Productivity with <i>any</i> tool?

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RE: Productivity with iany/i tool? by Malkavian (Friar) on Oct 26, 2000 at 19:18 UTC
I think it's a little silly to expect someone to be productive with any tool.. It's a bit like expecting someone to sanely go and dig a road trench with a small flat sponge fish. Not only does it not work, you look silly. Half of a task should be analysing a problem to work out what tools are the best ones for the job. Thankfully, where I am working, they leave me and my colleagues to work out what the best tools are, and try and come up with the best solutions we can. Sometimes, the problems themselves are hideously boring and mundane, but looking at clever ways to achieve the ends can be quite amusing. Often, it leads me down paths of learning new things I'd never even heard of, let alone considered. If your company is a little more.. Entrenched in it's ideals, the way to get what you want, is to look a little beyond the problem you're given, and try and find something that would work better and faster for the job in hand, and then present this info with your rationale. It would take a silly company to turn down the work you've alreay put your own personal time into, to show how using a different tool for a particular job would save both time and money for the company, and perhaps increase reliability and maintainability to boot. This being said, take care to make sure that you are giving an objective report. Just making a case for something you'd prefer to do, just because you like the idea more can seriously backfire if you're not actually correct. Just a thought. :) Malk.	[reply]
(Ovid) RE: Productivity with iany/i tool? by Ovid (Cardinal) on Oct 27, 2000 at 00:23 UTC
Malkavian wrote: It's a bit like expecting someone to sanely go and dig a road trench with a small flat sponge fish. Well, let's see. Take the fish, make a curved shape out of it and toss it in a dehydrator. Then, laminate the remains and use it to make a mold in which you can cast a steel sponge fish. Use said sponge fish to dig the trench and hope the boss doesn't notice your creativity. Okay, so it's farfetched, but I had a situation once that definitely felt like that. I was once asked to build a test system on a mainframe. Doing it by hand would have taken a month of very dull, repetitive work. So, I took some tools I had written in VBA (hey, it's what I had to work with!), and modified them to do the job. It took about four hours to run and then a little bit of manual tweaking and voila!, a new test system. Everyone was absolutely astounded that I was finished in a day instead of a month and my boss was mightily pleased. Unfortunately, I caught hell from the lead programmer for using VBA since no one else knew it (um, this was a one-shot deal. Why would anyone else need to know it?). To compound the problem, I sent out an e-mail saying this was the first time I had ever BUILT a test system, so would the people who use it please double-check for errors? The lead found some JCL that I hadn't converted (it took me about 30 seconds to fix, again with VBA) and ran to the boss complaining that I was sloppy in my work. The fact that I saved a month's worth of work seemed to have escaped her. Sigh... Cheers, Ovid Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just go the the link and check out our stats.	[reply]
RE: Productivity with iany/i tool? by wardk (Deacon) on Oct 26, 2000 at 21:25 UTC
Boy, I sure don't agree that one should be able to be productive with any tool. At least initially. Recently I took a contract that put me in a situation where I was required to use Visual Interdev (the signs were there, I should have heeded my better judgement and refused the job). I did my damndest to make it work, the problem not being making it "work" but being truly productive in my own mind AND not wanting to drive my fist through the monitor every five minutes (this was hard). I found myself continually missing perl, realizing I was trying to solve a problem in a perlish way, only to be forced to some asinine (IMHO) solution. Even harder than working with the tools, was working with people who had no idea that something else could exist that was better suited to solving the problem (building dynamic web-based database applications). and dealing with ignorant evangelicals..."just drink the damn kool-aid" So I prematurely ended the relationship and found something perfect. Something Perl. Had to refuse another very cool Perl job to take the one I am in now. and work is again, a pleasure.	[reply]
RE: RE: Productivity with iany/i tool? by mothra (Hermit) on Oct 26, 2000 at 22:11 UTC
I look forward to the day that I get to work with Perl as my primary language. I'm confident that day will come. :)	[reply]
RE: Productivity with iany/i tool? by little (Curate) on Oct 26, 2000 at 20:43 UTC
In my opinion this is impossible. To be productive and efficient with a tool, you need to know not only what it does and how it works, but also a lot of details of it's usage. Though it's the everlasting illusion of the GURU who comes and can handle anything within a hand stroke just using the perfect tool for it. But for example looking to job offers assumes that a lot of personal managers share this illusion while requesting knowledge of nearly everything related to computers with experience of at least 5 years witch each one. But we all tend to specialize in certain directions. And if somebody forces you to use an uncomfy tool while you know a better one to solve the task, well resign the job or argue for the better tool, but don't share the illusion they have and better help them to wake up. Have a nice day All decision is left to your taste	[reply]