A couple of years ago, I was working on some new software but the management of it was an absolute disaster. Even though it was an absolutely massive project, I was often sat there not knowing what to do. Additionally, there were teams that were doing exactly the same work as each other. It was a mess, so eventually I moved back to work on our existing software.
This week, there was a project update demo by a team still working on this new software. I thought all the speakers were working on this feature, but it seems Jennifer might have been on annual leave or something because she didn’t understand what work was done.
After a few slides of their presentations, Jennifer interjects.
Jennifer : “How is this different from what Igor is doing?”
(Igor is part of another team)
Luke: “I’ve had the conversation and I still don’t understand why this was brought in twice.”
Jennifer: “I don’t know what the use case is for the two versions.”
Mark: “We never got to the bottom of it, so we just cracked on and built what we got asked to do.”
Brilliant. So there’s multiple members of the team that were aware that another team was also making this functionality. Despite having conversations with managers, they still were none-the-wiser, so then they just made it anyway, despite knowing that one team’s work is going to be binned off.
I can’t believe a couple of years have gone by and they are still doing stuff like this.
Stranger Coding Tings 