Development fads
I was tech support manager for an organisation where the developers were seen as magicians and the ops / tech support teams as drudges. We were an Oracle shop (Oracle having been specified by the Development Manager) and my team had built up a very high skill level supporting Oracle. We been supporting bought in apps for a number of years before the development team started building bespoke apps. Their initial deliveries were pitiful and my team had to spend a lot of time giving them tuning advice, you can imagine my reaction when the Dev manager announced they were changing development platforms for the next big thing (I can't even remember what he proposed). He had just about got the go ahead to do this when I found out. His business case was based entirely on the fact that the licencing was cheaper than Oracle when I pointed out that most of our apps were Oracle based and my team would be running Oracle for the next decade his face was a picture, just to twist the knife I pointed out that it had taken his team 2 years to get productive on Oracle and the training had cost nearly £100,000. Needless to say that initiative was canned.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
