Nate Duehr wrote:

>>> I worked on on project where very good motivated competent
>>> programmers in a well organized environment did a phenomenal amount
>>> of work in a short time. It was unfortunately a rare experience.
>>
>> I'm intrigued! Can you tell us more?
> 
> Me too, I like positive stories about software development.  I've
> seen so little of it that was good in my long career as a tech
> support guy...

It's rare, but it happens. I'm not always an embedded engineer,
sometimes I'm a programmer, and sometimes I'm leading (you could call
that "managing" if you wanted :) a programming team.

Sometimes things just work together well, and there is no single block
in the whole thing. It's rare, of course... that's the nature of the
beast (the humans involved :), but it happens occasionally. And when it
happens, the "organized environment" has its part in it. Without it, no
team of significant size (and rarely even smaller teams of, like, one :)
will work well. I also don't think that experiences in one case are
easily transferred to other cases (as in "this worked there, so let's do
it here"). Some principles can be transferred, but the details depend a
lot on the specific situation and the people involved. 

> I truly believe that improper motivations and incentives are the root-
> cause of a whole lot of corporate evil, from the top down, too.  

Ah, of course :)  Just compare the conditions for an incentive to happen
with what the company wants to happen. And compare various scenarios to
achieve the conditions for an incentive, comparing the actual results of
those scenarios. It seems there is no causal relationship at all, in
most cases.

> My employer has apparently motivated the Director level staff to
> "close all tickets older than 50 days".  Note, it doesn't say SOLVE
> AND REPAIR all tickets within 50 days, just close them... 
> 
> Guess what e-mail I got Monday, along with a spreadsheet of six
> tickets all clearly labeled "Pending -> Engineering Release"?

Oh man... I've seen some bad things, but I'm glad I always worked in or
for organizations where that sort of thing didn't happen. Probably they
were to small for this.

Gerhard
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