Re: SLOC-wars

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:4519e058.0204100539.55abecac@posting.google.com...
>
> At GE we called it "career limiting move", or CLM. CLM was the name of
> my vollyeball team in the GE league. :-)
>
We sort of preferred "altering" as a kind of non-judgemental-sarcasm. Being
reassigned to some hell-hole corner of the plant to run mindless disk
backups until you retired was "Just An Alternate Career Path" - you're being
"Judgemental" when you say it isn't as good as "Vice President of
Engineering". :-)


>
> My typical reaction to this is to say: "Well then...what funtionality
> would you like to remove?". I always have my favorite removal
> candidates handy too, with savings estimate. :-)
>
Yeah. Great technique. Here's a problem. You don't usually build "extras"
into an engine control. Everything in there has to be there or the engine
doesn't run. (A handful of exceptions, but not many) So you can't always
come in with a stripped down version.

But the technique is wonderful for workstationish apps where you can say
"Here's the 27 screens we originally planned and on which I based my
estimate. Which ones do you want to live without in order to get the
deadline you want?


> The best response I ever saw though came from the legendary Gendreaux.
> He walked up to the whiteboard in front of them all and wrote the
> following:
> ---
>   o  Bugdet
>   o  Quality
>   o  Schedule
> Pick any two
> ---
>
The classic triangle. "Good" vs "Fast" vs "Cheap". The problem is that the
usual kind of guy who makes it to Senior Bozo status is the kind of guy who
gets the square peg into a round hole with a mallet. Sometimes their reality
checks bounce. One of my favorite manager jokes:

Engineer: "Hi, I came over to help you move your piano."
Manager: "Thanks. I already got it moved."
Engineer: "How'd you get that piano moved all by yourself?"
Manager: "Hitched the cat to it."
Engineer: "How did you get a tiny little cat to pull that piano up three
flights of stairs?!?!?"
Manager: "Used a whip!"

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com