Tools for Fools
Aaargh - tools!
Cant live with'em cant live without 'em.
This truly is a topic that can get me going. It has so many dimensions but lets start with the folliest of follies - inhouse tool development. Brrr - I bet most has been directly involved or seen it either consume resources wildly or decay into uselessness.
So what happens - some one has a great idea. Sure but then you do it as a skunk work and since its not core to the business you never ever get time and resources to make it even remotly done. So you end up with a piece of code that has expectations, since its been talked about for ages and the idea is great so the outcome has to even better. But it never gets there and eventually it will decay into worthlessness. The only good thing with this is that there hasnt been a serious consumption on resources to produce - well nothing :-)
The other scenario is even worse in my opinion - you actually make a product/project out of the inhouse tool. But since it isnt core business you have to motivate people to do it. Thus strongly emphasize the importance of the tool. Well what happens now? Someone has "The Tool" as their stream of promotions, income and status from "The Tool". No way that im going to do "just enough" - no way indeed. "The Tool" has to be the crown jewel of all tools in the world. Im going to spend enourmous amount of time and resources on the tool and the return of investment - well it shore aint my problem.
Whats the one and only sensible solution, unless you make "The Tool" into a full scale product offered to other customers externally and demanding it to be self sustaining. The solution is to let the people experience the pain do the tool development to solve their own problems. Possibly put the spike solutions into a company open source repository but never ever let anyone think that its a product. You're free to use the spikes but you are on you're own!
The other dimension then 3rd party tools. These also make you whine in despair. There are two extreme points anarchy and dictatorship.
Anarchy - every one has the freedom to choose the tool of their choice. Great now everyone is happy and probably also efficient in their own work. But unfortunatly tools are not interfacing well between eachother. I think that they never will - because the tool vendor business works sort of like the pusher business. The first fix is free but then "Im you're man!" and no one wants to loose the revenue stream so why the hell make it easy to move to another tool (and if some tool vendor would make it easy to move to their tool we pretty instantly will change the format of our tool to make it work crappy...). So the flood gates are wide open in the time river. I'll spend hour upon hour to try to get you're results and my results to merge.
Dictatorship - At least you have a standing chance to make the tools working togheter in, if you're lucky, acceptable manner. The downside is that you have a great deal of people angry at the tool and spending a lot of effort a) trying to get the tool changes b) bad mouthing the tool c) working with it in the wrong way or just plainly not working with it at all.
Depressing - huh
Cant live with'em cant live without 'em.
This truly is a topic that can get me going. It has so many dimensions but lets start with the folliest of follies - inhouse tool development. Brrr - I bet most has been directly involved or seen it either consume resources wildly or decay into uselessness.
So what happens - some one has a great idea. Sure but then you do it as a skunk work and since its not core to the business you never ever get time and resources to make it even remotly done. So you end up with a piece of code that has expectations, since its been talked about for ages and the idea is great so the outcome has to even better. But it never gets there and eventually it will decay into worthlessness. The only good thing with this is that there hasnt been a serious consumption on resources to produce - well nothing :-)
The other scenario is even worse in my opinion - you actually make a product/project out of the inhouse tool. But since it isnt core business you have to motivate people to do it. Thus strongly emphasize the importance of the tool. Well what happens now? Someone has "The Tool" as their stream of promotions, income and status from "The Tool". No way that im going to do "just enough" - no way indeed. "The Tool" has to be the crown jewel of all tools in the world. Im going to spend enourmous amount of time and resources on the tool and the return of investment - well it shore aint my problem.
Whats the one and only sensible solution, unless you make "The Tool" into a full scale product offered to other customers externally and demanding it to be self sustaining. The solution is to let the people experience the pain do the tool development to solve their own problems. Possibly put the spike solutions into a company open source repository but never ever let anyone think that its a product. You're free to use the spikes but you are on you're own!
The other dimension then 3rd party tools. These also make you whine in despair. There are two extreme points anarchy and dictatorship.
Anarchy - every one has the freedom to choose the tool of their choice. Great now everyone is happy and probably also efficient in their own work. But unfortunatly tools are not interfacing well between eachother. I think that they never will - because the tool vendor business works sort of like the pusher business. The first fix is free but then "Im you're man!" and no one wants to loose the revenue stream so why the hell make it easy to move to another tool (and if some tool vendor would make it easy to move to their tool we pretty instantly will change the format of our tool to make it work crappy...). So the flood gates are wide open in the time river. I'll spend hour upon hour to try to get you're results and my results to merge.
Dictatorship - At least you have a standing chance to make the tools working togheter in, if you're lucky, acceptable manner. The downside is that you have a great deal of people angry at the tool and spending a lot of effort a) trying to get the tool changes b) bad mouthing the tool c) working with it in the wrong way or just plainly not working with it at all.
Depressing - huh
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