Black hole projects

• They must have absurdly grandiose goals. Something like “fundamentally reimagine the way that people work with computers.” Nobody, including the people who originate the goals, has a clear idea what the goals actually mean.
  
• They must involve throwing out some large existing codebase and rewriting everything from scratch, “the right way, this time.”
  
• They must have completely unrealistic deadlines. Usually this is because they believe that they can rewrite the original codebase in much, much less time than it took to write that codebase in the first place.
  
• They must have completely unrealistic beliefs about compatibility. Usually this takes the form of believing you can rewrite a huge codebase and preserve all of the little quirks and such without a massive amount of extra effort.

• They are always “six months” from from major deadline that never seems to arrive. Or, if it does arrive, another milestone is added on to the end of the project to compensate.
  
• They must consume huge amounts of resources, sucking the lifeblood out of one or more established products that make significant amounts of money or have significant marketshare.
  
• They must take over any group that does anything that relates to their absurdly broad goals, especially if that group is small, focused, has modest goals and actually has a hope of shipping in a reasonable timeframe.
  
• They must be prominently featured as demos at several company meetings, to the point where people groan “Oh, god, not another demo of this thing. When is it ever going to ship?”
  
• They usually are prominently talked up by BillG publicly years before shipping/dying a quiet death.
  
• They usually involve “componetizing” some monolithic application or system. This means that not only are you rewriting a huge amount of code, you’re also splitting it up across one or more teams that have to all seamlessly work together.
  
• As a result of the previous point, they also usually involve absolutely massive integration problems as different teams try madly to get their components working with each other.
  
• They usually involve rewriting the application or system on top of brand-new technology that has not been proven at a large scale yet. As such, they get to flush out all the scalability problems with the new technology.
  
• They are usually led by one or more Captain Ahabs, madly pursuing the white whale with absolute conviction, while the deckhands stand around saying “Gee, that whale looks awfully big. I’m not sure we can really take him down.”
  
• Finally, 90% of the time, they must fail and die a flaming death, possibly taking down or damaging other products with it. If they do ship, they must have taken at least 4-5 years to ship and be at least 2 years overdue.

Wow… scary. Is your project a blackhole project?

Thanks to Mr. Mini-Microsoft for finding it.

In college I wrote a lot of code. A lot a lot a lot of code. Especially Junior Fall semester when I was in these two classes where the students unexpectantly couldn’t finish the coursework and thus most were completing their final projects 2 months after the semester was over.

As a Program Manager, I don’t get to write code. (Except for the code I wrote in Office X for Mac – most of the dialogs have controls that lay themselves out via a mechanism called Dialog Auto Layout. And, in fact, there’s one dialog where I forgot to check in the changes and as a result it looked like ass. Fortunately, it’s a dialog that few ever see!)

I do miss writing code sometimes. In particular:

1. I miss hitting the build and run button. You can’t really do that with specifications or e-mails. There’s often no sense of accomplishment or completion as a Program Manager.

2. I miss listening to music. I found it rather helpful when I was writing code, but I find it distracting when I’m responding to e-mails, drawing up schedules, or writing specifications.

Go figure.

Thanks to the kind folks at MAPGROUP, I am one of the first people to have their first edition of the Popout Map for Hong Kong – and for free no less!

I love these popout maps. Even though I’m from NY originally, I still find the NY popout map quite useful sometimes. I also have the Boston one, and that one is incredibly invaluable considering Boston’s street layout scheme. I also have the London and Paris ones too I think.

Thanks Mapgroup! I got it just in time before going to Hong Kong! I’m sure this will be put to good use! ISBN 1-84139-357-6

One of the bloggers I read regularly has posted his prediction for 2005 in this post. While I agree with him on many things (that we don’t invest enough in our future as a nation, etc), I don’t agree with this:

So here’s how I call it. Interest rates shoot way up in the first half of 2005. A lot of people sitting on multiple thousands in credit card debt go bust. A lot of mortgage holders find themselves living in McHouses they can’t keep paying for. End of housing bubble. Beginning of fire sale of US residential real estate (and other assets, including stock, SUVs, and signed limited edition Thomas Kinkade prints). Cratering of “consumer” demand. Impressive job loss. Ultimately, deflationary depression.

While it’s too early to post my predictions for 2005 (hm, an entry idea!), I totally disagree with his prediction. There’s no way interest rates will shoot up – that would cause incredible political and economic turmoil. With the increasing number of ARMs (adjustable rate mortgages) and credit card debt, this would bankrupt millions instantly. The upheaval of the middle class would be awesome – and I mean awesome in a bad way.

Rather, I suspect the strategy to reduce the debt will be more like the one in this piece. Here’s a snippet from the end:

But they argue there may be an alternative scenario to Roach’s. Greenspan might instead deliberately allow the dollar to slump and inflation to rise, whittling away at the value of today’s consumer debts in real terms.

You should read both pieces in their entirety. Fascinating stuff.

Nonetheless, I do believe we will find a way out of it. We’ve been through worse before as a nation, and we will surely find a way out of this jam as well.

Microsoft’s MSN is now offering a free blog service.

Here’s a Channel9 video that interviews some of the people behind it, and demos some of the features.

Here’s my very bare site.

It’s got quite the slick UI! Imagine – a drag and drop web UI.

Give it a try!