Shikarishambu on Software & Related Services

I often (though, these days it is less frequent*) come across folks who have practiced the traditional application methodologies, have heard of Agile development and are wary of Agile development. They all have their favorite pet peeve with the various flavors of Agile development – “two people coding together is a waste of resources”, “building before completing the entire design is surely a recipe for failure”, and so on…I have pondered this for a while and come to this understanding. The traditional methodologies are output driven (so many documents, checklists etc…) while agile development is outcome driven (does it work, does it satisfy the need, do the users want to use it?)

I was once on a “traditional” project for a large insurer. We completed the design (or, at least, we thought so), got the signoff and were waiting for the start of development. The client called us back and told us that on review against their methodology (which, they had licensed from a big consulting house which by then had stopped using that methodology in-house) they had found 20% gap in our design. I never figured how they came up on this 20%. My guess is that they reviewed the outputs against a list provided by the methodology and found some gaps.

Next time you are on an elevator and someone engages you on a traditional vs. agile discussion, try telling them that the difference is “output driven” vs. “outcome driven.”

 The New Year got off to a rough start for me. I returned from a month long vacation (half of it was unpaid and the rest was all the vacation days that I had shored up for this trip to India) to work to find that I have no work. My boss (the CTO) of the company told me that due to financial difficulties the company was going through another round of layoffs. Since they had decided to stop all IT initiatives they did not need someone to define and manage IT initiatives.

So, here I am looking for a new job. A recruiter that I talked to mentioned that I should not use “eliminated” or “layoff” as they have negative connotations. Instead, he suggested, I should use “separated.” Well, “separated” it is even though it does not change the reality. Someone else told me that averaging 2 yrs at a job does not sit well. True. I would not hire someone who changes jobs every two years. And, in the first 8 years of my work I was a sucker for the newest technology. I changed jobs every two years to work on the latest thing. In the last 10 years it has been the economy and the companies who have been prompting my job changes. One company that I worked for kept laying off people every 3 months that I finally quit after being there for 6 rounds of layoffs; the other decided consulting was not for them; the next two failed (one of them managed to sell themselves before it went under)

Someone once asked me – “How long can a ‘start-up’ call itself a ‘start-up’?” I had no answer for that one. My former employer has been in business for 3 years and is down by $35MM. In B-school they say investors look for 3×3 or 5×5 returns (i.e. 3x returns in 3 years etc…) I bet this is not what they had in mind. Anyway, what do you call a ‘start-up’ that is in this state? Wind-down.

Back to the job hunt.