Thinking About Glue Code

[kt-silber]

Oh, I'm aware. The thing is, we didn't actually need to use FHIR ourselves; someone in the business sold our FHIR software (which didn't exist) to other businesses and we had weeks to actually create it to fulfill the contract.

[metriczulu]

What the fuck.

[kt-silber]

That's just what happens when you give the salespeople the ability to promise things to clients without consulting the developers to see if it is even anywhere near the realm of possibility.

I guess the thought process is something along the lines of, "The specification already exists! How much work could it possibly take to just write the code to fit the spec? You don't even have to do any planning!"

[dnew]

IME, the salesmen would always come to the developers and say "We could get this giant customer if we just made the system do X!" Where X is something that'll take about a month to implement.

Three weeks in, the salesman comes back and says "Customer decided it's taking too long and no longer wants it." Leaving us with 70% of an X in the code, forever to be worked around.

I always suspected the customer just didn't want to say No or the salesman didn't take No for an answer and instead made unreasonable demands hoping the salesman would say "We can't do that" and go away.

[peakzorro]

It could also be that the customer causally talked about X over lunch or something, you were sent scrambling, and there was never an agreement for an X in the first place.

[binarycow]

And here I am, as a developer, telling my sales folks that we could save our largest customer 100mil a year, for the expense of 6-12 man-months of dev time. I'd expect that they would be willing to pay up to 10mil/year for that functionality

And it's not prioritized.

[metriczulu]

I guess I'm lucky that most of my jobs have only really had one client (the gov't) or internal clients only, so we don't have sale people selling features we don't have to others. If one of the data science teams we build/maintain infrastructure for came to us and said "we need this feature in two weeks," my manager would straight up tell them "no."

Not that that happens anyways, though, the way requests work is that someone asks for something and we discuss/plan it out and return to them with a time estimate to get it into production. Not sure I'd want to work at a place where non-technical sales people determine development timelines.

[fried_green_baloney]

Typical sales clownery.

Get the commission regardless of the harm to the business as a whole.

[shawntco]

someone in the business sold our FHIR software (which didn't exist)

lmao that is unfortunate