Vengeance

I was feeling a bit depressed the other day so I called the Depression Hotline.

I was put through to a "Call Center" in Pakistan.

I explained that I was feeling suicidal.

They were very excited at this news and wanted to know if I could drive a truck or fly an airplane.

True outsourcing story from work this week: Axe gets a panic call at work from a project manager in St Louis. Can one of Axe's people help out with a three week engagement starting ASAP? Axe asks them to lay out the problem.

Seems that the project started six months ago. Their customer has a legislatively mandated change to make, where they need to send a letter to their customers anytime the customer's information changes. Axe suppresses a chuckle and tries to determine the best time to tell the PM it's a one day project.

Six months ago, they hired an offshore architect with a PhD in Computer Science (from a fine Indian univeristy) to develop this solution. He worked on it for three months with status reports nobody understood, then quit with nothing to show for it.

Customer not amused. Insist on an on-site resource. PM hires an Indian developer to fly to St Louis. First day on the job, they ask him to create some Oracle tables based on the detailed design document (this had been created by an American developer in one day while they were waiting for the Indian guy to fly over here). When they come by to check up on him an hour later, developer has fled the building. He is now an illegal alien loose somewhere in the U.S.

Customer definitely not amused. Axe tells PM not to worry, Axe has him covered, assigns most junior American guy on his team who solves the problem in one day. Axe refuses the happy PM's offer to suck the "unit testing" teat for the next three weeks while we bill PM's project for it, in exchange for a case study in "why outsourcing doesn't pay."

OMG that is so funny.

that's so sad, yet so true...  of course it's not always the case (India isn't completely full of idiots), but the experience recently has been that even if you can get away with paying 1/3 the US price for a resource, you end up needing twice as many for longer periods of time... and then you factor in that the IT job market over there now is similar to how it was here in the late 90's (meaning you can get a 10% raise weekly by changing jobs), so your turnover is high and you constantly have to retrain people.  You also lose the stick part of the old carrot-and-stick motivational school.  You can't really threaten someone with their job if they can just giggle and walk down to the next outsourcer and get more money.

Most of the indian contractors I've been working with have been pretty competent. I suppose that's because they have to be; otherwise, we just "send them back" and get a person who can actually help us. Due to the high demand for IT workers these days, often times contractors are the only way we can get the manpower we need to finish projects on time.

The downside of this is, like ross said, once you spend all that time training them to use your systems, you lose them and have to retrain someone else 8 months later.

After working in IT for almost a year now, I'm pretty amazed at how little actual gets done in a given day. I've been working on a development project for our speech system (which took 3 days to write) and it's been in testing for over a month. If you don't count the daily defect meetings, I'm only doing maybe 20 minutes of bug fixes (ie, actual work) every day.

It is kind of shocking how little actually gets done in a given day. In management, it is a constant struggle to work against the "project management" overhead, futile "team building" exercises, and recurring meetings with no goals and hardly anyone paying attention. I try hard to free up people to do actual work, and it takes my whole day just to do that.

We got some new project wins, and Axe's teams are going from 21 to 37 people. Hiring is now a full time job for my managers... plus, I need to hire two new managers, so I am doing their jobs in the meantime. You would not believe the crowd I get applying for management jobs. No wonder we're all a bunch of clueless pointy headed morons, those are the only people who apply for the jobs.

I got a call from An American Express guy in New Dehli two weeks ago to verify some information for my new credit card.. i get the card yesterday and the name on the card is:

#rnaud L Franco

Thats right.. a # sign... sigh..

lol, unbelievable.  They probably meant to hit the @ sign.

QuoteQuote: from Axecleaver on 11:17 am on Nov. 20, 2007
It is kind of shocking how little actually gets done in a given day. In management, it is a constant struggle to work against the "project management" overhead, futile "team building" exercises, and recurring meetings with no goals and hardly anyone paying attention.

