Musings on IT and programming

So after my sabatic period I started to go to different job interviews (most of them thanks to my fellow colleages whom I can't thank enough) and after most of them I feel a little weird. Everyone tries to get the best people by every means possible but then somethin is quite not right. Maybe they ask wrong questions, ask for too much and are willing to give to little in return or just plain don't know what they want or what they need. Our field is filled with lots of buzzwords and it is obvious that some people manage to get jobs only by putting them on their résumé. Then there are some places where there is a bigger filter and filters out some of the boasters. But still it is a question of what do they really need and what questions are needed to weed out those that do not cover minimal aspects required by the job. Don't get me wrong, it is really hard to identify good developers on an interview. It seems that almost no one knows what to ask in order to get insights abo

Projects exceed their estimates both in cost and time. Why? Bad estimation would be an initial thought. If you know your estimates will be off by a wide margin is it possible to minimize the range? Common practice dictates to get better estimates which means get the problem broken down to smaller measurable units, estimate each of them, aggregate results and add a magic number to the total estimate. What if instead of trying to get more accurate estimates we focused on getting more predictable work outcomes? What are the common causes of estimation failure: Difficult problem to solve / Too big problem to solve Problems in comunication Late detection of inconsistencies Underqualified staff Unknown. I'd wager that having underqualified staff is perhaps the most underestimated cause of projects going the way of the dodo. If a problem is too complicated why tackle it with 30 interns and just one senior developer? If it is not complicated but big enough why try to dumb it down a

I'm not against of leaving a trace log of everything that happens on a project what I'm completely against is filling documents for the sake of filling documents. Some software houses that are on the CMMI trail insist that in order to keep or to re validate their current level they need all their artifacts in order but what is missing from that picture is that sometimes it becomes quite a time waster just filling a 5 page word document or an spreadsheet which is just not adequate for the task needed. Perhaps those artifacts cover required aspects at a high degree but they stop being usable after a while either by being hard to fill on a quick and easy manner by someone with required skills and knowledge or they completely miss the target audience of the artifact. Other possibility is that each artifact needs to be reworked every few days apart to get some kind of report or to get current project status and those tasks are currently done by a human instead of being automated.