3 ms·

I've moved from being an external consultant to an internal Dev and think I've been able to be 10x more productive in some ways. I have spent time actually doi

by xupybd 6y ago

I've moved from being an external consultant to an internal Dev and think I've been able to be 10x more productive in some ways. I have spent time actually doing the administrative tasks, and I have direct access to all stakeholders. This means I don't have to spend time doing requirements gathering. I understand the businesses needs. Once I would have built a web interface with all the extra work required. Now I write a script and a report to display data from the process. I can do that in next to no time, most of my time used to be spent on the front end. It turns out no one needed or wanted a front end. Business events supply all the input via existing systems. Printable reports work much better than web interfaces. I have no security tiers as you either can see a report or can't. It's amazing how much time we spent building parts of systems that no one wanted. I'm producing 10x less of a system than I used to but still solving the business problems. The things I build now are more boring, don't push my technical skills, yet deliver more to the business.

TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
This is an important point, which I didn't bring out in my diatribe. I'm a mechanical engineer working as a dev/op. I understand what my engineering-department coworkers are trying to do, and have a good feeling for what it would take from software to help get that done. I'm embedded in the business, talking with people. I don't have a B-school background, and sit around talking to managers, to write requirements docs to chuck over a wall. I see what needs to be done, and do it. Perfect example: When I got put out to pasture (in my story), I was working on rewriting an old, slow application that was used by just a couple dozen people. In about 3 months, I was about 80% done, and got around to asking the really important questions. The program was slow because it was basically doing a pivot operation on an entire database. I took the 800-line query in their existing Java application, rewrote it in 40 lines, and doubled the speed, but why? Turns out that there were just 2 other people in the company that used the output, and I knew one of them, and I knew he didn't need 90% of that data. So we were just getting to the point where -- like you said -- maybe a weekly email of just the relevant data was really all that was needed for the output -- when my boss politically maneuvered to kill the project. So now these users will deal with this horrible mess until the heat-death of the universe.

by xupybd 6y ago

TheRealDunkirk 6y ago

This is an important point, which I didn't bring out in my diatribe. I'm a mechanical engineer working as a dev/op. I understand what my engineering-department coworkers are trying to do, and have a good feeling for what it would take from software to help get that done. I'm embedded in the business, talking with people. I don't have a B-school background, and sit around talking to managers, to write requirements docs to chuck over a wall. I see what needs to be done, and do it. Perfect example: When I got put out to pasture (in my story), I was working on rewriting an old, slow application that was used by just a couple dozen people. In about 3 months, I was about 80% done, and got around to asking the really important questions. The program was slow because it was basically doing a pivot operation on an entire database. I took the 800-line query in their existing Java application, rewrote it in 40 lines, and doubled the speed, but why? Turns out that there were just 2 other people in the company that used the output, and I knew one of them, and I knew he didn't need 90% of that data. So we were just getting to the point where -- like you said -- maybe a weekly email of just the relevant data was really all that was needed for the output -- when my boss politically maneuvered to kill the project. So now these users will deal with this horrible mess until the heat-death of the universe.