What's it all about, Alfie?

I just got out of a meeting, and I have to say that I'm really quite shocked to see someone at The Shop so incredibly inflexible as Jim. This is the first time I've met Jim, and while I haven't been impressed by his emails, and specifically his responsiveness to my requests, I always wrote it off as him being exceptionally busy. Busy people have a lot going on - I get it. But today was the first face-to-face meeting, and during that, Jim really blew my socks off.

Jim is vending some demand data, and it makes perfect sense to everyone but Jim to have him include the current inventory in his service. After all, if there's some change in inventory, it's going to really effect what we need to get because excess inventory will shrink demand, and a big run on something will push it up. But not in Jim's mind.

No, Jim was making a theoretical demand calculation, and in that, I can see a value. But he's also including the inventory on hand at the time of his run - which is once a week, so it's going to make it harder for us to know what current inventory-effecting events to include in the demand we get from Jim. We have to look at the time of his run, and then look at all events to see how they might effect the demand.

It'd be far simpler to have Jim vend the raw demand and then we can always correct it by the current inventory. Much simpler. No problems in potentially lost transactions. Better.

But not to Jim. Holy Cow! It's been a long time since I've seen a professional programmer push back so hard on a feature. It was speculated that it was all about the level-of-service issue… after all, hitting Jim's service once a week and saving the results is far easier on Jim than having to make sure it's up all the time and vending the right data. I just can't get over the sheer laziness of this guy.

He's a developer. What's he got to do but develop? How hard is it to make it work 24x7? Not too hard, I've done it in a bunch of technologies over the years. Stop being so bloody lazy, Jim!

Holy Cow!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2012 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Coding, Cube Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.