In the enterprise, nothing is what it seems

There is a hidden network of bloggers (all around you), a kind of secret brotherhood...

These are the 'ghost bloggers'.

'Ghost-blogging' is the practice of sharing true stories about your own working life, true stories too cutting, too poignant and too true to share on your own blog.

The following is an example of a ghost blog entry, sent to me by someone I know, appalled at some of the Kafkaesque behaviour they've been subjected to inside the kind of enterprise everyone should find familiar.

(I've ghost-blogged my own personal stories on other blogs, at times...)

Here goes...

Version Control, Requirements Tracking and Deployments

In the enterprise, nothing is what it seems

In the enterprise when they say: "don't worry about that, another team will do that for us" what they mean is: "you just took on a dependency that you have no control over".

In the enterprise when they say "we want you to re-use this standard asset" what they mean is "we want you to hold on to this gold-plated, diamond encrusted anchor while we throw you over the side".

In the enterprise, the group allegedly responsible for 'provisioning developer desktops' will, in actual fact, be the group who expends every effort imaginable to stop developers from being able to actually install developer tools onto their desktops.

In the enterprise when there are three separate groups, allegedly responsible for version control, requirements tracking and deployments, you'll find in practice the requirements are documented through excel spreadsheets over email, the source code won't build, and the deployments take everyone by surprise, including the deployment team.

In the enterprise when they talk about 'strategic direction', they mean 'strategy tax'.

In the enterprise when they ask you to "simply call a web service", what they mean is, "use ftp to push a fixed-width file onto a queue that feeds the mainframe which routes another file to a web service that calls you back on a random port". With a completely straight face.

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