You're Fuckin' Crazy

Yes, a reference to a Guns 'N' Roses song.

Recently at work, we've been having quite the shake ups. About a year ago, the company I work for was in a terrible state. Their one and only product grew out of a set of scripts that the founder had used when he was a systems administrator. The scripts were so handy, they became a product. To quote another developer here, "It's like someone found a good place to set up a tent and later decided to put in a chimney." As you can imagine, the product didn't boast the best architecture. To make matters worse, the original guy would visit customer sites and write code on-site for their one off changes. Try figuring out how to support / upgrade that!

At some point they were acquired and everyone decided they needed to play grown up and act like a real IT organization. They hired a development manager that then proceeded to try and straighten this snot-fest out. Of course, this is a "two steps back three steps forward situation"--things were going to get worse before they got better. People would have their "freedom" to be bad developers sharply curtailed. That's a good thing in my eyes.

Well, recently the acquiring body decided shit just wasn't going right. They needed to get sales of their steaming pile of a product back up to desired levels. The solution? Put the original fuck up back in charge of the project. During the meeting to announce this, that little fucker was just as excited as can be. Finally, he was going to get to do things his way. Of course he could straighten things out (never mind that he was the original cause of all of the problems). Step one? No more iterations, regular releases, etc. We'll just do everything in one big waterfall-like chunk. Brilliant!

Now, that brings us to the "crazy" part from our title:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. -- Benjamin Franklin

Have fun storming the castle, you hump.