April 2, 2008 by roland.

If you are my age or a little older, you have some childhood memories of the cold war. Too young to understand it at the time, you remember parents watching the news during the Cuban Missile Crisis, duck and cover exercises, and news reel type shows about Russia and Communism in general. Most of them won’t be clear memories, just remembrances.

One memory, which seems to be stronger than the rest, was that of Russian Cold War construction practices. Perhaps this memory remains longest because you will occasionally see some station like The History Channel serve up some segments of those news reels.

We were told that construction would be scheduled like clockwork. No allowances for supply delays, weather delays or deaths at the construction site. When a building was scheduled to be done, it was declared to be done no matter what stage it was in. If the building happened to be an apartment building (we didn’t have condos then), families would be assigned to live in units on floors that didn’t exist. Do you remember the stories about waiting a year or more to get a phone installed, then up to another year to get it actually working? I do.

Lately, it has occurred to me that this tale parallels the plight of software development today. Some might even call it the Microsoft Development Policy, but I won’t go quite that far…this time. Back when I got my second programming job it was for a VAR (Value Added Reseller). The development staff used to have a running joke. “It compiled, the first screen came up, ship it; everything else is a billable mod.” The difference today is this joke seems to be put into actual practice for much of the software industry.

In my travels to client sites, it seems that all of them are still ga-ga eyed over off shoring. Upper management still believes that if they can get someone for $10/day or $10/hour they have saved money. Sure, you can make it look good on a spreadsheet, but sooner or later you have to smell what used to be coffee.

I have yet to see a single project where we got skilled and seasoned professionals on the other end of the phone line. The vast majority are fresh out of school and hoping to learn. Nothing wrong with that in general, but upper management schedules the project and installation date thinking they have 30 seasoned professionals with an average of 15 years in the field. The only way to work with the kind of trainees you are getting is to spec the programs down to the detail line with pseudo code. That takes more time than the entire project budget. Never fear. Management has found a way to stop you from wasting too much time writing specs. They mandate you must use Microsoft Word to write your specifications. Yes, you are screwed before you start.

What about the other portion of the “team” you were given? The ones that claim to have worked on 5-6 projects already and have a good grasp of software development. It takes a long time to wriggle any information out about those projects. When you do get it, you find they were only on each project for 2-3 months before getting fired and landing on your project. You usually find this out around the end of the second month when you are already putting the paperwork together to fire them from your project.

Months go by, and you start receiving some software. Some of it compiles, a few of the screens come up, and that is about as far down the path of functionality as your “team” got. The installation date is weeks away and it will take a seasoned developer at least six months to undo the disaster you’ve been handed. You start working 80+ hour weeks just to get the project stable enough to out live a 30 minute demo to management. Dedication to quality, your first, and most crucial, mistake.

The day of the demo arrives. You walk on eggshells and get through it with a drastically restricted set of test data. Management prides itself on how they “cut costs” on this project. They order you to install it per the installation schedule already chosen by them and to disable the old system. They also tell you that your team is being moved onto other projects. One member (the newest and least qualified) will be around for 30 days of bug fixing while you are working on a new project with a new team. Oh yes, you will be taking over support of this project by yourself while working full time on your new project.

Now we all know just how the Russian family felt that was told they couldn’t possibly be homeless since they were living in an apartment on a floor that didn’t exist.

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April 1, 2008 by roland.

Some time last year I watched a documentary titled “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” as part of my regular Net-flix rentals. The documentary was very well done and I was quite surprised there wasn’t a flurry of lawsuits surrounding its release. Perhaps the legal team at Wal-mart thought very few people actually watched documentaries and it would be cheaper to let it die an obscure death. Perhaps that logic holds true when you have to pay $8 to rent a single movie, but with a flat monthly rate to watch as many as you want keeping only N movies in your possession at any given time, a lot of people will toss in documentaries which wouldn’t otherwise get a viewing.

What really struck me about the documentary wasn’t how much work went into it, although they did so much homework for it the thing was almost too long to watch. No, what really struck me was the segment they filmed in China. My first thought was that they bought a camera when they arrived and smuggled the film out. That thought quickly went away when I noticed the police and other officials they caught on film with a quality that could not have been a hidden camera. China, a country famous for that scene in Tienam Square of tanks rolling over their own citizens, obviously let this documentary be filmed. It bothered me like a toothache which doesn’t come from a cavity and the dentist can’t fix. Had I known what was in the works at the time, as we all do now, it would have made perfect sense. China was bidding to host the Olympic games.

How could those two events possibly be related you ask?

Step back. See the whole board.

What was going to happen as soon as China started issuing travel visas to reporters? The thing which did happen recently, Tibet. They knew this was coming, and they planned for it years in advance. Tibet was inevitably going to spill over into an international human rights campaign. They knew this. In part, I believe the Olympic committee knew this as well. It would leave one with a generally good feeling if they came out and said China was awarded the games so the human rights issue could be addressed on the world stage. I might even watch some of the games if they said such a thing publicly.

How, oh how, was China going to redirect a PR disaster away from how it treats some of its citizens?

Had you watched this documentary, made in 2005, you would understand. They are going to play the Wal-mart card. You get the sense watching this video, even more so now in retrospect, that the Chinese police were standing right beside the camera crew, getting them access to the Wal-mart “company towns” in China. People telling the stories of how they are trained to lie to government officials about how many days and hours per week they work. Telling stories of having to pay for living in the dormitory even if they don’t live there, but soon not making enough money to live anywhere else.

No, as soon as the Tibet and human rights issues hit the media frenzy level, the Chinese government is going to pull this documentary out of their local video store and use it to launch a criminal human rights case against Wal-mart. This will create a PR disaster for Wal-mart and divert the story for months. The entire world will talk about Corporate Oppression instead of Communist Oppression, and the games will go on.

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