[thechat] No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

[Roger Austin]

Conyers, Dwayne wrote:
> Over the past three years, have been working a project to 
reengineer a paper and sneaker-net system into an on-line workflow.
The lead engineer did everything to block all of my architectural
recommendations:
> 
> * I recommended an enterprise data model design before coding.  
>   He said no dB work needed.  In the end, that proved a 
>   critical mistake.
> 
> * I recommended against this 3rd party tool that crashed when 
>   the vendor demo'ed it.  The engineer insisted on buying it 
>   and spent months trying to debug it before giving up... and
>   causing us to miss our delivery milestone.
> 
> * When the users cried foul because the system did not work
>   the way they worked... and there were bugs, I designed an
>   architectural document to propose fixes.
> 
> My document was declared to be a criticism of the system and I 
was handed my walking papers by the PM.  The good news... there
are a number of people waiting to snap me up to work their project
teams.  The bad news... I will really miss this contract.  The
perqs were awesome and the location made for a perfect commute.

  What you have described has been duplicated many times. It wasn't
a technical issue, it was political. Most of us can relate to this
in various degrees. The question you have to ask yourself is "Is
it worth it to go with the flow and enjoy the perqs or is it better
to make waves and try to do the right thing?"
  You were never going to win in this situation. I sounds like their
management is asleep and the engineer didn't want your opinion. He
will probably get an award when he fixes the problems using your
work as the basis of the fix.
  Good luck on your new gig, Roger
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