I feel sorry for Bruce, Kris Thompson, and the other lads on their project.
I don’t feel sorry for them JUST because they have to work with eachother, but rather due to the revenge of the “Enterprise Architect”.
The story that Bruce tells is a common one in large companies. One large company gets in bed with another (insert one of: IBM Global Services, Accenture, EDS, etc) and this relationship leads to nightmare projects.
The gang seemed like they had snuck by this problem. In their last project they used open source software and it was the most succesful project ever! You would think that people would learn from that, and it appeared that they had… as in this project they got to start from where they left off.
That is until the inevitable happened. Mr. Enterprise Architect says that Spring/XDoclet/… is FAR too simple and robust, and that they have to migrate everything to the IBM stack. Oh momma.
Let people do their job. It is tempting to write up a dev equivilent of the Bastard Operator from Hell, but I guess that is Dilbert :)
September 23rd, 2004 at 1:49 pm
I offer my sincerest condolences my fellow engineers. I went through similar at my last company. For years we were forced to use “popular” enterprise software (Oracle) ONLY because of the name. Our company loved to shmooze customers by saying that our application was highly-scalable, fault tolerant, robust, etc. because we used Oracle. In reality NONE of this was true because the company was too clueless (and cheap) to actually use any of the Oracle services (like Oracle Parallel Server) that allow those enterprise features. In reality we weren’t doing anything with Oracle that we couldn’t have done with HSQL. And what really burns me is having to put up with all the Oracle install, configuration, nightmare for no reason.
I agree with Dion, let the people actually doing the work do their work and get out of their way!
CP
October 23rd, 2004 at 2:21 pm
The only thing with hire dollar signs tends to be the kindergartner’s from Accenture.
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/leadership