Re:The Rise and Fall of the 'IBM Way'
by senderista on Friday December 15, 2023 @05:46PM
(#38659791)
Yes. There was a ton of this going on as well.
We were almost always the first to say that we needed an extra week. Tons of harrumphing. We were, however, never (maybe 1 exception) the last team to ask for another week.
The thing is when we said we needed 1 week, it meant we needed 3-6 business days. When they said 1 week, it meant they were too scared to ask for three.
The inanity of the whole thing is that the project we were on was behind by a year that people would admit to (it was more like 30 months), so who the fuck cared if our division delivered our part three months late? It was going to collect a lot of cobwebs before it got properly exercised.
Bunch a drama with absolutely no purpose whatsoever.
I am amazed there is an wiki article for this.
See also https://wiki.c2.com/?ScheduleChicken
That same other lead and I had figured out that IBM was perpetually 5 weeks behind, and always fishing for problems on other teams they could use to invoke day-for-day schedule slippage.
And the reason we knew it was five weeks is this: they would not take patches or hot fixes from us. Because doing so would indicate that we hadn’t fulfilled out contract to deliver on X date. So I’d give them version 1.0.4 (had to be exactly 1.0.4, if the CI/CD pipeline glitched and I gave them 1.0.5 they would demand an explanation, fuckers). And then I’d go off working on catching up with automating functional testing that we were still figuring out, trying to get it to run faster on one particular underpowered destination system, or get feedback from other teams about how some feature in the release was fundamentally broken, and I’d fix those problems and issue 1.0.5-7.
I’d tell them they needed the patch and they would say no. Then eight weeks after we gave it to them they’d complain it was broken, they are blocked, and the schedule will slip “day for day” until we fix the bugs - often bugs they should have seen week one if they were actually using the deliverables we gave them.
In one case it took me about 14 clock hours to fix their problem, but in all other cases I had already fixed that bug almost exactly six weeks before they found it. I just informed them that 1.0.7 already fixes that, upgrade. They were hoping for a week and every time they got less than a day, and only then if the meeting schedule aligned so the could stall for half a day. That was honestly one of the more satisfying aspects of that job.
Ten times they came at us with that schtick, and it worked once. Barely.
Near as I can tell they were spending a month at the beginning of each milestone cleaning up tech debt from stapling together the feature set for the previous milestone, and not getting around to our stuff until much later than they wanted the company to know.