Pro Developer - Throwing Money Out the Window

What if programmers were in charge?

The other side of this coin is that had our recommendations been heeded, a huge amount of this waste would have been averted. Either the disaster would never have taken place, or time and money wouldn't have been wasted on a project that was obviously never going to see fruition in the first place. So the real question is this: how do we convince our superiors to trust us and follow our lead in the arena we know best?

There is no single silver bullet that will solve this problem. People are complex creatures, and you can't expect to deal with them successfully without taking a number of things into consideration. However, I want to touch on something here that is an important consideration if you truly wish to effect change in your organization: credibility. It might surprise you to learn that in the scenarios and conference room skirmishes I've just outlined, we have none.

What's that you say, how could we possibly have no credibility when we can list disaster after disaster in our own defense? Simple. Those disasters, all those failed projects you can list at the drop of a hat? They were all our fault. Yes, you heard me right. From management's perspective, the reason they failed was not because the task was illogical or impossible. It failed because the programmers simply didn't get it done. Where else could the blame possibly lie? You certainly don't expect management to take the heat, do you? How do you think they got to be managers in the first place?

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Christopher Duncan Christopher Duncan is President of Show Programming of Atlanta, Inc. and author of both the monthly syndicated column Pro Developer and the recent book for Apress, The Career Programmer: Guerilla T...

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