I envy the Sports Industry. While no statistics represents an absolute (other than GPA + SAT pretty much = your academic potential plus or minus an essay here or there for college entry) the Sports industry has it a lot easier than we do. Let’s see the RBI for code delivered to production for an individual; or the rebounds per game for a Project Managers; or maybe the career scoring average for the COO?
Having been around this business for a while I think I have heard it from all sides: business leaders that just cannot understand why IT can rarely deliver projects on-time and within budget; developer ego that cannot understand why they are forced to worked with these incompetent business leaders who cannot make up their mind or define their requirements appropriately; QA caught in the middle who cannot understand why developers cannot write perfect code. And at the end of the day, it seems I must remind myself everyday that I am here solely to solve business problems and not to generate code for the sake of generating code. Now, not everyone struggles like I do. But look to your left and your right – it’s a lot of us.
So I was not entirely surprised when I was asked to join a meeting to help a colleague, and watched in amazement as a business leader discussed their “requirementsâ€. They knew they wanted “agile†development. They knew they wanted Java. They knew they wanted a PM, 1 senior developer and 2 junior developers – to go – with a large fry. And I am certain, in the end, they probably got exactly that.