London Stock Exchange hires 81 C++ developers for delayed Linux system | Hacker News Reader

London Stock Exchange hires 81 C++ developers for delayed Linux system

computerworlduk.com

51 pointsDMPenfold200848 comments

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Guess they've never heard of Fred Brooks...?

Who's that? Google turns up nothing.

First result in Google:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks

Mythical Man Month is quite well-known

I'd misread it as 'Fred Books'. Sorry.

Copy-and-paste is your friend.

Nobody did. At my ex-employer, I did an informal survey, with a simple reformulation of the original question: "Would adding developpers to a late project help or not ?" Everybody answered yes, even some people that DID read The Mythical Man Month.

Of course, the question is loaded. You're assuming that they will be adding developers who have no familiarity with the project. Project resources have lifecycles, especially for larger ones. If you have, say 200 developers on a project at the start and as the project reaches maturity, you reduce that amount to 50, those 150 other developers don't magically forget everything overnight.

So, if six months down the road, you need more dev resources because you're falling behind a little, adding some of those devs back will probably help speed things up. Notice that the company that added the devs in the story has 400+ heads already. What they could be doing is hiring new guys to take on some of the non-exchange related work they were doing and shifting some project-experienced devs back on.

Of course, that's the best possible scenario. What they're probably gonna do is just fuck things up.

Nice people don't use the word "resources" in that context :-)

Critically thinking people don't harp on word choice while ignoring the argument.

Actually I accepted your argument (and upvoted) - just the use of "resources" like that is something I hate...

(Note the smiley on my comment).

yep, never ignore the actual argument based on word choice, but word choice might give you a rather large clue on the mindset of the people making the argument.

The article also alludes to "open source developers" - this could be interpreted such that they're bringing on developers who already work on specific OSS projects to do specific integration/debugging/optimisation work. But who knows, the whole thing is pretty damn vague.

When you're a development manager and someone offers you some extra developers what'd you say? If you say no to more developers, then it's very easy for your decision to be blamed for the project failings. At some point, the decision is probably more about politics than increasing the likelihood of the project succeeding.

If politics are so important, that is if the system wants to be gamed, then game it: accept the extra developers then have them do something totally irrelevant to the project completion.

I am always amazed at the number of very senior IT people who have never heard of him. I read his book as a very junior employee and felt like I was in some kind of secret club compared to everyone above me. People can be forgiven for going down technical dead ends or any of a multitude of bad decisions that are only obvious in hindsight. There is zero excuse for repeating mistakes that are well-documented and avoidable. The funny thing is, it's not like his book is all theory. Anyone who has spent 5 or more years near most big corporate IT shops can readily identify most of the things he mentions in their own organization.

The Mythical Man Month, Peopleware, The Pragmatic Programmer and all the classic Joel On Software Articles - they taught me so much. Unfortunately, just like you I have encountered very few people in my day job who have heard of these books. I am not sure if that is reflective of a big company, or IT folk in general?

> There is zero excuse for repeating mistakes that are well-documented and avoidable.

I once showed the CAP Theorem to a former employer. A few of the guys there were still convinced they could have a fully distributed system that would be consistent and available. I left soon after.

that was also my first reaction when i saw the headline.

i first read Mythical Man Month when i was i grad school, and didn't really get it. i mean, i understood everything he was saying, but it didn't resonate with me. a decade later i was working at Digital Equipment Corporation and had much better understanding. and after doing another startup, i wound up at Microsoft. then i _really_ got it.

And you wonder where all the potential start-up technical founders in London are ending up...

It could be that they have 810 developers and need to increase their staff in 10%

I gather it's for the Department of Objectively Overzealous Management of Endpoint Drivers project...

yes because the project is 10% behind schedule

it all makes sense

They're hiring 81 additional people for a late project and I should still believe that their earlier failure was Microsoft's fault?

http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_aban...

What these people need isn't software or more people, it's just a minimum of the soft stuff that the brain is made of.

bad news: they are all Hurd developers

It was 81 because they assumed there would be some attrition among the newbies. They probably really only need 67 or so.

Does anyone know why the LSE purchased a company based in Sri Lanka for the work? I'm probably totally out of touch, but I would expect to find a company developing trading systems to be based near a major exchange (London, NY etc.).

Ah, there is a Colombo Exchange. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombo_Stock_Exchange

Yes, MillenniumIT started proving services for CSE first and then moved to Malaysia, Boston, London, etc based on the initial platform developed for CSE

As I remember at the time of the "last straw" .NET debacle, this Sri Lankan firm was supposed to be really good, speed obsessed C++ types. And they had real systems in production, as noted by others in this thread.

That mythical man month is BS, there are lots of open source project with hundreds of contributors..

I wonder what kind of skill they are looking for specifically? (Education, experience, etc)

> That mythical man month is BS, there are lots of open source project with hundreds of contributors..

Non sequitur. Have you read the book?

Why 81? it seems that they tried to hire as much as possible, not wise.

They placed them in a 9 by 9 organizational matrix to fuel synergies through increased communication by placing them in a physical 9 by 9 cubicle matrix.

Or maybe that's all the headhunters could find.

Or a 3x3x3x3 hypercube?

C++ is definitely in some other dimension.

I don't suppose there's any chance we can send it back?

Trick it into saying its name backwards?

Three times?

unless it is part of an assignment statement, a conditional, or a loop, it will have the same effect.

That's writing the name backwards.

Where's Gene Ray when you need him?

What is this synergy/syngeries/synerging I keep hearing about? I know the meaning of the word and I see that it's some kind of a big company cliche, but where'd it come from?

I don't know. My first memory of it is from Dilbert (and I can find a comic from 1997 with a synergy joke) but I would be surprised if that were the origin of the meme. It's hard to track down even when it started showing up.

Most of these terms seem to have been introduced by strategic consulting firms (e.g. McKinsey or BAH) and then filtered out into general management usage.

Whenever I hear that word I still think of the AI that Jem uses to generate her hologram-self.

Maybe they need to have nine babies in one month?

Or 80 in nine months.

If they had stuck with plain C they'd probably only need 2 developers.

For the Horde!!!

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