My Legacy

In July 2004, I was offered a development job by a start-up firm I will refer to as ‘ABCD’. I was sorely tempted at the time, however ABCD were undergoing a round of funding at the time and they couldn’t guarantee when I could actually start.

In August 2004, I was offered another development job, this time by a three-year-old firm I will refer to as ‘Acme’. Acme had a small team of developers already, were offering me the same salary as ABCD, and would let me start work as soon as internal issues (relating to the individual I was succeeding) were resolved.

In September 2004, I took a job working for Acme. A Delphi-based software house, the managing director was astute enough to realise that they were blindly following a dead platform, and I was tasked with leading the company’s development forwards. Within a fortnight, all the developers were on a course to assist them with transitioning to VB.net, and my work had begun.

Since then, I pride myself on the way that I’ve pushed the development within the company forward:

• The code was overhauled completely, migrating to VB.net where possible or providing (with a view to eventually ending) support for clients using existing Delphi software.
• As each new version of Visual Studio was released, it was evaluated and software slowly migrated onto it for continuing support.
• Where possible, applications were migrated to the latest version of the .NET framework itself, and to updated versions of SQL Server to take advantage of newer features.
• Seeing the potential drop in support for VB.net both from Microsoft and the community in general, I started learning C# in my own time and within a week was easily able to convince the MD that, for the benefit of future recruitment and support, all new projects should be written in C#.
• Spotted the advantages of object-based database models, and as soon as was viable dropped our database layer in favour of Microsoft’s own Entity Framework, giving us access to toolsets including LINQ.
• Saw the ease in which MVC allowed the splitting up between development and user interface work, and (having rejected the original asp.net MVC and MVC2) evaluated then adopted MVC3 for all future work.
• Kept track of best-practises, and whilst never dictating rigid development standards still ensured that all code would be written in a manner familiar to any other team member.
• Continuously educated the ever-changing development team about key aspects such as software security and encryption.

A year ago, a new member of staff joined the company. Claiming to have prior experience in development, he assumed the role of project manager whilst claiming a job title giving him overall responsibility for IT and Operations. It is this individual that I refered to in my previous posts of the Security Moron.

Within a week, he had sent around his former employer’s Development Standards document with a recommendation that we adopt it; not only was this document related to his former employer’s business but it also explicitly ruled out processes and procedures that we had adopted and were actively using, whilst making further recommendations that were nonsensible in our type of business.

Since that time, his input into development, albeit not as a developer but as an operations manager, have increased as his failings as a project manager have became apparent. I have already documented his failings related to security, but when it comes to development he required that certain processes become self-contained modules of work, with little understanding of how these could work in practise or of the downsides associated with them.

His plans for a ‘central audit module’ bore no relation to reality and thus when one was implemented to his requirements it was so non-specific that any output required further work, whilst the ‘security module’ written to his specification actually managed to increase development time considerably and leave code significantly less maintainable that if we had done without.

The one project that he was placed in sole responsibility for from start to finish is generally regarded as a flop; well over budget and currently on the verge of cancellation due to incomplete requirements (that I had been assured many months ago were “100% complete”). Today, we have been given notice by a client that I personally have serviced since my first day that they were taking development in-house after a year of incompetent support under his care.

Furthermore, the company as a whole is following a business model that I specifically recommend against in my previous post ‘Unsupportable Success‘; the managing director is willing to take on any work involving a support contract with no consideration as to who provides the support or even the hours that the contract covers.

A month ago, I was approached by a recruitment agency; a client of theirs were hiring and I may be a good fit for a role they are filling. Persuing this further, it turned out that the client were none other than ABCD (although the agency were unaware of my previous contact, and ABCD themselves had changed so significantly that my offer was a documented, but otherwise unmemorable, blip in their past). The interview went well – so well that, half-way home I received a call from the agency asking me to turn around and return for a second interview that same evening.

As of yesterday, it is now public knowledge within Acme that I have accepted an offer from ABCD. Within an hour, I was excluded from the ‘development team strategy’ meeting, and from now on the development within the company will be pushed forward by the Security Moron.

I had hopes, one day, that when I left Acme I would leave some sort of legacy, in that someone else would take over and push the development team forward in the way I have: my team contains a number of people, each of whom could easily fulfill that role. It is a standing joke within the team that everything the Moron suggests is prefixed with ‘in my old company…’, and the weakness in his technical skills are obvious to all. But with him assuming charge of development, any change will be despite, rather than because, of him.

I no longer have faith that the company will progress. I no longer believe in Acme. I will miss the people here, but I will not miss the company.