[OT] Extra time spent

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Fri, Jun 06, 2014 at 01:24:20PM +0000, Dejan Lekic via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> A typical scenario is when (top-level) manager (M) want thing
> yesterday, and tell senior engineer (SE)
> 
> M: How long will it take?
> SE: Well, we did not even analyse the requirements for this feature.
> Let's spend some time brainstorming this first, and then I will be
> able to do better estimation.
> M: We have no time for that, and I think you already have all you
> need.
> SE: OK, 3 days.
> M: What??? We need this thing yesterday!
> SE: Well, I could do a quick hack... It will take 1 day, but we will
> not have time to test, no time for code quality, etc.
> M: DO IT!!!
> (that "quick hack" code stays there because next week another urgent
> thing came, and SE never had time to make the code better)
> 
> Moral of the story: it is not SE whom we have to blame for bad code,
> it can easily be the management who made deliberate decision for
> that...
[...]

Yeah that sounds very familiar. A typical situation at my job goes
something like this:

Customer: I want feature X!
Sales rep: OK, we'll implement X in 1 month.
Customer: No, I want it by last month!
Sales rep: OK, and we'll throw in feature Y too, at no extra charge.
(Later)
Sales rep (to coders): Here's a new project for you: implement X and Y.
Coders: That sounds really complicated! It will take us 2 months.
Sales rep: What?! We don't have 2 months! They want this by *last* month!
Coders: That's impossible. Even the quickest hack we can do will take 1
	month.
Sales rep: This is a huge customer and it's going to cost us a billion
	dollar deal! You have to *make* it work!
Coders: sigh... OK, 3 weeks.
Sales rep: No, yesterday.
Coders: Fine, tomorrow we'll make a paper-n-glue model.
Sales rep: Today.
Coders: Sigh...


T

-- 
Gone Chopin. Bach in a minuet.