>> Other favourites are spending a day designing something when someone else 
>> has already done it
>
> Sounds like either poor communication, or somebody with too much time on 
> their hands.

The former, I blame it on the way the departments are set up in the company, 
it's like they are all in competition with each other, so information 
doesn't get shared very well.  It also doesn't help that everyone thinks 
what they are doing is highly confidential and can't even be shared with 
another department...

> I suppose some people might argue that's a necessary evil when the 
> customer can't make up their mind what they want and yet demand that it 
> arrives on time. But I don't know.

Usually we give the customer a design freeze date in order for the first 
deliveries to meet their deadline.  This is fine until the customer informs 
us of a change a week before the freeze, then we have to tell them that 
actually we don't have time now to make that change - things get a bit messy 
then.

> Ooo, how about this one: Designing something when you have no spec at all, 
> and then writing a spec to match the thing you just designed. You guys 
> ever do that one?

Not really, you need to have at least a rough idea of the performance 
required before starting design work.  Of course the detail level of spec 
varies from customer to customer, but the basics are always there to start 
the design work.

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>> Sounds like either poor communication, or somebody with too much time 
>> on their hands.
> 
> The former, I blame it on the way the departments are set up in the 
> company, it's like they are all in competition with each other, so 

...so all the departments are trying to beat each other and hence 
working aginst each other, rather than working together towards a common 
goal?

> Usually we give the customer a design freeze date in order for the first 
> deliveries to meet their deadline.  This is fine until the customer 
> informs us of a change a week before the freeze, then we have to tell 
> them that actually we don't have time now to make that change - things 
> get a bit messy then.

Shouldn't the freeze date be set far enough forward that it doesn't 
matter if they change something the *day* before the freeze?

>> Ooo, how about this one: Designing something when you have no spec at 
>> all, and then writing a spec to match the thing you just designed. You 
>> guys ever do that one?
> 
> Not really, you need to have at least a rough idea of the performance 
> required before starting design work.  Of course the detail level of 
> spec varies from customer to customer, but the basics are always there 
> to start the design work.

Heh. Several of our internal applications where developed this way. The 
CEO's nephew sits in a darkened room by himself, decides how the system 
is going to work, builds it, checks that it runs, and then we try to 
implement it company-wide. That includes writing the design specs so 
that they match what Mr Wizzkid actually wrote.

Never mine the *minor detail* that we have written procedures which 
prohibit such behaviour and there could as such be legal consequences if 
somebody like the FDA or the MHRA found about about this - which they won't.

Still, I guess you can't really do this for an external "customer". If 
you invent something off the top of your head and try to sell it to 
them, presumably they will suggest that you take a long walk off a short 
cliff...

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> ...so all the departments are trying to beat each other and hence working 
> aginst each other, rather than working together towards a common goal?

Not only that, but seemingly horizontal communication to different 
departments is actively discouraged in Japanese culture - so you end up 
having to go up several layers of management and then back down another part 
of the tree to get an answer.  And it's not as if managers are really that 
interested in (or have time for) the discussion of detail design.  So as you 
can imagine, each department is quite isolated.

> Shouldn't the freeze date be set far enough forward that it doesn't matter 
> if they change something the *day* before the freeze?

Sure, in theory, but in reality the Engineers are usually not sat around 
doing nothing during this time.

> Still, I guess you can't really do this for an external "customer". If you 
> invent something off the top of your head and try to sell it to them, 
> presumably they will suggest that you take a long walk off a short 
> cliff...

The customer will have at least asked for some minimum set of parameters, 
like brightness, contrast etc.  So the major design decisions are based on 
this.  Usually however they will ask for much more detail, often running 
into hundreds of pages with references to thousands more pages in other 
documents.

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>> ...so all the departments are trying to beat each other and hence 
>> working aginst each other, rather than working together towards a 
>> common goal?
> 
> Not only that, but seemingly horizontal communication to different 
> departments is actively discouraged in Japanese culture - so you end up 
> having to go up several layers of management and then back down another 
> part of the tree to get an answer.  And it's not as if managers are 
> really that interested in (or have time for) the discussion of detail 
> design.  So as you can imagine, each department is quite isolated.

That is utterly clustered. o_O

> The customer will have at least asked for some minimum set of 
> parameters, like brightness, contrast etc.  So the major design 
> decisions are based on this.  Usually however they will ask for much 
> more detail, often running into hundreds of pages with references to 
> thousands more pages in other documents.

Heh, yeah. The spec for our project DB system was "we need a project DB 
system". So some kid who's not even a company employee went and sat in a 
darkened room and came up with some VB thing that he thought was pretty 
cool.

4 years later, we're still using it. WTF?

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scott wrote:
> The former, I blame it on the way the departments are set up in the 
> company, it's like they are all in competition with each other, so 
> information doesn't get shared very well.  It also doesn't help that 
> everyone thinks what they are doing is highly confidential and can't 
> even be shared with another department...

Sounds like Bellcore. The company owned by its competition, none of whom 
were allowed to talk to each other.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
    you literally shooting yourself in the foot.

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> Sounds like Bellcore. The company owned by its competition, none of whom 
> were allowed to talk to each other.

Once, through a contact of a contact, I was able to get hold of some 
mechanical drawing I needed.  This was nothing confidential, the product was 
already released and anyone in the public could just buy whatever it was in 
and measure it.  Anyway, they would only hand over a *paper* version to my 
contact, and my contact had strict instructions to only show this to me 
under his supervision and then shred it!  This was totally WTF I couldn't 
believe what was happening.

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scott wrote:
> totally WTF I couldn't believe what was happening.

Yeah, but nobody ever threatened to send you to jail for illegal anti-trust 
collusion stuff because the guy across the hall liked to answer his 
voicemail on speakerphone. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
    you literally shooting yourself in the foot.

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On 12-5-2010 12:30, scott wrote:
>> I was looking at some slides from a presentation about testing and 
>> developer productivity. One slide was a photograph of an actual 
>> whiteboard at Google HQ, listing the things that had reduced 
>> productivity on a particular day:
> 
> Sounds an interesting task, I should suggest people here do that.  But 
> one of the problems here I see is that a lot of people count the 
> "unproductive" work as productive.  

Then there is the vice versa. Sometimes unproductive work turns out to 
be vitally important later.

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Wait, what the... NOW WIKIPEDIA IS DIFFERENT! O_O



Am I *really* going mad? Is anyone else seeing this??

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Thu, 13 May 2010 19:55:02 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> Wait, what the... NOW WIKIPEDIA IS DIFFERENT! O_O
> 
> 
> 
> Am I *really* going mad? Is anyone else seeing this??

Imagine this:  Software and websites get updated to newer versions of 
software and sites get changed to add functionality and that sometimes 
changes the interface.

<gasp>! ;)

Jim

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