Confessions of an IT Manager_Phil Factor

82 Talking Technical
explaining that I'd started work for the company and wanted to get up to speed
on what they were developing for us. I stuck a row of biros in my jacket pocket,
put a notepad under my arm, and shambled in to meet them. Their office was
one of those strange glass constructions near Staines, beloved of IT companies.
The MD, looking immaculate in charcoal grey with gold specs, nodded
distantly at me, his lips curling in a slight grimace of contempt, and hurriedly
passed me on to an amiable programmer. I didn't see the MD again, or any
other supervisory staff, which suited me just fine.
We talked happily for a couple of hours about the intricacies of messaging
in a distributed environment, and the architecture of the application that they
were writing. The programmer then ran through the work that had been done –
and they hadn't done very much. Considering the man-hours they'd charged for,
things just didn't seem to add up.
Over a rather uninspiring canteen lunch of machine tea and egg sandwiches,
he waxed garrulous, and I responded at my cynical and jaundiced best. We
reminisced about the ups and downs of a career in IT and swapped tales of our
years spent in front of terminals. Suddenly he was singing like a canary, and
leaking like a sieve.
He explained how the expensive database designer for whose services we
were paying was actually just a friend of the MD's wife who was doing a Maths
postgraduate project. It was her first database. Although we were being charged
for the full-time services of five programmers, the team of three were being
constantly pulled away to do other work.
What I was hearing confirmed what I had begun to suspect earlier: the
expenses bore no relation to reality, and the project was likely to slip
disastrously. After a short while, I'd heard enough. No triumph, just sadness
and revulsion. I tried to steer the conversation back to safe technological topics,
but once he had started, he was like the Ancient Mariner who 'stoppeth one of
three' to tell his epic tale. I discovered that the technical platform was chosen
because the MD's chum had just got the dealership for the hardware. Also, that
they had taken open source modules that specifically forbade free commercial
use and had deleted all copyright and authorship messages. They'd then charged
us as if they'd been written for us.
And so it went on. Like the Ancient Mariner he had to get the whole story
out to assuage the guilt-by-association he felt. It was just rather unfortunate for
the miscreants that I, the IT Director of the company they were defrauding, was
the 'one of three' that he stopped.