• trubolotta (10/15/2010) ... The "corporate" goal to reduce admin user time per technical report succeeded (10 mins. to 7 mins.) while ignoring professional user time (30 mins. to 120 mins.). ... The net result, in my opinion, is to produce low quality apps with the illusion of lower costs.

    Ahhh yes the illusion of lower costs. Another perpetual example of this is what I call "silo management" (others might call it "left hand doesn't know what the right is doing").

    Two of the cost centers in every company are "capital equipment" and "human resources". Each seems to have a separate mandate to reduce its own costs. The capital equipment people are responsible for buying servers. When it comes time for new ones, they gauge the current disk space requirement and then buy new machines with the minimum disk space that will meet that requirement. Of course by the time the new machines arrive, the requirement is obsolete and developers are out of disk space. The developers then proceed to burn their hours daily and miss deadlines monthly and lose business yearly because they must spend their time archiving and restoring lower-priority data instead of developing applications. But the capital equipment expense has been minimized, you betcha.

    I cannot remember the last time I worked on a project where the staff was not doing the "disk space disco" on at least one machine. Every medium-sized company with software developers, I would guess, saves thousands on hardware every year while spending hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions paying developers to shuffle data back and forth. I am reminded of Dr. Evil, whose staff had to politely explain to him that "trillions" are bigger than "billions".