go to your boss and tell them, Look, i'm very happy and very good at what i"m doing, i want to go back.
Unfortunately, I already tried that. The response was, in its entirety: "I expect you to make it work."
This particular guy redefines the word "capricious".
Standing Wolf, you're absolutely correct that software engineers should not, by and large, be allowed to do user interface work. Unfortunately, if you don't allow software engineers to do it, it generally ends up being done by managers. In VB. Badly.
Tallpine, unfortunately, no; more or less all of what we do involves air-gapped networks and rooms that one can't get into remotely.
Bogie, writing the manual first works only when the customer knows exactly how the software will be used when it's done. That's a great method for things like word processors and stuff like that. Unfortunately, it doesn't work so well when the application itself is
creating the niche in which it lives, because it's never been done before. When that's the case, it's not always possible to see in advance how the end users will need things to be, because the environment isn't fully understood until after the first revision of the thing is in the field, producing results.
I've pushed back in my own way; yesterday's pronouncement by fiat (the thing that finally drove me to vent here) was that the PHB-in-question mandated that the portion of the project that I have had technical responsibility for (which was coded on Linux,
for Linux, using linux dev tools, and which used a source-code repository called subVersion, running on linux, integrated into the dev tools) should store all of its source code in Visual Sourcesafe, like the Windows app front-end, despite the fact that the subVersion repository has never caused a single issue, and we have SourceSafe problems all the time. And despite the fact that none of my dev tools work with SourceSafe.
His plan was that today, whether I liked it or not, the subVersion server was going to be slagged and repurposed. But I have the root password. And now I have the entire subVersion repository hosted elsewhere. So when he goes ahead and slags the old machine, he can feel all clever and impressed with how well-endowed he is, and I can get on with my job.
Because I know for a 100% iron-clad
fact that if I hadn't done this, six weeks down the road he'd have come back and wanted to know why I couldn't fetch a particular prior version of my software out of the new repository[0] in order to debug a previous revision in the field. And when I told him why, he'd have made it my fault. Because he's that kind of guy.
-BP
- Why? Because you imported all of the current branch into SourceSafe, that's why; you lost all of the history when you did that. Duh.