[lug] Developer abuse

[Timothy Klein]

On Monday 15 November 2004 06:28 pm, David Morris wrote:

> Now, the project hasn't gone completely smoothly because the
> overall project (building the payload for a sattelite) ran
> into some fundamental hardware problems and the customer (we
> are a contractor) ran out of money for a short bit,

Ah, see, you gave it away.  I now see why your project went so well.  
Certain industries (like space vehicles) tend to take things very 
seriously, and plan software right (or maybe you just work for an 
independent firm that got picked because your company knew how to do 
it).

From my (very) limited experience, the culture that demands doing 
things right (with respect to software) simply does not exist in a 
large part of the American business world.

A satellite is non-trivial to fix, orbiting high above the earth.  
Interestingly, accounting software managing millions of dollars worth 
of stuff a day is *also* non-trivial to fix.  But the people that 
commission/design the stuff where I used work always acted is if 
fixing the million design and coding bugs in the software they 
bought/wrote was trivial.  Go figure.

But you're correct -- it can be done.

Tim

PS -> Interestingly, I used to work somewhere in which project 
planning for construction took place.  Planning construction 
projects, even simple ones, takes a lot of time.  Where we worked, 
most of the jobs were fairly small, and thus planning actually took 
longer than the job.  And architects and engineers are VERY strict 
about allowing the client to change design part way through a job 
(read:  they will charge you out the wazoo and delay your job if you 
do, and they make you sign contracts clearly stating what you want at 
every step of the way).
-- 
== Timothy Klein || teece at silverklein.net
== Vanity Page: http://tinyurl.com/vkhp
== ----------------------------------------
== Hello_World.c: 17 Errors, 31 Warnings...