kebabShopBlues

I’ve just worked on a little support problem that was quite interesting - although not in a good way - as unfortunately it demonstrates failures at so many stages of the specification and development process that I am quite disappointed to be associated with it. Associated, but not the cause of it, to be clear

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A few months ago, our client had a ‘Compliance’ team visit. It was a nightmare. Worse than the general guff Marketing / Sales Departments come up with… or those nasty little changes that are all designed to improve the user experience (you know the ones; where you have to turn some design or code on its head, just because the users are apparently totally unable to understand ‘X’ or ‘Y’*). Anyway, I’m not exactly sure what we were meant to be complying to, but some of the changes were so arbitrary that we could not think of a single justification for them.

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I’ve written before about all sorts of approaches to programming style, how you should do some things and why, and also why you should not do other things.  Recently, I’ve found my increasingly frustrated by the environment that I’m working in, by what I perceive at face-value to be a lack of knowledge or perhaps simply a mismatch in individuals’ idea of standards.  Of course, my employer currently has no standards. No standard anything - code layout style, data-design approach, unit-testing, in fact, testing anything is not ’standard’ at my current employer.

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(and how your Client can Delight You)

Yesterday’s post reminded me just how much value I have begun to place in my working-relationship with our on-site client-liaison. She has a fiery temperament, is outspoken and very different from me, differences which I have come to appreciate. And let’s not forget, in an otherwise all-male office, she is a she and, sad but true, it really does help to have a little bit of a mix of the sexes.

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Some time ago I wrote about the joys of working for my new employer, in a low overhead environment. I think I can now say with some certainty that this has become a confused and un-managed environment. We’ve grown quite some way since I wrote that entry, and this has been a substantial contributor to the situation.

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Yesterday, I wrote about varied aspects of looking for work, but concentrating on Equal Opportunities and Job Requirements specifications. Today I’ll look at some other systems that are at work in the job market right now.

When writing on such broad topics, it’s difficult to disassociate oneself from one’s own experience of the marketplace. Unless you have hard facts and figures… and I regret that I do not.

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I once worked in an IT company that had a ‘Data Preparation’ department. Every single member of the team (I seem to recall there were about 15 of them) were women. I asked one of the bosses about this once, regarding the equality issues, and he said that only one man had ever applied for a job in that team. Well it was one or none anyway. These days, I sense that answer would not have been enough. Today, I suspect that he would have had to prove that any job adverts for roles in that team would have been ‘equally accessible’ to men and women, that special efforts had been made to ensure men had felt able to apply for the role. What is the equality world coming to?

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Jeff Atwood has posted about the Sugar UI, which is the proposed operating system for the $100 PC, ‘One Laptop Per Child’ initiative. He looks at the new OS, which has been designed to be a new experience for first-time users of a PC - read ‘Children’:

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Today I’m going to tell you the story of the best job I never got. And it’s entirely true, which is nice. (more…)