Helping the Wrong People with the Wrong Product

Since my project just got pushed to Test and we have to wait for them now, I’ve found myself with some time at work. So the boss’s boss tasked me and J to another project…

The “other project” is an inventory system under a totally different group (Not even in the E-Commerce division). I’m still trying to figure out why an inventory system is even a Telcomm’s domain, but I digress.

Their last real developer apparently left the company recently. There is one remaining; but meetings reveal this dev doesn’t seem to understand basic programmatic logic and object orientation. Thusly, we may as well be the only two devs on the project.

The project is written in Java. That is to say, it was decreed by a man we’ve never seen that it would be in Java; I have yet to see that any code actually exists. For that matter, the same goes for the mysterious Java man who actively refused to let us use .NET.

Allow me to elaborate on the source of my disdain: Java is a language from Sun Microsystems, a strong proponent of the Open Source Movement. Further, it’s used by the same types of people who use technologies like PHP, MySQL, Apache, and *cringe* Linux. And the people who make these concious decisions don’t just use them; they hold pride parades on the commune. Prove me wrong.

NDAs prevent me from going into much detail here; but suffice it to say there are technical aspects we were introduced to that will greatly impede the assimilation of any new Development staff and applications.

The people we’ll be working with are in constant debate as to what they want, how they want to organize the data, and the cosmic origins of the Universe. So we’re supposed to be writing around arbitrary requirements that apply to the wrong project, for people who don’t even know what they want yet.

Getting real information out of these people is so difficult that it took us four hours of meetings across two days just to extract the fact that they probably want it to be a website.

It gets worse. They want us to write at least one new application in a language we don’t know or like, for a group we have no business with, for people who don’t know what they want; within two months.

It gets better. Apparently, E-Commerce has shot a developer or two their way in the past. Conversations with past victims (And other people who suffered collateral damage) indicate the target group is known internally as the “Black Hole” of the company. Evidently, people go there, get sucked in, and are never heard from again. Millions have been dumped into this “Parent Project” which remains unfinished and reminiscent of a teenager’s MySpace page.

Oh, yes, and apparently the CIO has an eye on the whole project. That’s right, the Corporate Information Officer of the worldwide Telcomm I work for.

So now I have to battle the fear that the CIO will see the poor design and overall badness encompassed by the entire project, and blame someone. The blame will roll downhill and land on the only two developers on the whole project; despite the fact that we’ll be working on a very small portion of an overly-complicated “Parent Project”.

The “Parent Project” (which our project(s) will be a part of) would thusly be interrogated, the blame game would ensue, and there is a possibility that we’d get fired for saving the Black Hole from supernova.

On the other hand, there is a possibility that the CIO will see our project(s) as the tiny shimmer of light within a gaping void of darkness and despair. Perhaps said executive will detect that the group has two people who prefer productivity to meetings; who posess a “Get it Done” attitude instead of a “Let’s extend this deadline” attitude. Perhaps this will result in rapid escalation. Who knows; time will tell as the situation pans out.