Saturday Silliness
on 10/28/2006 at 04:00 AM
About 80% of this list applies to me, so I suppose that makes me an information systems journeyman at least.
* You know more TLAs (three letter acronyms) than you do people, and can speak entire paragraphs using them almost exclusively.
* You have the original Dilbert “my spoo has too much phleem” strip framed on your wall. And it makes total sense to you.
* At the dreaded Monday morning status meeting your supervisor wants to know why your project isn’t registering on the dashboard. You tell him that that app doesn’t have the bandwidth to drill down sufficiently ... this is accepted and everyone understands what you just said.
* All projects begin in red status and stay there until completed. No project is ever really completed, only endlessly modified. That’s why you are the Change Management SME.
* You strive to be the goto guy, but you wind up being the guru. It would be so much easier if you were just a desi like everybody else.
* It doesn’t matter what the project is, but somehow the makefile becomes your responsibility.
* For stress relief at meetings you inject quotes from Star Wars, Star Trek, Monty Python, Hitchiker’s Guide, Princess Bride, or Rocky Horror into your talk. This lets other run on the riff for a minute and everyone has a good time, as they know all the words too. Management has no clue ... its a sure way to spot the outsiders. Example: work-arounds are described as “It’s just a step to the left”.
* If you put forth a new idea at a meeting and somebody tried to shoot it down out of spite your response is “Don’t NACK my packet without a test case.” When they bring up issues you then shoot them down with “yeah, but that’s only Sev 3”.
* Most days you are Dilbert, but you wish you could be Wally once in a while.
* You can easily pronounce people’s names if they are from India, Pakistan, China, Korea, or Japan. You also know when all the major holidays of those cultures are, and what they’re all about. Sometimes you’ve wondered why, of all the religons in the world, its the Hindus who have the most fun with theirs.
* You can translate any extreme foreign accent. You don’t laugh or even smile when idioms get mangled, but you do bestow membership to the EAS (English Assasination Society).
* ISO 9000 is just as big a joke as CMM.
* The biggest joke in IT is reusable modules.
* What the hell is decaffinated coffee?
Been there, done that, had the T-shirt stolen from my chair when I wasn’t looking.
Drew, what is CMM? I agree that ISO9000 is a real joke. I got stuck with about 4 entire sections to manage (after it was all written, of course). I have never read such bull&#*^ in my life. Total vagueness mixed with a bunch of really fluffy bullet points that threatened to suck your IQ down to 10. Most of what we did was not compatible with it, but somehow we managed to get our certificate every 3 years.
I’m trying to decide if I should get back into the IT work or stick with my new-found career in banking. Any advice?
The CMM is Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Insitute and DARPA’s Capability Maturity Model, which is supposed to create a perfect software development environment by giving management full insight into project progress and improving software development by making it repeatable, defined, well-managed and optimized over time.
Total Bullshit!
Which is why we re-named it Clueless Management Madness.
Oh. We used to do something in the mid 90’s call TQM or Total Quality Management. Supposed to empower the employees and limit management and make the company some utopia, likely of some unspecified French origin. Also total BS.
Someone has to lay awake at nights dreaming up this stuff. Then they lay awake more nights figuring out how to sell it. In the end, they make a ton of money with it but the people who have to live by it get screwed over royally.
Bingo! It’s just TQM - by another name. There is a complete cottage industry of “CMM Auditors” who will come in to your organization and grade you on your level of compliance. Prices start at $50k for initial appraisal.
DARPA got involved when the some brilliant salesman sold the government on the idea of cutting software development costs with this new “paradigm.” (Lord, forgive me for using the “P” word - I promise not to use “empower")
The CMM was then created and next thing you know all government contractors had to be appraised and certified at Level 3 or higher in order to do business with Uncle Sugar.
There’s one born every minute. Somehow, they all wind up in government procurement.
Let’s see if I remember it right.
CMM level 1: Utter chaos. Chickens without heads. Cats and dogs together. Nothing ever gets written down. Yet somehow the work gets done and new releases get out the door. Normal state of affairs for most businesses, it relies on loyal employees who actually know what they’re doing. Can’t have that!!
CMM level 2: Some boss writes a bunch of procedures for everyone to follow. Nobody does, as the boss doesn’t have a clue. Remember when he tried to be a One Minute Manager?
CMM level 3: Boss really got on everybody’s case, so we all wrote down what we do and how we do it. We follow the plan, since the plan outlines how we already work anyhow. Boss’s neice graduated business college at just the right time, so now she’s in charge of organizing the massive pile of papers. This makes her a Quality Assurance Specialist, so Boss gets her some neato business cards. Once a month she comes around with a clipboard full of checkboxes to irritate us with, but we don’t mind. She’s 23 and wears skirts, which isn’t something we’re used to. Work slows to a crawl on clipboard day. Can we have a private meeting?
CMM level 4: Due to cost cutting necessary to afford having a QA Specialist on board, workers don’t get raises so turnover is now really high. New guys come in working for peanuts. No time to train them, so here’s the pile of procedural documents. Follow them, now get to work.
CMM level 5: New guys spend half their time for the first 2 years rewriting the documents to match how they actually do things, since most of us were rather vague when writing the originals. C’mon, we know chickenshit when we see it, and we knew nobody was ever, ever going to check on what we wrote. And if we gave it all away in detail we’d be expendable. So the next generation took our notes and adapted them a bit. This is called Continuous Process Improvement. When they quit the next batch of serfs will repeat the process. And so on ...
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CONGRATULATIONS, DREW!
That comes about as close as anyone ever has to actually describing what happens with CMM. Give yourself a raise, young man! Two-percent, of course. That’s all we can afford this year. However, we do have these nice paperweights for all you dedicated employees.
Be sure to vote for Employee Of The Week on your way out. Now, rush-rush! We have deadlines to meet, gang!
Keep up the good work, boys and girls!
If you are driving home and it light out; it’s morning and you worked all night!
