[lucasnemeth]

For me the absurd part was this one:

"Philip (President): Our factory is underutilized by 10%. Either we start building more of our backlog or we lay people off. I'd rather keep everyone busy, build inventory, and get ahead of the curve before the busy season. How can we do that?

Lee (Operations Manager): Company policy restricts us from building more than 3 months of backlog. If you just change that to 4 months, we'll have plenty of work."

You can't have one week of 10% less productivity if not you will immediately fire everyone? And you company policies only work if you change a line of code? And this line of code is from some old legacy code that no one touch and your whole process depends on it? No, 6 days of development is the least of the problems here. This company is absurd.

6 days for the line of code wasn't optimal, but wasn't that bad. What this story shows to me how bad management pretend things are IT fault.

[rpeden]

It didn't mention firing anyone. When I see 'layoff' used in the context of manufacturing, it usually means something more like an furlough (i.e. the laid off employees stay home and don't get paid until the company has enough work for them to do). In this case, it seems they'd rather not do it, but if the software change drags on long enough, they'd have to start layoffs.

As for requiring a code change to implement new policy; maybe not ideal, but it looks like they're trying to move away from that with the requirement that hard coded constants be moved to a parameters file.

And in general, using the company's production software to enforce business policies is probably an important management control. Often when you see rules like that, it's because the company got burned by something in the past and wants to enforce a process that prevents it from happening again. In this case, maybe in the past an operations manager was evaluated based on how busy the factory does, and so just kept building up more and more inventory to game the metrics he/she was being judged by.

I think it was a tad inaccurate of the manager to call it 'legacy' software. It might be an old system, but it appears to be critical to the company's operations, and it seems to be something that is worked on fairly regularly. Even if it's written in Cobol and JCL, I'm not sure it would be fair to call it legacy software unless the company is actively working on a replacement and making only necessary changes to the old system in the interim.

So, while I understand your concerns, I'm not sure it's fair to pin this on bad management. It sounds to me like a company that's probably been in operation for a long time, and has processes in place to make sure nobody pushes any changes to a production-critical system without proper approval and testing. They could possibly streamline the process, but it doesn't seem (necessarily) crazy based on the information we were given.

[lucasnemeth]

Ugh. that's sad. I'll be sure to avoid old manufacturing companies when looking for jobs then.

[asher_]

This even isn't the absurd part.

If you increase the backlog time you are building for, then it's a one-off increase, it doesn't increase the quantity of new work coming in, so once they've worked through this one-off extra with their 10% spare capacity, things will just go back to how they were before.