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by IsaacL
1203 days ago
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I'm very interested in stories like this. > I wrote software to automate all of this. It took a half an hour, with NO manual intervention. It was strangled in the crib. Can you say any more about why management at your company decided to strangle this project in the crib? What exactly happened? If you tried to pushback, how did they shut you down? If you have time I'd also be curious to hear an outline of how your solution fixed things. |
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I wrote an application (in engineering) that did a thing that everyone loved. It had a thousand internal users. Another group (in IT) thought my project was their domain, and tried to kill it. When they couldn't, they staffed up and wrote their own version. I wrote mine in a year and a half; it took them 10 people and 3 years. Their version sucked so hard, no one would use it. They hired Microsoft to help them make it better; they failed.
In frustration with the situation, the IT manager managed to replace my boss' boss with someone he had mentored into the company, and lo and behold, we were told to stop working on my project. We made a patch to fix a bug, and they feigned outrage, and pulled the plug and made us hand over my application, which has now run for about 6 years without update, while they try to force more people to use their piece of junk. I hear they've gotten most people transferred now.
Right about the time the management change was happening, my boss and I were starting to go off in several directions of other useful things we could do with the data. One of them was the function I mentioned. It was a very manual process, but very scriptable. I created a message queue in Azure, to "release" the job, and had another machine (with a proprietary program this process needed) pick up the message and just crank through it. I had just gotten that done when they pulled the plug, and it was never used in anger.
A lot of times, people tell war stories like this, and you think, aww, come on; it couldn't have been THAT bad. But this bad enough that the CIO called the IT manager to a special meeting about it, and he was reassigned to a lead a new group. You're free to speculate if that was a promotion or a chastisement. My boss thinks it was the former. I'm not so sure.