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Saturday, April 30, 2016

Miscellany: 4/30/16

Quote of the Day
What ought one to say then as each hardship comes? 
 I was practicing for this, I was training for this.
Epictetus

Tweet of the Day
Good Profit: Charles Koch: Part 1

I've usually limited myself to embedding smaller videos, like 3-8 minutes. But today I'm running longer ones. I think Charles Koch is a fascinating character because the Left has so demonized him and brother David. He really comes across as a gentle-mannered, folksy, avuncular, intelligent man. I never really read up on him, but this is a guy with 3 engineering degrees (2 Master's) from MIT, almost deciding to become a professor (name-drops Wiener, a huge name in cybernetics: I'm very impressed): someone who was a rising star as a consultant when his father, in failing health, managed to convince him to return to the midsized family business, without a clear successor. (It almost comes across like a variation of George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life".)

I found it intriguing that he likes employees challenging their supervisors; I remember I came close at one point to quitting on the spot while I worked at IBM. My boss had wanted me to do something I strongly disagreed with (technical issue); I said that I would do it if ordered but I would file a statement disagreeing with the decision. My boss backed off. I've had to disagree with consulting clients all the time; it can be almost suicidal when they have the power to have you walked off the property in 5 minutes and have to approve your timecard.

Sometimes you can't win. I was trapped into 2 failing projects for different Chicago public sector entiies in 1998, one while I worked for Oracle and the other in 2002 (I was a subcontractor). The latter was particularly bad. The same services company I was subcontracted to on an operations contract had won for their consulting business business unit a 90-day accelerated upgrade project. The project manager (PM) supposedly was a fellow PhD, but I seriously doubt it was legitimate because he was the stupidest PM I ever dealt with and I've had my fill of extraordinarily incompetent ones. The PM quickly decided that I was a control freak DBA he didn't want anything to do with. This involved the upgrade of an ERP system, and if it was bungled, it would be my ass on the line fighting fires after the contractors were gone. I was not even tailing these guys, and I wrote the PM literally a single-spaced 7-page document on the mistakes I personally saw his DBA's make; I pleaded with him to check it out with an independent DBA or the corporate DBA staff. He ignored it.

Let me give just a couple of telling details. For HR processing, the city needed to implement a Vertex data subscription. The software installation required a Microsoft C++ compiler license the city department didn't have. NOBODY on the project team even brought up the issue; no requisition, no action, literally 2 weeks before the go-live date. What were these guys up to? I attended daily status meetings, so I know what happened. The project DBA's complained the server room was too cold and they wanted software to enable remote access from their city cubicles. (If you thought the PM was smart enough to suggest their wearing a sweater instead, you would be wrong.) The city eventually turned them down; it was driving me batshit crazy: you don't even have the software to test the HR upgrade, and we're wasting time in status meetings discussing this bullshit?

A second detail is literally 6 weeks into the project; the consultants were committed into doing 2 dry runs of the upgrades during the 3 months. I'm somewhat simplifying discussion to make the point: let's say that there were 7 categories or stages to the upgrade. These guys had not done 1 upgrade in 6 weeks; in fact, they never got out of category 1 of the first upgrade. I could do a full manual EBS database clone within 3.5 hours; their DBA CB decided he didn't want to trust (I did clones regularly for my test and development environments) my clones and literally frittered 2 weeks of the schedule trying to convince the city to buy third party software for cloning (after Oracle told him they wouldn't backport their new 11i cloning functionality; in fact, I had told both managers after he first described using adclone in 11.0.3 over a speakerphone conversation over lunch, this guy was bluffing about his experience). So guess what happened? He caused his own database to crash into an unrecoverable state--and none of his weekly backups were usable; we were literally back at step 1. The DBA was due to fly home to Florida, and the plan was to fire him over the phone; at this point, the department IT manager (who, by the way, never personally talked to me) is upset over the lack of project progress and orders everyone to work over the weekend; I finally take the project DBA helm, but after I make more progress in one weekend than over 6 weeks, the PM decides not to fire the rogue DBA because he doesn't want to retrain a substitute. PLEASE; I would have trained someone on my own time rather than deal with a troublemaking DBA who corrupts his own databases and doesn't know how to do backups.

The rogue DBA, along with the PM, spent most of the remaining time on the project trying to regain his lead spot from me, and I didn't have time to deal with troublemaking political bullshit. The PM was spending time drawing up plans for running two simultaneous upgrades during the last few weeks. He had a staff of 5 DBA's; I was limited to 40 hours (and my boss was arguing the consulting SBU should be picking up many of my hours). I was telling the PM he needed to run the DBA's in around-the-clock shifts. He refused. I kept telling the managers that the target dates were unrealistic, but they didn't want to hear it; I was running into typical upgrade issues with no schedule slack--data issues in production that had to be fixed (e.g., the city had booked certain past subcontractor data wrong which caused a related upgrade process to blow up), platform software bugs, etc.  The city had booked the project to go live before the last 6 weeks of the year for end of year processes. I did complete one upgrade (there was a minor technical glitch on setting up a middle-tier server post-upgrade I was working around).

No happy ending to this story. In fact, I ran across an Internet job board post for my position during the project. My boss knew PM BK was incompetent, but he figured so long as he gave BK everything he asked for, all the rope he needed to hang himself,  if and when the project crashed and burned, U*** management couldn't point fingers at him. He did not want BK pointing fingers at his DBA, me, as the reason why BK failed. He kept a stack of DBA resumes prominently on his desk so I would see them. I guess he learned "Management By Intimidation" at the Machiavelli School of Business. You know that old saying about not shooting the messenger?

As for the retard who hired BK.... CB, of course, was one of the weirdest freaks I've ever met in the business world. For example, he used to pick up (and save) abandoned McDonald's receipts (no doubt for fraudulent expense reporting), he often walked around with no socks or shoes, and (I swear) after that weekend in Chicago, he complained that he hadn't been able to launder his clothes, so he raised his arms, pointed at his shirt underarm sweat stains and kept repeating "Stinky! Stinky! Stinky!"(until a female functional consultant finally told him to knock it off)--I shit you not! I think that he was seriously mentally ill.

There's a second part to the Hoover Institute interview, which I may embed in a future post.



James Grant: On the United States of Insolvency



Lost Family Regained



Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Bob Gorrell via Townhall
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists

 Rod Stewart, "Passion"

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