In my 6+ years at AOL, the managment teams last on average of 18 months. This is all the way up to VP-level. The cycle seems to go thusly:

10 START

20 Hi, we're your new management team! We'll be spending a good 6 months coming up with powerpoint presentations and org charts outlining how the current way of doing things is WRONG, no matter how effective it seems. If it was right, you wouldn't have a new management team, would you? It has NOTHING to do with the fact that we can't be arsed to learn how you've been doing things.

30 Welcome to the new way of doing things! It's a 2-year plan, and it relies on an all-new toolset that will take 12 months to build if it gets built at all. I fully expect you to stop using the old tools, despite the fact that the new tools haven't been debugged yet. After all, we've allocated the portion of the budget to getting you outside training to paying for the new tools.

40 New management means more headcount! After all, there's so many of these "old timers" bitching about how the old way of doing things was better. Let's hire some new people too stupid and desperate for work to know the difference! Better yet, let's get contractors that couldn't get full-time work due to incompetence, and pay them more that our existing employees! The old-timers should have plenty of time on their hands to do their own job AND train the new guys, what with our New! Better! Way of Doing Things!

50 Uh-oh, I hear Layoffs are coming. Lets go to the VP and tell him we can take on more "mission" (i.e. work that other people are currently doing satisfactorily) to show them we're too valuable to be put up on the chopping block. Doesn't matter if the new "mission" has nothing to do what we're currently trained for, we've got a bunch of new hires. They'll happily accept the increased workload, because they don't know any better.

60 Sorry guys, we're gonna have to some of y'all off anyways. But no, we won't be giving up any of that extra "mission" we took on, that'd show the VPs we can't handle the responsibility we ASKED for. Suck it up, and be glad you still have a job.

70 Why do you people keep bitching about headcount? You're doing your job just as well with the current amount of people as you were before the layoffs! I don't see how the fact that YOU can't take a sick day without leaving your co-workers in the lurch is MY problem...

80 Success! My incredible strategy of cutting costs by dumping more work on less people has finally paid off! I'm being promoted, and I won't to deal with you pussies whining about "workload" ever again! Enjoy your new manager! I'll be sure to NOT put in a good word for you. Hell, I haven't even really bothered to learn most of your names in the last 18 months.

90 Oh, and since I'm not your manager anymore, we're not going to be supporting those tools we developed for you anymore. So what if we never really got them finished. You'll just have to hope what you have keeps working until your new manager decides what to do with them.

100 GOTO 10

(Edited by Sodom at 3:53 am on Nov. 22, 2007)

it's funny you mention the project management overhead... just yesterday I was in the process of telling a PM for the fourth time in about 2 hours to get the hell out of my office so that I could actually get some work done (as opposed to providing him status updates every ten minutes... this because someone else went over their allotted time, so of course the answer is to try to compress mine), and the guy says to me "look, I'm focused on this right now, so it has to get done!  I'm not sure if you're aware, but I'm managing five (haha!) projects, and three of those require SAN resources!" (SAN is what I work on).  So I just snicker and ask him how many PM's are on his team (I think the answer was eight or something), and then inform him that they all have about the same ratio of projects requiring SAN resources... and that there are two people on the SAN team including myself... and the other guy is an old mainframe guy about a year away from retirement who handles standard things well but isn't usually really eager to step outside of his comfort zone for anything new or different.  So the PM basically shrugs and says "so?"... but then the wheels start spinning and he does some quick math and the lightbulb in his head starts flickering.  He just muttered something about how his projects were more important as he walked out, lol.

that same guy is pissed that people stopped attending his twice-weekly status meetings because he and the other PM who was helping him for a while (aside:  wtf?  helping with what?) would sit there for the first half hour with MS Project projected on a wall and update timelines and in the process screw up timelines where they had lazily just strung a zillion dependencies together that weren't actually dependent on each other... so we'd basically just sit there and watch them do their "work" the whole time.  The last time I went, I asked them as I was walking out if they'd like to come into the datacenter and watch me configure some fiber switches, and they completely missed the point and asked "why would we want to do that?"...  lol

