I am posting this anonymously because I don\'t want to get into potential troubl
ID: 649638 • Letter: I
Question
I am posting this anonymously because I don't want to get into potential trouble.
I have a big problem.
I recently joined a team that is less than a year old. I have been here since a month in to the project started. The company structure looks like this:
Owner (non-technical)
Project Manager (non-technical)
Lead Developer (Technical, but bad at it)
This project is a website using ASP.Net that the Lead Developer designed a horrible architecture for. You will have to take my word at it, but basically, the way we are required to build web pages is giving us 3+ minute load times on a single web page over VPN in Debug mode.
It has spiraled to the point where other coworkers agree that they spend more of their day waiting for pages to load than actual development.
Now the big problem is this. Project Manager does not know technology and admits it. He has specifically stated that he trusts the Lead Developer to make the correct choices on application architecture.
No one on the team knows what the Owners opinion would be, but everyone is afraid to make waves in this economy (myself especially).
What would you do?
Explanation / Answer
This problem can be demonstrated to the project manager in very non-technical terms. Put your site in a browser window in front of the PM and ask him to play around with it for a while. After about two page loads, the lead developer should be called on the carpet, if things are as bad as you say.
The PM may not have the specialized development knowledge to understand why it's bad, but he can see for himself as a general website user that it is. Other sites showing similar information load in a fraction of the time of yours, and yours is loading over the local network from the server in the next room.
If this doesn't fly, then go to the owner. The owner's a money guy, but he'll very quickly be able to see that a slow website which nobody will visit == no money. Set up the same demonstration, and before the first page loads he should be calling BOTH the PM and the Lead on his much plusher carpet.
If you're worried about one guy making waves, then get more than one developer willing to voice their concerns. Honestly, in a company as flat as yours, if the product you are developing is a bomb, you are out of work whether you speak up or keep quiet. So looking at it that way, you have nothing to lose but a couple extra weeks or months with the company. If that's a problem, schedule some "dentist's appointments" and look for new employment before airing your concerns, so if you lose this job you start the next one Monday.
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