[AnAnonyCowherd]

I got hired at a Fortune 250 to rewrite a system, from the ground up, that had been running for 5 years. I rewrote it in about a year and a half. Huge success; 1000 happy users.

What I learned over time was that "the" person responsible for the group that was _supposed_ to be writing this sort of software in the company had been trying, for 10 years, to make something like it, with a whole team of contractors. In fact, it was his initial failure that caused my boss to write the first version of the program. When they saw that my boss had hired me, they doubled their efforts.

Their version of the idea was total garbage. Nobody would use it. It was terribly slow, clunky, and had a fatal flaw that would have caused people MORE work than just not using their program.

The boss of their group managed to get one of his underlings moved above my boss. He told us to stop working on my program. We did. They brought it Microsoft consultants to try to make their version suck less. It didn't work.

I suggested many things to work together. Rebrand. Code features they needed. Use some of their software. Whatever. All rejected out of hand.

We BEGGED our boss to IMPLORE the other manager to AT LEAST fix the "fatal flaw" of the other version. He agreed to, but we knew he wouldn't.

We released a bug fix for production. The other manager lost his mind, and got our manager to force us to hand over the code to his group. It took them TWO YEARS to make a single change. My program happily ran like a clock during the interim.

They finally gave up on their version.

My boss was put on a PIP. I was put on the tiniest project possible (which was completely doomed anyway), and forced to write what should have been a quick and dirty web app as a corporate, Java monstrosity. (But I repeat myself.)

In my first meeting, the other manager's toady told me to my face that he was going to kill the project I was hired for. In 4.5 years, I never even met the other manager, though he sat 50 feet away from my last cube.

There was no winning. My boss was very politically savvy, and just plain nice. There was nothing he could do. I stayed completely out of it. I did the job I was hired to do, and embarrassed the wrong people. He was written up. I was put out to pasture.

You can say that I should have done things differently. Maybe. Maybe not. What it tells me is that I was in the wrong company. Which sucks, because I could have written LOB tools like this for the rest of my career there. But this sort of dimness of vision is rampant throughout the company concerning anything related to IT. According to them, the only way to write software is to follow a strict waterfall methodology, in Java, with overseas contractors.

Making the company suck to work at, and the act of wasting millions of dollars, because it helps you build a political fiefdom, is an idea that needs to be rooted out and eliminated by the C levels. Why does this not happen? Instead, one of the C's just did a "post-mortem" on this whole fiasco, and the result was that IT needs to be "more aligned" with the business, and have better "communication."

Really? That's the level of acumen of our C-levels? They can't smell the metric buttload of BS that was shoveled in that meeting? OK, then. Good luck in the future!

I start a new job on Monday. Crossing my fingers that they will be open minded. I wonder if my old company will still be viable in 10 years.

[0db532a0]

What was your strategy in one-to-ones, and what would you have changed?

[AnAnonyCowherd]

I suppose someone would say that I could have been more diplomatic, but someone needed to voice a differing opinion. Unfortunately, there was just no way -- diplomatically or otherwise -- I was going to be allowed to influence the culture or the process. Too many other people had built their careers on the back of a 30-year-old process. It was, as they say, entrenched. Sometimes, you just get dealt a bad hand, and you can't draw into a winner.