Have you ever worked on a project of oh, say a hundred programmers, spread all over the world, in different time zones and each speaking a different language, each given a set deadline, each starting at different times, none of them talking to each other, nobody supervising the work done, nobody coordinating the work, no-one integrating, no set standards amongst the programmers, some programmers almost finished, one or two have finished, seven or eight are playing Doom, one or two are jerking off, one or two have finished jerking off, some will fix on failure, some have their heads up their asses, some see the urgency of the problem, some don't, some are working on the Euro also, some will be working on the Euro throughout 1999, some are giving up, some are bailing water, some are bailing out, some are sticking it out, many are pulling their hair out.

Sound familiar???

We have a snowball's chance in hell folks of this turning out peachy.

Andy - getting balder by the minute...

"The conveniences and comforts of humanity in general will be linked up by one mechanism, which will produce comforts and conveniences beyond human imagination. But the smallest mistake will bring the whole mechanism to a certain collapse. In this way the end of the world will be brought about."

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, 1922 (Sufi Prophet)

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), January 12, 1999

Answers

This is called outsourcing, I believe. Pointy-hairs think it's a GOOD THING. (Sorry, couldn't resist).

-- Nigel Arnot (nra@maxwell.ph.kcl.ac.uk), January 12, 1999.

Yes, I worked on a mainframe project like this in France but with 3,000 programmers, with its tentacles extended to US, England and Germany. It is exactly as you say. LOL.

'Course a Pollyanna might say, if this is the way things are, why has anything ever worked? Well, it don't work, actually, as such. The deal is that the "Cory Hamasaki's" of the world (there are about 143 of them, I reckon) are really the true "Michael Jordan's" of our infrastructure.

Normally, these 143, due to the wonders of our supply-demand economics, can spread themselves around the 1,000 or so world enterprise systems that are truly critical. Now they can't. Buy some more beans .....

-- BigDog (BigDog@duffer.com), January 12, 1999.

Hell, last year I *ran* a project with "only" 3 sets of people, and 25 programmers, 10 testers, 5 misc. people.

Languages: English, German, Polish, and French.

Early morning meetings (anathema to programmers), programmers' translations going through a marketing guy who just happened to speak Polish.

e-mails that couldn't be parsed into readable English.

Misunderstandings galore.

Ultimately the Germans ended up with their own source code set (to "understand" the program) and went off and wrote their own incompatible system, while ignoring the American Architect's specifications (actually on paper), and code. Thereby rendering large parts of the files incompatible across the intended platforms.

I quit a week after we shipped.

We finished late & overbudget & not *quite* to spec. 8^)

There, now I feel better!

-- Jollyprez (jolly@prez.com), January 12, 1999.

Nigel - LOL! touche...

Big Dog - you didn't happen to work for Amadeus did you? - I was on that in the eighties - sounds familiar :)

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), January 12, 1999.

The work was for Bull Systems (GCOS8, GCOS7). Amadeus doesn't ring a bell ....

As we used to say, if the French were as good at sofware as they are at cuisine, they would rule the world hands down.

-- BigDog (BigDog@duffer.com), January 12, 1999.