I don’t talk much here about my job…
…primarily because I don’t define myself in terms of it. The job is what I do the pay for my life, not the thing that defines my life.
However, sometimes the frustrations boil over and I am reduced to a bit of flat out ranting.
Things That Only Corporate North America Could Do:
1) Assign a major component of development to developers in another country–and then don’t give them access to the source control system. What the hell?! How do you get almost to the end of a program without having a solution for a problem like this? Why not just ask a painter to produce a piece, but then refuse to give him canvas, brushes, or paint.
2) Randomly shut down the access of all remote developers to key internal systems.
3) During the final few weeks of the program, when things are really getting tight, move the entire company to a new domain. (And very likely cause all kinds of domain conversion problems with the source control system, and the previously mentioned access to it.)
4) Create programs that require the direct, day-to-day interaction of people in 3 different North American time zones spanning 4 hours, plus people in Israel, plus people in Australia. In other words, set up a system that literally requires at least two groups of people to be working well outside normal office hours in order for things to proceed. For bonus points, do this while making a speech about how you want your employees to have lives, and how you aren’t interested in forcing people to work long hours.
5) Add entire new features to the program plan halfway through the development cycle. Don’t worry about design documents, or reviews–clearly when you throw something together at the last minute, in the middle of the hustle to meet existing deadlines, what you produce will be pure gold.
ARGGH.
That is all.
Kira
b3n
Sharon
June 13th, 2005 at 1:52 pm
We have contractors in India. They have source control access, but in order to keep costs down, I’m pretty sure that they’re running over a 1200 baud modem, since it takes about 8 hours for them to sync up when it should take 1/2 hour, tops.
As a result, they sync to a single machine, check out all the files, copy to various machines around their lab, do work, copy the files back to the source control client, then submit their changes. Hardly any problems ever occur.
That last sentence was sarcastic, just in case you don’t have that out east.
Also, an EBF release is supposed to be an “Emergency Bug Fix release.” However, it’s gradually turned into an “Extremely Buggy Feature release.” Welcome to corporate NA.
June 13th, 2005 at 9:48 pm
What SCC do you guys use?
I only ask because I have a 10Mbit connection, and it can take 8 hours for me to synch up–but I am fully willing to put the blame for that squarely on the shoulders of Rational Clearcase (”a marvelous merge tool attached to a hideous repository”).
June 14th, 2005 at 11:06 am
We’re using Perforce. I swear by it, but I have to say that the only other SCCs that I’ve used have been RCS, CVS, and the home-grown one that was in place when I was doing co-op (which, I think, was backed by RCS).
June 14th, 2005 at 2:49 pm
Sometimes I dream about Perforce. Seriously. We used to use it when I worked on PowerBuilder. (We also used it at YouPowered, but I don’t like to think of those days.)
Although I have been hearing a lot of good thing about Subversion as well.
However, I am stuck with ClearCase: a system so complex that for every 20-odd developers you need a full time system admin. A system so poor at handling remote developers that it often takes me multiple DAYS to get my source tree synched. A system that has literally no way of answering the question “what other files were changed at the same time this one was”. A system that literally CAN NOT be accessed by a machine that is not part of the domain that CC runs on (like a home computer, on a workgroup, that was VPN’d into the network for example).
Kill me.
June 15th, 2005 at 2:56 pm
Apparently one of our out-source offices in India is on a flakey dial-up connection. They sync to one machine (which can take several hours) and then the developers work off that. So, thank Rational Clearcase for putting you on par with a narrow-band connection on the other side of the planet.