
It would go like this: We receive the project brief on, say, 15 March. It takes a few weeks of talking and then doing this estimating to get the #proposal finished, say ready for presenting to HugeCo on 1 May. It would say "If we start work on 15 June, it will be done March 31".
We would send it to HugeCo's R&D division. They would immediately #approve it, and send it up the chain of command, because apparently everything had to go all the way up to a Senior Vice-President In Charge Of Things Beginning With The Letter "P" (or some such officer). And HugeCo would #dither, and #committees would be struck, #meetings would be held, #crickets would chirp.
Eventually HugeCo's SVP would pull their #thumb out and #approve the project, and it would get back to us fairly quickly. But now, it's October 15.
And our bosses would tell us we still had to #deliver it by the originally proposed date - 31 March. The one that we said we could meet if we started work on 15 June. I don't know how HugeCo expressed this to our pres & VP. But they were happy for the business.
What they did next drove us #engineers up the frigging wall.
Our pres & VP would go back in the boardroom, and start going over all the #tickets on the critical path. They'd just #arbitrarily#chop the #estimates - this 8 becomes a 3, that 15 becomes a 4, on and on all along the critical path. Sometimes they would have to make multiple passes to get the answer they wanted.
Eventually, they would reach a state where the final ticket on the critical path had a completion date of 31 March.
So then, they'd start handing the tickets out to us to work on. And you'd pick up a ticket that you had estimated as 3 engineer-weeks and find it how had an estimate of 4 days, with no other changes.
And for the entire rest of the project, it would be constant sniping and complaining from management about why we were so slow, and the project was so behind. It was a whole lot of no fun.
The project would eventually grind to completion 6 weeks late, and with a lot of stuff only half-assed-done. But it would be finished.
And the dance would start over again.
HugeCo went out of business, and sent #shockwaves through the industry. Top-heavy, committee-driven, glacially slow - it was no wonder they couldn't compete.
The company I worked for #shrivelled and #died after HugeCo collapsed. They had been 75% of the company's revenue, and it just disappeared.
Our company tried to go on, shedding people and desperately chasing new customers. But eventually the wheels came off. I left for sunnier shores literally weeks before they threw the keys at the landlord and slunk away.
I was glad to walk out the door that final time.
Fun memories 😜
8/8
FAQ: "Why didn't you leave earlier?"
A: The economy here was lousy. There were no other jobs.
I really liked working with the HugeCo R&D people. They were great. The rest of HugeCo moved at the speed of continental drift, and it was frustrating to see amazing projects die because they couldn't bring them to market on time.
Think stuff like "layer-7 switching" at many-gigabit line speed when the rest of the industry was barely doing IP/layer 3 routing, and usually not at wire speed.
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