Hi Kevin,

Your situation reminds me of an editorial I read a while back in ISC Extra. The article is below along with the attached advertisements:

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1) FROM THE EDITOR
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I just had dinner with a developer I've known for a long
time who was just, er, asked to resign from a project
that was taken over by one of those "dot-coms" that we've
been hearing so much about lately.

It's a story, like so many, that makes you simply shake
your head, asking, "What were they thinking?"

The developer had been working with a company for a
number of years, developing and upgrading an application
that was widely used in a vertical market industry. The
owner of the company had decided to sell, and found a
dot-com organization who wanted to get into that market,
both because of growth prospects as well as "to show
those stodgy folks how business in the new millennium
should be done."

The dot-com reviewed the current application, a monster
involving hundreds of tables and years of work, and which
had recently been converted into the current version of
Microsoft's Visual Studio toolset. The new version was a
few weeks away from shipping.

After review of the work that the developer had done, he
was asked to walk away, since his techniques weren't
perceived to be "state-of-the-art" for the project. There
was no Internet connectivity, and this type of system
would be perfect to be deployed on the Web, they figured.

This request came from the new president, all of 28 years
old, and supported by his development team, average age
of 25. They believe they could replace the last six
months of work by this developer with three weeks of work
by one of the junior team members.

A year later, having burned through 24 developer-years,
the replacement application was finished -- and promptly
refused by every customer who had been using the old
system. Evidently, the dot-com people had forgotten to
tell the customers that the deployment of this
application was going to be changed from a traditional
client-server installation at the customer's site to a
Web-based architecture, with all of each customer's data
now stored on the dot-com's servers. They also sort of
forgot to do performance testing -- operations that used
to be handled nearly instantly in the old system now took
up to ten minutes in the new "state-of-the-art" system.

What happened? The junior developer was going to jump
into this system, consisting of over 120 tables, and
start delivering code within two days. How was this going
to be done? Why, using their wow-cool XP techniques,
together with new tools, and an "attitude." Management
didn't want to hear the experienced developer's
admonitions that they weren't going to be able to re-
architect and recode six months of an application that
they knew rather little about before the end of the next
pay period. Thus, he was branded as a trouble-maker, not
a "team player," and, finally, "old-fashioned" and "out
of date."

The company is now 45 days away from running out of cash,
and every one of their customers has refused to sign on
with the new software, relying instead on a package that
was written a decade ago, and had been promised a major
upgrade to a GUI and new data back ends for several
years.

The jury is still out on what will happen here -- it's
quite possible the developer just recently forced out
will be asked back after the current development team is
given the axe.

Just one more reminder that, in business, the biggest
mistake you can make is assuming the other party will act
rationally.

Whil Hentzen, Editor
Information Systems Consultant eNewsletter
mailto:whil@hentzenwerke.com

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developers, including FoxTalk
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