right on bro!

Given that yesterday pretty much went off without a hitch and I woke up today actually really wanting to go into work - today I was solidly worked all around.

Working #1: The application/Website I was designing is launching next week. Now, I haven’t touched this thing in about 2 months. It wasn’t all that great to begin with, but it drastically increased usability and met the four primary business goals that we had in this version.

Keep in mind that the reason I was on the redesign for this application is because a product manager decided that I “took too long” to develop the last version and handed interface/design duties to the programmer. That is, I took two weeks to develop a customer application that supports a $30 million business. That is, at any other software company, you have entire teams who take 3-6 months to develop these kinds of applications. Oh, but the reason I’m on it now? Because the coder completely fucked it up.

So the product manager who is responsible for, well, managing the product, has known since I released the first version of the technical specifications (which she was supposed to write but didn’t know how, so I ended up covering for her ass because I happen to think that she’s actually pretty good at what she does and just need some training) that there was one last round of minor changes that needed to be done before QA occured. That was about 2 months ago. I was told that the application would be launching next week, but given that I’ve been re-structured into product managing and designing a couple of other things at the same time, it wasn’t really in the forefront of my mind. We had just hired a new developer and he seemed very capable and easy to work with.

So today, the product manager comes up to me and says the application is already in QA, ready to launch next week, and I need to finish my stuff by tomorrow to get it done. Oh, and they cut out two major pieces of functionality that I slaved over, because they couldn’t get it done in time. Which happens to mean that the application doesn’t meet two of the business goals. WTF?

So today, I had to immediately finish one project that I had been given last night in about an hour (which, in most companies that are serious about product development, would’ve taken about a week), drop another project which was already late, and cram these revisions in.

That means that by the end of today, I have completed two half-assed projects intead of one good one. And yet the people at my workplace seem to think this is acceptable.

Imagine that you go to, let’s say, the Gap. You walk into the store to buy a new pair of jeans, and there are holes some pairs, and stains on others. You ask the sales rep about it, and they say, “Well, yeah, our jeans have problems, but we had to sell you something, so buy it!” Would you buy these jeans?

I’m really uncomfortable with this new management’s model of software development, which basically is, “Get something to market using low standards that would be laughable by any other company in our league, just so we can look like we’re doing something. We’ll fix it later.” Granted, software is not jeans - it can be patched. But cutting out basic requirements and trying to patch them later is an abuse of the patching system.

Working #2: I was eating while surfing the net, and I didn’t notice that the cat jumped up and started eating my dinner which I couldn’t eat any more after that.

Working #3: The new episode of CSI was pre-empted tonight due to the Yankees/Red Sox game.

Working #4: Is it just me or has everyone else gotten a huge increase in spam email lately?

Potential Working #5: Jamming these changes in may require me missing my team’s outing to Oktoberfest at Alpine Village tomorrow.

Oy…thank god for whiskey.