3 ms·

By the way, I give this advice after having done this at least once. The product was delivered slightly ahead of the revised schedule, after which the team was

By the way, I give this advice after having done this at least once. The product was delivered slightly ahead of the revised schedule, after which the team was disbanded because the higher-ups did not want to deal with the surreal situation. I managed to get 1 out of 6 developers to follow me.

kyberias 13y ago
This is inspirational. Please share more details if you can. I love stories like this.
- spiritplumber 13y ago
  Not much to tell; the person who had put himself in charge of building this Android based sensor for NASA wanted to build a little empire, and kept asking for more funds and personnel and insisting that all communication go through him. There was me and one other person doing all the work, so we just tuned everyone else (four people) out and forged on (to the extent of ordering parts and PCBs on our own dime, etc.) The higher ups were getting two sets of reports, one saying "we are stuck and need more resources", the other showing progress. Eventually the final recipient of the sensor called a meeting, at which we just showed up with three working units from the first production batch (we had gotten the PCBs printed and I had hand assembled them, but it wasn't really fair to call them prototypes anymore). That caused quite a bit of cognitive dissonance :) Mesh management is a WIP.
twic 13y ago
Sorry, just to clarify - when you say "this advice", do you mean "eat everyone", or the other thing?
- spiritplumber 13y ago
  The other thing :) Much as I seriously considered treating my cow-orkers at the time as valid sources of protein.
thoughtsimple 13y ago
I did something like that once, many years ago. I was working on a doomed project to replace the numerical control for the companies main product line--internal grinding machine tools. The project was going no where. I was getting sent out of state to attend worthless meetings. I took myself off the project, sat down and wrote an OS for the existing hardware and dragged a few coworkers along for the ride. By the time I left, almost all of the software group was working on my OS. This was many years ago--I would never write an embedded OS today but this was the early days of microprocessors and good embedded OS software was very expensive and generally licensed on a per use basis. Trying to get the company to pay license fees would have killed the project immediately. The OS and subsequent application software took about 2 years and worked quite well. It helped the company get a contract from GM Saturn. I learned a huge amount in those 2 years. It didn't help me keep my job at the company though. The broken nature of the company wasn't fixed by simply delivering working software. There was really nothing I could have done to extend my career there and in hindsight, I should probably have gone and done something different.

kyberias 13y ago

This is inspirational. Please share more details if you can. I love stories like this.

spiritplumber 13y ago
Not much to tell; the person who had put himself in charge of building this Android based sensor for NASA wanted to build a little empire, and kept asking for more funds and personnel and insisting that all communication go through him. There was me and one other person doing all the work, so we just tuned everyone else (four people) out and forged on (to the extent of ordering parts and PCBs on our own dime, etc.) The higher ups were getting two sets of reports, one saying "we are stuck and need more resources", the other showing progress. Eventually the final recipient of the sensor called a meeting, at which we just showed up with three working units from the first production batch (we had gotten the PCBs printed and I had hand assembled them, but it wasn't really fair to call them prototypes anymore). That caused quite a bit of cognitive dissonance :) Mesh management is a WIP.

twic 13y ago

Sorry, just to clarify - when you say "this advice", do you mean "eat everyone", or the other thing?

spiritplumber 13y ago
The other thing :) Much as I seriously considered treating my cow-orkers at the time as valid sources of protein.

thoughtsimple 13y ago

I did something like that once, many years ago. I was working on a doomed project to replace the numerical control for the companies main product line--internal grinding machine tools. The project was going no where. I was getting sent out of state to attend worthless meetings. I took myself off the project, sat down and wrote an OS for the existing hardware and dragged a few coworkers along for the ride. By the time I left, almost all of the software group was working on my OS. This was many years ago--I would never write an embedded OS today but this was the early days of microprocessors and good embedded OS software was very expensive and generally licensed on a per use basis. Trying to get the company to pay license fees would have killed the project immediately. The OS and subsequent application software took about 2 years and worked quite well. It helped the company get a contract from GM Saturn. I learned a huge amount in those 2 years. It didn't help me keep my job at the company though. The broken nature of the company wasn't fixed by simply delivering working software. There was really nothing I could have done to extend my career there and in hindsight, I should probably have gone and done something different.