Reply to Message

I resonate on 1, 3, 4, 9 & 10
I work in a University, not in an enterprise, but nevertheless I recognize some situation I went (and I am still going) through...

1. I also call this "the single shovel syndrome." The name refers to a commonly made remark about road works: "When there is some road maintenance work, you see ten people, but only one is digging." Although, personally, I do not believe that this is always true, it could actually happen if your work plan calls for a hole to be dug and there is only one shovel: it does not matter how many people you put a work, only one will be able to help. This is actually a bit different from the "pregnant woman" effect: pregnancy is a strictly sequential task and it cannot be split in parallel, hole digging can be split, but you must provide enough resources (shovels) to get advantage from parallelism.

3 & 4 (about time estimations). When we submit projects to the EU for funding we are asked for a timeline that extends for 2 or 3 years. We should specify how long that workpackage about development of a cloud 3D sharing platform (or whatever) will last. My first reaction is "How in the (whatever) am I supposed to know?!?" It depends on many variables that, since I do not have a crystal ball, I am unable to predict... It depends on the ability of the people that I will hire to write the software, it depends on the outcome of other WPs, we could have problems in getting SW and/or HW that will delay the development. In these case I (like anyone else, as far as I know) just throw some numbers that can look reasonable. BTW, I decided to read Brooks' book to actually get some hints about stuff like this.

9 & 10. I summarize this in the motto "people are not computers." With computers you can expect them working since the time you plug them and you can use them with lots of different tasks, but people do not work in this way; they are more slow, more "low pass" (to use an electrical expression) and they have lots of overhead when switching tasks.

I see 9 especially with some people from industry that come to me with a request like this: "Oh, we need some young graduate, it must be an expert on (a very obscure piece a SW that only they use), since we must deliver a product in two months and we are searching for someone who will be productive since day 1." Typically I am kind enough and tell them that I will ask around for someone, but in my mind I think "You just got your times wrong," ask to a couple of people (just to say to myself that I tried) then remove their request from my mind.

I see 10 with many coworkers of mine. They get a student to work on some project (that does not interest them, but it is founded) and they would like that the student worked also on a different project (that interests the professor more, but it is not directly founded). The overall result is that, if correctly handled, the student does a good work only in one project, otherwise does a bad work in both projects.
Posted by framefritti@...
23rd Apr 2012