Revenge of the PHB!
Sheesh. Work is like a soap opera... If I could cash in on some of the story lines that are true to life from work, I'd be a millionaire. Today Lisa (my project manager) got chewed out for the presentation that we put together. Not by anyone who actually saw it, but by our erstwhile boss, who was not included because he does not work for the same division that we do. His basic beef was that we didn't show him first. Tough cookies. It's Aquila proprietary information, and he has no right to it; moreover we did it on our own time so he can just learn to deal with it. He managed to piss off most of the Aquila IT management this time though, so we'll see what happens next..
I thought about it for a while and I've discovered why I don't get along with Chris. I'm process and results oriented. He is not. I have been formally trained in software development, and he has not. He believes that software development, 'just happens', and not that there is a process involved. I'll grant you that software is still a craft industry. It demands a sense of elegance, art, and science. There is a great deal of creativity involved, but at the same time there is a large amount of rigorous logic involved. The most profitable applications are non-trivial problem solving. That means that you don't make much creating forms that capture user input and place it in a database when you should be designing transaction systems to allow online trading in the spot markets. All software developent groups start out small. The apps that they develop grow in size and complexity in accordance to the successes and the value that they bring to the business. If you've been doing small apps for several years, chances are that you are not tackling the problems that would really make the business grow. Now, internet developement ( I hate that term ) is becoming the glue that holds a business together. Not only do I have apps that exist on the internet, but I have apps that were written in Java whose sole purpose is to exchange data between AS400s. Most platforms support TCP/IP, have a JVM therefore making them accessible to my development skills. Having a skilled developer just doing small web apps is a waste of time, money, and talent.
