>On Nov 21, 2013, at 8:12 PM, JOANNA A. <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > Yeah. I just kind of ignored all that....agile/waterfall, etc.
> >
> > The main thing was the disconnect between the managers and the workers
> and the fatal inability of managers to listen to workers.
> >
> > Joanna
managers are workers too. As Michael Lopp famously says, "The first thing an engineer does when she's promoted to manager is forget." He doesn't mean forget how to code, which the engineer does, in fact, do. She forgets the organizational imperatives that had shaped engineering and must learn the organizational imperatives that create the "management world" (here, I steal from the sociological phrase, "art world".)
But because Shirkey believes that the problem is simply that engineers aren't in management, then he believes that, if you could just induce more engineers to go into management or at least induce managemtnt to adopt the magical practices of engineering to cure this lack of listening: open source development, experimental (so called) agile practices, lean development, and so forth. This is horse shit. It's like saying capitalism can be fixed if we are all nicer to each other.
He's enamored of the belief that engineers are a special class here to save the world with their special "maker" sensibility. Hence his bizarre belief that ordinary non-internet engineering type people couldn't possibly understand the project management triad - time/money/labor - a concept which predates internet software and is something anyone who's worked anywhere can grasp. Conceit.
Meanwhile, he doesn't grasp another structural imperative. You can use agile all day long for years and years, but it's really only "easy" to soft release to, say, the state of Utah to test a feature if you, like Google and Facebook, don't bother hiring QA testers and, instead, give away software so consumers can test it for you. The consumer-as-tester model applies to only some kinds of software, the kind that doesn't handle sensitive identity information, financial information, and is largely entertainment. Start talking software that performs calculations to submit your taxes or software that runs a transit system or drives your car or simulates brain surgery so surgeons can learn to drill into skulls.... and you're not talking soft releasing to 10,000 people to catch all the bugs.
Finally, Gar is totally right about the contracting thing. I worked with one of thos outfits last year. I was brought on as an independent contract to hire while I worked alongside people who'd been on a project that went 3 years, though initially 18 months. Those kinds of contracting companies are in business to lie to their clients and listen to the sweet sound of kaching kaching kaching every time they bill the client.