Unfortunately, there’s a very little flexibility built into almost any corporate culture. This stems from “dog eats dog” approach everyone is taking, since it’s enough to have one asshole on the team to convert “Happy family” into “Survival of the fittiest”.

Nevertheless, I came up to the management with the idea long known from totally different area. I suggested that management (namely VP of IS and whoever is immediately underneath him, supervising software development) would create a so-called DMZ – a “de-militarized zone” for projects.

The project would be dropped into DMZ queue (as opposed to regular software development queue) if its execution would take a significantly less time is the documentation workflow is skipped. For example – updating couple of words on web site, changing an image or something similar. There will not be many of them, so it does not pose any threat of being too large to manage and growing out of proportion. On the other hand – it will free up a lot of developer’s time that could be used somewhere else.

If you are like me and mix and match working inside the corporate culture with freelancing, then this rant is old news to you. But I need to let some steam off, so here goes…

Whenever I work for a large company – and by large I mean a company that have departments led by different people, not Joe Shmoe being the director of IT and supervisor of accounting department at the same time – I can’t help by wonder why so much time, money and energy goes to waste. Thanks to bureaucracy, every good idea can go so wrong it would be doing just the opposite.

Take the company I happen to work for right now. The software development team is supposed to have decent laptops and additional 21″ LCD screens. Newcomers get their laptops pretty fast, but the request for memory and 21″ screen needs to be put separately and (I did the asking around) takes on average about 3 to 5 months. So all this time new employees are forced to work on a year model of an underpowered laptop with only one gig of memory, low performance CPU and an average hard drive. Two installed security suites, full-blown software hard drive encryption (with built-in security chip unused), bunch of software and remote management utilities running in the background being the default installation. Now add here MS Outlook 2003, couple of Internet Explorer (or Firefox) windows, MS Word or Excel – and you get a decent workstation for an average clerk. Now, on top of that let’s add Visual Studio 2005, SQL Management Studio or Enterprise Manager, maybe a feature-rich text editor (like UltraEdit) – and you get a pony trying to pull a firetruck to a fire.

Recently, I timed the bootup of this laptop (I happen to be the proud owner of one) – for all the tools to fall into place and start working properly it took from bootup (include two login/password entries – one for boot another for Windows/domain login) to being able to start typing the code in Visual Studio. It took me just under 20 minutes. That’s every day now. Talk about “wasting your time at the watercooler”, eh?