Joel

That is the sort of situation that could occur in my case, they wouldn't realise the work that's gone into it.

Thanks for that article.

Kev

>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:
>
>---------------------------------------------------------
>1) FROM THE EDITOR
>---------------------------------------------------------
>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
>
>Be sure to check out Pinnacle's monthly newsletters for
>developers, including FoxTalk
>(http://www.pinnaclepublishing.com/ft). You can sign up
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>
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