All a matter of a one's point of view.

I was sitting in the office of one of my co-workers today drinking a cup of coffee and reading over the latest proposal for some contract that we are going to attempt to get when in walks Kiddy Porn (KP). He and this the co-worker who's office I was in started some small talk and after a few minutes KP mentions how completely backwards my company is as we have 27 developers (an exageration as we only have 12) but only 5 sales people. He went on to say the reason why we have so many developers is that the developers are always having drop what they are doing at a moments notice do another more important project and that because of this we rarely ever finish anything This nearly caused me to shove my foot so far up his ass that he'd still be picking bits of rubber out of his crap for the next year. Here are the reasons why I nearly exploded:

A. We have five sales people of which maybe two have closed a deal in the last two years. On top of that we provide a salary good enough that they can apparently live just fine without receiving any commission, now does that make any sense?

B. We have 12 developers not 27 and if KP would pull his head out of the sand long enough he'd realize that we are a software company not a company that provides a service. So really having 12 developers really isn't unreasonable.

C. We never finish anything because the sales people never actually close a deal, they get on the phone and start trying to sweet talk a potential client. They then make us write a bunch of code to provide the functionality that they described to the potential client only to have the potential client decide they really don't want to buy our service. It seems to me that we should at least try to get some token amount of money out of people before we write a line of code.

D. KP was someone who sold a client some functionality that we did not currently have, he then forgot that he ever did this until a year later when the client started asking about this bit of functionality that he sold them. Pure genious, and oh yes a bit of that scurrying around like chickens with our heads cut off.

E. The fact that he is named KP is a reason, guess what he used to do in his free time at work.

F. The project I was on has been finished for about a year or so, we just are always developing and adding new bits of functionality, KP maybe would know that if he ever talked to anyone or say logged into and looked at the system that KP is selling.

That was enough to get me all fired up like an englishman after his favorite soccer team looses but it continues. When I mentioned to KP that software development, and managing software projects is actually pretty hard he turned to me and said "It can't be that hard look at so and so." It was this point where KP went on to blather some garbage about how anyone can do it, that it isn't that hard, yada yada yada. He has a point but I think he missed my point that managing software projects are a little harder than he thinks. Hopefully I will have a few Mr. Wonderful-isms to post tomorrow, who is Mr. Wonderful well that will have to wait till tomorrow.