i don't want to sound like I completely devalue what PMs can bring to the table, but in my experience the vast vast majority of them are pretty useless from an IT perspective.  I feel that a decent IT PM should probably have a minimum level of across the board general IT skills so that they don't spend the beginning of every project basically needing to be educated at the lowest level just so they can write up the basic documentation.  Most of them, in my opinion, also need someone to remind them that their most basic function is communication, so when you start trying to push that part of your function off on the technical resources on the project team, you really remove any value you had in the first place.  Don't send us project portfolio templates and ask us to fill them in.  Don't ask us to contact vendor PMs and schedule meetings and then ask us to reschedule them because you have conflicting lunch plans.  Don't show up 10-15 minutes late to your own meeting without sending out an agenda beforehand and then ask for a catch-up summary when you stroll in, lol.  ahh, the PMs at work have been in rare form lately.  :)

Sodom - well done, sir. That's IT management in 90% of big business shops out there. You really need a strong manager above you to make sure that you don't get kicked in the nuts every six months when the reorgs happen.

Ross -

QuoteI feel that a decent IT PM should probably have a minimum level of across the board general IT skills

That's what we do at my job now, and it works. Sometimes the PM's will fall back on their PiMP training (http://www.pmi.org/CareerDevelopment/Pages/Our-Credentials.aspx), and I'll have to jerk them back to reality.

Jackass, you're asking me why this isn't done, where six months ago you were doing this exact same work. Why do YOU think it isn't done? Ah, I see the lightbulb going off. It wasn't a staffing problem or a performance problem, it was your f'd up dependencies that made the project plan a poor timeline predictor. Now go away and for the love of God, if you open your mouth again without thinking I am going to make you look really ridiculous.

lol!  nice

bumping this thread for its comedic value.

although its kind of frightening at the same time... only 9 months of college left :shocked:

Everything in this thread is still true, except now I have 62 staff. Next week I get to propose my new improved reorg plan... oh no, that asshole Sod was talking about, it's me!!!

I do make an effort to learn everybody's name, even to the point where I keep a spreadsheet with things like spouse and kid names, hobbies, etc. I find it supremely creepy but necessary. Shh, don't tell anyone.

Have been successfully fighting a delaying action against the outsourcing peril. It's inevitable, though, and someday in the future, I'll go down with the ship.

jfc, 62 people?  I'd consider hanging myself, I think.  I only have 6, and even with that small of a group there's enough whining most days to keep me entertained.

I just have to add my 2 copper to this.

Axe, if you think some of those comments could be aimed at you and re-orgs, try reading them from a PM point of view...

I have to agree though that there are way too many pm's out there that shouldn't be, or at least in the wrong field. It's one thing to know how to create a timeline but a good PM should know how to roll with the punches.

I've been in IT for quite some time, but stopped touching the actual technology itself a few years back as a network architect and now concentrate primarily on business cases and project development. Zhaa is actually one of my vendors I get to yell at when I need to vent :)

I can't say how many times I've been in meetings with other PM's who throw out "Well I'm not technical" when they get into trouble and blame staff. Or how many times I've phased out in board room meetings wondering what wrong turn was it I made that got me from happily bartending 20 years ago to having to shut up and smile at someones "brilliant" plan for a more efficient service offering that is doomed to fail.

> there's enough whining most days to keep me entertained.

My job is basically unlicensed psychiatry now. I have four directs who manage the other 58, but it's too much for them - my busiest manager has 18 people and travels 3 weeks a month to client sites. I'm about to pitch another layer of middle management to my boss, which should take a lot of pressure off them. I asked to put this in place 6 months ago but it was viable then - he needed to see the problem and not just have me predict it.

But honestly, I hired well and now my job is fairly easy. I just need to be organized and able to predict the future well, which I do. There is very little day to day stress.

I have a reputation for caring about every one of my employees and extending my protection to them in an otherwise faceless bureaucracy. If you take care of your people, they take care of you. My message to my people is, I want my job to be stress-free and simple. They work hard to deliver that for me. As a result I really don't have a very hard job.

>  Zhaa is actually one of my vendors I get to yell at when I need to vent

One time, Zhaa let me die in arena and then our team went on to win. I wanted to yell at him but then I realized he had the big picture in mind. Maybe it was the same kind of thing for you.