Ship That Pig

Learning from real-life software development horror stories

(c) 2007, Devin Moore.

The book is done! To get your copy, contact me with your request.

Ever more stories are coming out now about how stressful information technology can be. Many of these articles also discuss ways to combat the stress. However, few of these articles discuss the sources of the stress. They seem to indicate that the job just inherently causes that kind of stress, no matter what, or that certain people are just susceptible to stress at work. I argue that there are very definite and particular causes of stress at IT jobs. These causes have many definite solutions, and the causes and solutions can be reasoned from looking at the stress on any given IT worker. I hope to present in multiple volumes the problems me and my coworkers or peers faced, to foster a dialogue about the solutions to these issues.

This book has two main sections of war stories: the back stories, from before I started to keep a regular log of things that happened, and the stories after that. All of the war stories are based on true events. I hope that this book both provides for numerous new ideas in computing, as well as to provide some insight as to how it is that the mind of a typical IT person reacts in response to stressful work situations. I believe it will be of interest to anyone who has encountered a stressful event in their life and had the urge to tell people about how they thought things should be done in light of that event. I also chronicle my experiences and thoughts to show how I came to develop some of the computer ideas that are noted in this text.

I see myself as the average IT worker. I often rehash old situations and scenarios in my mind, playing through all the details. I look for things I can learn from, and things that didn’t make any sense. I produce tons of ideas every day, many are repeats of other ideas but some are brand new. I feel that I should write them all down, no matter how insignificant, because I believe that even the simplest idea can really help the right person.

There are thousands upon thousands of organizations with these same problems I have encountered, many are worse than the scenarios spelled out here in Volume 1. What I hope to illustrate is that even by attempting to avoid conflict, it still finds us because of how poorly managed these projects are. Something has to be done, and I suggest various ways that these things could be fixed. However, I don’t imagine a true solution is coming anytime soon, so long as the forces that are creating these conflicts are still around.

My own grandmother recently recounted to me a story that, aside from the technology used, almost exactly matched the scenarios I have encountered… but her story dates to the 1940’s! From this fact alone, it is clear that the same mistakes have been repeated for long enough.