Originally Posted by
PAXboy
Ian W
There will be more of these complete machine failures when the Directors of the Board pay the money!
I was in telecommunications and IT for 27 years, including mission critical stuff for banking. After the recession of 90/91, it was all about saving money. One small example: A friend of mine who works for a small software company still get faced by the Boss telling the staff to put their development plans on hold as he just sold sone new feature to a customer. A feature that had been dropped from the development plan for a good reason. That is within the last month.
On this scale of events: as has been said above, there are too many systems, many of them legacy that do not dovetail well together. irrespective of the outsoucing problem (and it is a problem) this level of complexity, to provide ever more features and services - will fail.
I think we are both right.
It is cheaper to use IT 'professionals' who have only ever seen Java and its variants and they are then forced to try to work with legacy systems written in one of the vogue languages from the 80's or in assembler with FORTRAN maths libraries. There will be one or two 'skilled' programmers who will dig in and use clever features of compilers to write glue code (in stiffware
TM) to hold these systems together. These programmers will then move on leaving no documentation behind them and nobody will know how these kludged together systems actually work or how to fix them if some new added feature causes them to fail.
This is all due to a lack of quality control and pressure from unthinking management on IT staff that do not have the authority to tell the management 'NO it will not work'.