Never as complicated or sophisticated as client makes out

[psychocandy]

Anyone ever got to client site on first day and thought Wow this really is a complex environment I didnt expect this?

In my experience, you go to interview, clients tells you how big, complicated, cool their set up is. Then they tell you how busy it is and how hard everyone works.

You get there on first day and your unimpressed. Nothing big or complicated.
Place is like a country club and post-3pm on a friday theres no-one there.

I think its a permie thing. They get so wrapped up in their own little world they think its brilliant. Of course, us contractors generally see a bit more and how other companies work too.

Of course, not that I'm complaining aboiut working in a country club environment mind!

[BigTime]

See if you can get into IBM

[Mich the Tester]

I'm in an environment where there really is quite some complexity to the projects and products, but the biggest obstacle to getting productive at clientco is actually the tool chain, which they think is highly advanced but is actually a rather ramshackle collection of overpriced tools connected by fragile in-house interfaces and completely loony MS word and excel macros. I reckon I'm quite good at quickly understanding the systems that are being built at most clientcos, but when I'm confronted with overcomplicated glorified office software I struggle to stay awake. I often think things could be better if Word was replaced by WordPad or even Notepad to prevent MS Office lovers making all sorts of crappy templates and linked documents and the entire IBM-HP requirements and test management suite were nuked and replaced with a couple of simple freeware products. Oh, and scrap the procedural working practices from 20 odd years ago.

Or maybe I'm a bit fick.

[psychocandy]

See if you can get into IBM

Cos its complicated or more country club?

[northernladuk]

Did the client also expect you to be able to use the correct your/you're when writing?

Looks like you are both disappointed then....

[psychocandy]

I'm in an environment where there really is quite some complexity to the projects and products, but the biggest obstacle to getting productive at clientco is actually the tool chain, which they think is highly advanced but is actually a rather ramshackle collection of overpriced tools connected by fragile in-house interfaces and completely loony MS word and excel macros. I reckon I'm quite good at quickly understanding the systems that are being built at most clientcos, but when I'm confronted with overcomplicated glorified office software I struggle to stay awake. i often think things could be better if Word was replaced by WordPad or even Notepad to prevent MS Office lovers making all sorts of crappy templates and linked documents and the entire IBM-HP requirements and test management suite were nuked and replaced with a couple of simple freeware products. Oh, and scrap the procedural working practices from 20 odd years ago.

Or maybe I'm a bit fick.

Yeh. dont get me wrong. A lot of clients are complex because of the crap they use or because they use some obscure featre in the OS that no-one else in the world does (and they're quite impressed with themselves).

Which is why sometimes they describe it as complex. In my book, its not complex just because you do something weird, give me 10 mins and I'll google it if I'ver never used it before.

I suppose this is where you get the old chestnut gigs on jobserve with 20 essential skills on. Van Driver needed -must have experience of red vans.

[psychocandy]

Did the client also expect you to be able to use the correct your/you're when writing?

Looks like you are both disappointed then....

Dun fink so

[BigTime]

Cos its complicated or more country club?

Complicated

[doodab]

Anyone ever got to client site on first day and thought Wow this really is a complex environment I didnt expect this?

Once or twice. I had a short gig doing some performance tuning on an 3 tier system with 3 different sites each having a setup of 8 web nodes (on Sun SPARC) & 16 application nodes (on Linux) with multiple database nodes (on IBM power) in a datacentre somewhere else. Hitting the ground running with that lot, gathering the relevant performance stats & log files from all those servers and the relevant software, crunching the numbers to make something resembling sense out of it, and verifying the config and changes across all the servers was a bit of a challenge.

But in general, no, it's the same old same old. They have a basic 2-4 x web nodes, 2-4 x application nodes and a clustered database managed by a DBA team so not really in their gamut and they think it's the bees knees. Most of the configuration & tuning side is a simple matter of following the vendor recommendations and basic DBA and OS skills and the OOTB application software I deal with is far more complex than anything anyone sane would build from scratch because it's ultra configurable (and I know it pretty well, although not inside out like some guys I've worked with), so the only mildly complex part (of the niche product consulting side of my job, at least) is figuring out any customisations, which aren't always made in line with the vendors coding standards, and implementing further customisations.

Luckily I specialise in integrating said niche product with all and sundry so I get to do quite a bit of proper software architecture and development. I've even had .Net gigs on the basis it's easier for me to pick up C# than to find an experienced C# programmer and get them to learn all the other stuff I know. Another advantage of working with this sort of product is that I'm regularly exposed to multiple OS & databases which lets you build up a nice range of skills. This also tends to be the more challenging part of my job, mostly because you don't have the option of playing safe and falling back on vendor recommendations & white papers to the same degree as you do when dealing with the product itself, so you have to technically justify yourself a bit more.

[Mich the Tester]

Yeh. dont get me wrong. A lot of clients are complex because of the crap they use or because they use some obscure featre in the OS that no-one else in the world does (and they're quite impressed with themselves).

Which is why sometimes they describe it as complex. In my book, its not complex just because you do something weird, give me 10 mins and I'll google it if I'ver never used it before.

I suppose this is where you get the old chestnut gigs on jobserve with 20 essential skills on. Van Driver needed -must have experience of red vans.

I generally think it's best to not use some of the more exotic features of MS Office because you can be sure that as soon as you move up to the next version of Windows all your supposedly clever macros, templates, database links and so on will break and you´ll have to spend months sorting them out. Besides, it´s not big and clever, it´s just showing off without actually making something people want to buy.