Comment by justherefortart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justherefortart | Hacker News Reader

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justherefortart

I took over as IT Director at a company with a small team. Everyone would take their issues to the developer all day long, interrupting his day constantly. So every new "fire" because the latest task.

Not surprisingly the hacked together new website (which went live months late and $100s of Ks over budget) was a train wreck. Unreliable and constantly causing errors/issues.

The first thing I did was said the only person that can talk to the development team is me. It took about 2 months to get all the software processes in place that were non-existent, to get the entire website working and stable, and to get our task/goal list under control.

The cocksucker owner comes to me and says "I want these 4 project you quoted that would take 6 months done in the next 3 months". So I quit (so did their lead developer that was doing 90% of the heavy lifting).

IT Management is a mess everywhere I've ever been, just to varying degrees. Maybe this is because most my career has been as a consultant or contractor, but it's really discouraging.

I just finished reading the Phoenix Project, and I wanted to say the beginning of this post read almost exactly like the first 3/4's of the book.

https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Busine...

I hope you didn't jump straight to quitting. There may have been a legitimate need to launch something that quickly. When I get requests like that, I usually explain the immutable rule of software development... deadline, quality, scope: pick two. Since he wants to adjust the deadline, ask him which of the other two he'll compromise. One answer, quality, would probably lead me to quit, since I can't stand delivering stuff that sucks, but if he were willing to adjust scope of those projects, it's a completely reasonable request.

The company was a hard sell for me to even take the job in the first place. The owner is a piece of shit human being. Once I saw the inside, it's likely even illegal what they're doing.

So no, I didn't jump. I had to be persuaded to take the job in the first place. Life is too short for bullshit. I delivered what I said I would, and when they didn't live up to their end of the bargain, they faced the consequences I told them they would when I was hired.

IME sacrificing quality almost always pushes out a deadline and costs, sometimes for decades. Low quality means constant firefighting will interrupt everything else.

As a slightly pedantic aside, I prefer Kent Beck's observation that the triangle is time, scope, resources, with quality independent of those three. Of course, quality can be sacrificed in the short term to improve time or scope, but the impact is so gruesomely negative to their long-term prospects that it should simply never be done.

Resources as a leg also lines up with the observation from The Mythical Man-Month that adding resources to a late project makes it later. (I have experienced this directly.) So resources are rarely mutable to a significant degree; you have the team you have and the budget you have - and you really do not want to see what happens when you suddenly get an unlimited budget!

So I tend to phrase it as every project is either scope-bound or schedule-bound. One of those can flex - which one? If you can't flex either, you will probably fail.

Don’t use slurs like that here.

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