[thelist] Size doesn't matter?

Luther, Ron Ron.Luther at compaq.com
Mon Jul 9 08:31:15 CDT 2001


Hi Chris,


Chiming in from Compaq HQ here .... I'm pretty sure I count as a "corporate
in-house team" kind of guy.  ;-)   [Business side - I'm not IM.]  I work
mostly with a package called 'Brio', but also some ASP.  Sometimes I confuse
the heck out of the IM guys by throwing a little Perl at them as well.

I don't work on the public site - just the internal reporting stuff.
[Deployed a nice set of reports last week to let folks in one office see
that they have orders for a 'left-handed computer' from their office but
none in stock - while at the same time seeing that another office has them
in stock, but no orders against them.  Those folks have to pull the trigger
on the intra-company transfer ... I just put the bullets in the gun.]

I'll echo Martin's comment about 'internal fiefdoms'.  "Sorry - I don't have
the time or expertise to modify this report, but you're not on our team so
you're obviously a moron and I can't let you see the code."   Helpful, eh?

Basically - you're not alone - there is 'looniness' everywhere.  Just play
the odds - if you're part of the solution more often than being part of the
problem - you're doing okay.

I'll add a few more wrinkles:

'prototyping' ... Some yahoo takes three months to throw together some
FrontPage crap running off static Excel spreadsheets to wow a local V-P.
Naturally, they like it.  Now, you're the "bad guy" 'cuz you can't
'productionize' it to run dynamically off the databases, document it, and
train a world-wide base of users in less than a week.  What's wrong with
you? I thought you knew this stuff.

'skill levels' ... This goes along with 'fiefdoms'.  Some group somewhere
may have had an ASP "wizard" for some period of time.  He's lateralled to
another group.  [This happens A LOT in bigger companies.]  The old site
needs maintenance.  So now you inherit some ASP code that is sooooo old the
radio buttons are sixty lines of custom COM object coding - swell!  Or
better yet - the page calls a compiled C++ object that no one in the known
universe has the source code to.... or it's built off a trigger in a SQL7
database that the person who transferred was the sole dba of 'cuz it's on
the machine in his office.  What's the matter with you? It's a "simple
change"!  {Sadly, all of these examples are real.}

'globalization' ... Being in the 'corporate' group means getting all the
calls; from the UK, from Belgium, from Australia, Canada, Singapore, and
Japan [so far this year] ... claiming your data is "bad".  Helllooooo!
We're corporate.  We don't have the time or inclination to diddle with your
local data.  If the data we're reporting is "bad", guess what Sugar, its
'cuz your local system is sending us bad data!  D'oh!!!   [Personally, I'd
MUCH rather do development work than research global data integrity issues.
You absolutely, positively cannot be "a hero" researching data integrity
issues.  It's very very frustrating and time consuming!]


Gosh - that all probably reads like a rant ... but most of the time I really
do enjoy what I'm doing here and try to have fun with it!  (I especially
wish I could 'show off' some of the cooler stuff.)

Anyway Chris, maybe take a long weekend and get away for while, then come
back fresh and keep your chin up!

HTH,


RonL.
"Lead with the left!"

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Evans [mailto:chris at fuseware.com]
Subject: RE: [thelist] Size doesn't matter?

>But I think most of the really, really big sites have their inhouse
>teams.

I guess that was my point - do we have anybody on thelist on those in-house
teams?  I don't contract - They pay my salary.





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