We'll swing it... somehow

I'm sure things have changed a lot since I left, but back then, in the '90s post-communism Romania, the concept of "project management" was not in the vocabulary. Of course, there were line managers having authority and taking care of recruiting, training or performance evaluation. And there were emerging IT projects, but those projects were not managed. Believe it or not, there was no schedule, no budget allocation, no metrics. That's how socialism used to operate, without a profit-and-loss system of accounting, without rewarding success or penalizing failure. Now, to get the full picture, please combine this paradigm with the "Know it All" style of leadership. The reason a leader got the position was because he knew everything about everything, right? 🙃

I joined a team of... one developer. Since there was a competition for the position, and since the CEO's nephew ranked 3rd, the team increased by three, for the price of one hiring event. Now, the entire team, leader included, was barely reaching a total of 15 years of programming and having zero hands-on experience with software architecture and design. This didn't prevent the team lead to decide that we were going to develop a ..(drums rolling, please).. Flight Data Processing System. Distributed! "Behold the keyboard of Kalis! We were the greatest Klingon code warriors that ever lived!"

I will spare you the details of how FoxPro (oh, boy!) became the language of choice for something that was NOT a database application, or why the application had to run on PCs, under MS-DOS, instead of some decent UNIX machines. It's the Novell's NetWare that I would like to mention.

Novell dominated the market for PC based servers until Windows NT. Unfortunately, they were using IPX/SPX instead of TCP/IP. IPX (network layer) and SPX (transport layer) were designed for local area networks and are really efficient protocols on a small LAN. Designed with the wide area in mind TCP/IP has superior performance, by far. Novell's attempt to support TCP/IP by wrapping IPX within IP packages was not a good approach, the loss of performance due to overhead making it largely ignored. Novell's NetWare is part of history now, but it was used a lot back then, when internet was just a baby.

The first "project" to which I contributed didn't really fail, the result being a bit better than the status quo (i.e. nothing), but I wouldn't say that we delivered, either. "Klingons do not deliver; they EXECUTE. For the glory of the empire!"

Qapla!