Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

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Like the famous image of the guy who's sitting next to a pretty girl, straining to supposedly hold a fart, I can't NOT mention this. I work for a blue chip Fortune 250. We write software for a computer embedded in our products. This software is broken up into 8 pieces, which are reduced to the least-common parts.

Every database, application, and workflow in the company has to deal with possibly 8 different part numbers when referring to a release of software. From the mainframe, to the PDM to the ERP to every single ad-hoc Excel spreadsheet used by every department to help manage the complexity.

Most of the parts are shared across various builds, with 2 or 3 of the "subfiles" being different. So, in a release of hundreds of various custom softwares for a particular hardware product, there are hundreds-times-5-to-8 subfiles released. Each software must be broken apart, checked for commonality, and rebuilt using the common files, and then checked against the base build to make sure that it rebuilt correctly. Each release of software requires LITERALLY DAYS of work to do this, even with Excel macros.

I wrote software to automate all of this. It took a half an hour, with NO manual intervention. It was strangled in the crib.

WHY do we do this? Before WAN's became de rigueur, we took our software to the computer on the production lines that programs the embedded computers on floppy disks, and the software had to be broken up into 8 parts so that it would... fit on a floppy. We operate with a built-in technical debt that hasn't been needed for 30 years which would literally break the company to address. It's virtually unseen at this point.

If there's a worse example of "technical debt," I'd love to hear it.

I'm very interested in stories like this.

> I wrote software to automate all of this. It took a half an hour, with NO manual intervention. It was strangled in the crib.

Can you say any more about why management at your company decided to strangle this project in the crib? What exactly happened? If you tried to pushback, how did they shut you down?

If you have time I'd also be curious to hear an outline of how your solution fixed things.

I've mentioned it in many posts here, because I still have trouble processing it. I could write a book.

I wrote an application (in engineering) that did a thing that everyone loved. It had a thousand internal users. Another group (in IT) thought my project was their domain, and tried to kill it. When they couldn't, they staffed up and wrote their own version. I wrote mine in a year and a half; it took them 10 people and 3 years. Their version sucked so hard, no one would use it. They hired Microsoft to help them make it better; they failed.

In frustration with the situation, the IT manager managed to replace my boss' boss with someone he had mentored into the company, and lo and behold, we were told to stop working on my project. We made a patch to fix a bug, and they feigned outrage, and pulled the plug and made us hand over my application, which has now run for about 6 years without update, while they try to force more people to use their piece of junk. I hear they've gotten most people transferred now.

Right about the time the management change was happening, my boss and I were starting to go off in several directions of other useful things we could do with the data. One of them was the function I mentioned. It was a very manual process, but very scriptable. I created a message queue in Azure, to "release" the job, and had another machine (with a proprietary program this process needed) pick up the message and just crank through it. I had just gotten that done when they pulled the plug, and it was never used in anger.

A lot of times, people tell war stories like this, and you think, aww, come on; it couldn't have been THAT bad. But this bad enough that the CIO called the IT manager to a special meeting about it, and he was reassigned to a lead a new group. You're free to speculate if that was a promotion or a chastisement. My boss thinks it was the former. I'm not so sure.

I feel that this could be dramatized in the style of The Cuckoo's Egg, but with that IT dept playing the roll of the Russians. Maybe take a little literary license and make them a literal Cold War, Soviet-era KGB cell.

Fascinating story!

It reminds me of William Binney and ThinThread (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread). (ThinThread was a system developed by a small team at the NSA that basically performed more "targeted" intelligence gathering, rather than the vast data hoarding that was described in the Snowden leaks. Naturally, bureaucratic inertia favoured the less efficient, more expensive, more privacy-invading system.)

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