Dinosaurs in IT

Preface

As an IT developer I have seen several monsters at work. These monsters were applications, databases, projects and sometimes … yes… people!

Today I am going to describe a kind of people who were actually the "dinosaurs" in our development teams.

The only difference between them and the real ones is that dinosaurs were victims of a global catastrophe. The IT dinosaurs are a catastrophe themselves.

Are you a fresh padawan in IT? Just relax and hear some advice from an old developer:

Never become an IT dinosaur!

Beware of the project tyrannomanagerus 🦖

This is a dangerous species of colleagues lurking in many IT companies. These kind of dinosaurs do have something more lethal than big teeth and appetite. They have a title they feel proud of: IT project manager.

Shush! No, not all project managers are dinosaurs are bad. But the "middle-tier" IT project manager is definitely a dinosaur of the old ways IT companies used to work.

How can you distinguish them from the others in five simple steps?

• He feels and is a tyrant in project
• He lives next to waterfall projects 😉
• He considers communication between customers and developers BAD
• His project plan is more important than deliverables
• He finger-points responsibilities if something goes wrong

The key characteristic of this project manager is centralised communication. And this is done for two reasons. First, he wants to control and considers as work controlling others. Second, he wants to manipulate information for his benefit.

If I am hard with these points, just relax and ask yourself:

• How often were delivery dates decided without you being asked?
• How often requirements changed and you hear about it too late?

Tyrannosaurus managers know they should not decide without asking you. But they do it nevertheless and since they control information they manipulate it and try to trick you.

A typical case: They want to satisfy customers, promise them something and they come back with an impossible delivery date. Typical excuse: customers decided about delivery date.

Yes. I have been in this position. A manager comes to you to provide urgently a non-binding estimation about a project you barely heard of. They take this estimation, cut it in half to make it "more appealing" to customer and a week later you hear about a delivery date for this project which was already yesterday.

Another big issue with them is they prioritise project planning above product value. This is actually totally against customers. Actually they even forget there is a product behind a project. I consider this the main reason why these kind of people will not even try to understand agile ways to build software.

It is even sad when all people on company level operate project-based and forget about products. In the end, all software products will be doomed to bad support, outages and the constant feeling "this is not what I ordered". I am sorry to tell you but this is the result of bad project management, not development.

Of course tyrannosaurus will happily finger-point you if anything goes wrong. Is it lack of time that forced you to patch a bug in code with a gum and a coin? Is the customer unsatisfied because features are missing you were not aware of? No worries, he will tell everyone it is your fault. Do not forget, he controls communication and does everything to get his big fat bonus.

Another great example is this big scandal about manipulating gas emissions in cars. I can imagine those big managers and CEOs blaming in court the development team that they implemented this cheat in code without their acknowledgement. Can developers prove them wrong? Managers controlled people and communication and abused them the perfect way.

Countermeasures 💪

If you feel there is nothing you can do about it and you feel too small for turning the wheel in a project, let me give you three simple tips:

• Speak out! I spoke about some issues I had with a manager to my team. No comments, just facts. And guess what? All of them had the same experience. In the end with a team decision we threw him out from a project! And people say miracles never happen!
• Logs As a small test, simply ask your manager to forward you his requests by email. If he is hesitating about it, there is something rotten in this dinosaur.
• Persistence He is a project manager and you are developer. So what? Do you feel his position as manager is stronger? It is simply not. Companies need months or years to find good developers. HRs are paying lots of money in headhunters and ads. If you do your job right, you actually have the upper hand. If you have a different opinion about something and he plays his title as an argument, throw it back to his face. Don't let him intimidate you.

Conclusion

These dinosaurs are far from extinction. I still find them every day in many big companies, which are trying to find themselves in the modern agile era. They are afraid of agile working because they think it will be their "ice age" and force them to extinction. They usually speak for it and work against it.

But a new species has evolved from the agile age: the product owners. The amazing thing when I work with them is that we have a common goal. We both want to see a product evolving and becoming better and better. If projects still exist in a company, they work only as a way to finance our common goal.

Hopefully one day we will only learn about Project Tyrannomanagerus in computer science history class together with COBOL and oracle. Their waterfall projects and stories will live only as storytales and legends to scare the next generation of developers.