in reply to Managing By Walking Around: from 1982 to 2006

I support manufacturing test so I'm on the actual factory floor most days! But RealVNC saves a lot of shoe-leather :) Although we don't actually manufacture anything anymore, we ship in boxes from suppliers, test the hardware and ship it out, but that seems to be the modern way.

Unfortunately, due to the amount of legacy software, the amount of small changes to the hardware we test and even the way some of the product engineers work and make change requests and even because the life of the test platform (Windows) is shorter than the life of the product, I've been on my job for just over two years and am still firefighting, not managing.

Fortunately, the code tends not to be so complicated (in a functional sense, not a maintainability sense :( ) that if it is working, we try to leave it, especially since a botched upgrade can affect production.

How can you feel when you're made of steel? I am made of steel. I am the Robot Tourist.
Robot Tourist, by Ten Benson

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Re^2: Managing By Walking Around: from 1982 to 2006
by talexb (Chancellor) on Sep 25, 2006 at 14:10 UTC
      I've been on my job for just over two years and am still firefighting, not managing.

    That's a very interesting point.

    I would expect someone to be in a fire-fighting mode for the first three to six months, but after that there should be enough of an infrastructure in place that you can get onto the good stuff. Unless your managers are dumping exponentially more and more stuff on top of you.

    Alex / talexb / Toronto

    "Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds