The Job from Hell

Imagine it’s Friday afternoon and you’re sitting in the local bar with a bunch of other developers bitching about how your company and its management is the worst ever. Then the guy from Project Failures stands up and says, “Hold my beer.”

The tale he tells is the most horrific story of project mismanagement and employee-hostile policies that I’ve ever heard. The project itself is bad enough:

  • 6,000,000 lines of code,
  • 50,000 C++ classes,
  • 48 hour build time using 32 parallel machines,
  • 15 minute startup time,
  • 30 second to 30 minute mean time between crashes,
  • 45 minutes for a context menu to popup,
  • 7 days to load 700 MB from a CD
  • and much, much more.

There’s probably plenty of projects with a similar profile. It’s the rest of the story that’s so horrifying.

After several years they instituted version control. It was so complicated that they had 4 people assigned to work on it full time. Doing a first checkout required an appointment with the version control folks and usually required a week to get. Before a file could be edited, permission was needed from a manager and then coordination with version control, which took another 2 days. Management, of course, had no software experience.

The development team was 20 engineers but there were 35 managers. At one point they fired all the engineers but kept all the managers. Engineers were required to be in at 9:00 and were fired on the spot if they were even one minute late. They regularly turned off the coffee pots so engineers wouldn’t waste time drinking coffee. At one point they even tried to coerce the engineers to give up smoking so they wouldn’t waste time on smoke breaks.

There’s a lot more. You really have to read the post to get the full flavor. It will make your job seem like paradise.

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