I occasionally meet up with my old university mates. One friend works for a contracting company. He is a really good developer on a juicy £100k wage which is crazy, and it shows how much money companies waste on software on short contracts. Often they may only have small, permanent development teams, then hire some temporary staff for extra capacity, or they might just fully outsource their software requests entirely.
Since he works on short contracts, often 3-6 months, (sometimes up to a year), he has experience seeing how many companies operate.
I love having discussions with him because he is incredibly knowledgeable and always keeps up with the latest jargon. He knows all the Cloud and Web-development jargon, popular software tools, and Agile process.
He came out with this statement:
“It’s reassuring that you get to work with different companies doing different things, but they are all terrible. You are often asked to help – not because it’s going well; but because it’s going wrong”
What he was saying is that companies have different philosophies when it comes to software. It could be Cloud only, on-prem only, strict Agile development, different levels of automation etc, but whatever they do, it doesn’t quite work, and they will make baffling decisions.
So when I write about the baffling decisions where I work, it’s just that we are failing in a different way to other companies.
Stranger Coding Tings 