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Re: Company considers recoding Java app in Perl

by Your Mother (Archbishop)
on Aug 12, 2005 at 22:14 UTC ( [id://483433]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Company considers recoding Java app in Perl

The entire set of backend service tools at Amazon.com was in Perl and C (almost no Perl facing customers but tons facing employees). The tools were disparate, separate, and sometimes overlapping so they were difficult to learn and maintain. Someone high up decided Java would fix this. 18 months later there was a GUI replacement tool (mostly replacing just Perl and wrapping existing C) that was 18% code complete compared to the original base. What was there was buggy and often too slow to be practical (long conversations to distract customers while you waited for data to come back). Still it was hailed as a huge success by management.

The old tools were still around because of the incomplete nature of the GUI and even new, untrained employees gravitated back to them because they worked consistently and in much deeper ways. Even though it was the only sanctioned way to do the work, the Java tool had about an 80% abandonment rate.

Many, many millions of dollars (training, retraining, lost hours, developers' time, new hardware, in fighting, work on an open list of 500 bugs, etc, etc), and lots of confused, frustrated, or plain angry employees, later the entire thing was sent to the scrap heap and recoded as a web app in Perl (again, just replacing Java parts mostly and still wrapping C).

I understand it's all now being redone again in Java, though this information I only know from an overheard conversation so it could be erroneous.

These kinds of decisions are often from work-flow illiterate senior managers who cannot get good information through the bureaucratic layer cake. They make terrible choices and blame the technologies for their failures because that's easier than admitting a good bit of your managers, technical PMs, and maybe even you and a few of your developers are incompetent and should be culled or repurposed.

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Re^2: Company considers recoding Java app in Perl
by jhourcle (Prior) on Aug 13, 2005 at 03:34 UTC

    There are many middle managers who believe that the best way for them to improve their reputation is to make significant changes as soon as they're put in charge.

    Good managers understand that their job is to facilitate the work of those people under them, shielding them from stupid requests by other management, and inspiring them to get the best possible work out of their charges.

    Most good ideas come from the lowest underlings -- mostly because there's more of them, so they have an advantage in numbers, and they know their part of the system and its failings in their eyes.

    (and I know you said 'senior management'. By my consideration, there's four basic levels of employees -- executive level (VP, CIO, board of trustes), middle management, team leads, and the folks who do most of the work. As such, most 'senior management' falls into my 'middle management' class.)

    A good manager is like a good system administrator -- you almost forget they're even there, because their part of the system run so smoothly. Other people assume they're not working hard, because they're not seen to be struggling like the incompetent managers. They're humble, letting their team take the credit when things go right, but should things go wrong, they take the blame on them. (but they're good, and know what's going on, so they never let things get bad enough that other people know something went wrong).

    When you find a manager like this, don't screw things up like I've done, and tell their bosses how stupid their ideas in front of everyone else at meetings.

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