Performance Review

I just had my annual review & it was not a pretty sight.

The good news includes - I still have my job - my boss has given me clear 
indication of what needs to be fixed & some overall goals, which have been 
sorely lacking in recent years.

It occurs to me that it would be extremely constructive if I could provide my 
boss with some alternatives to the system he now uses, since he is not a 
computer technical person ... how on earth is a non technical computer person 
expected to be able to judge the quality of software I write in some language 
he does not know ... how challenging is this or that?

There is stuff that is extremely difficult for me to do, but I cannot 
communicate with a non-programmer about what the challenges are.  How can a 
non-programmer evaluate my performance?

It would be simple for some 3rd party, familiar with the languages we use, to 
look at some of my programs in an audit & make some remarks about how my 
relative worth to the company, compared to the quality of code at other 
comparable companies, but I have been suggesting for decades that we get a 
computer audit on a larger scale, so this just aint going to happen.

Of course this sort of thing can backfire.

I remember in the midst of some conversion at a former emplouer whining about 
some challenge they had given me, saying that there is no way I can get all 
this done inside the deadlines, and my boss informing me that the company, 
without telling me, had asked IBM if I had what it took to do the conversion, 
without any professional help, and the SE (which tells you how long ago this 
was) told them that I was the best programmer that anyone at the local IBM 
office had ever had the good fortune to run across.  So the result of that 
was they threw even more work my way.   The shame of it was that when I 
finally left that place, I was unable to use the SE as a work reference.  I 
did ask the SE for confirmation that this was not a snow job.

I asked my current boss

HOW MANY DAYS HAS THE COMPANY BEEN DOWN DUE TO COMPUTER INFRASTRUCTURE 
PROBLEMS?  He said NONE, in a tone of voice as if he was surprised that I 
should ask such a question.  I told him that in my opinion there are 3 
reasons why that is so ,,, our choice of having IBM 400 hardware, our choice 
of a good ERP, and my performance in managing it.

Now I think that there ought to be some industry statistics - how many days 
of surprise down time & other mishaps do other comparable companies have - 
400 & non-400, so there is a basis of comparison with our performance.

How much time do companies typically spend testing software improvements?
How critical is this?

I was going to ask him, but I bit my tongue, because my foot was headed there 
at lightning speed.  HOW MANY COMPUTER BUGS HAVE BEEN INTRODUCED AS A RESULT 
OF SOFTWARE I HAVE WRITTEN FOR THE COMPANY.

The reason I bit my tongue is that I can think of 3 in the last 2 years & the 
really embarrassing part of that answer is that 1 of them I could not find, 
so I developed a work around.

This is another area in which there might be some reliable statistics.
Rate of bugs created, both in terms of like
1 bug per million lines of source code & how many in what time period

It would not be fair to compare to Microsoft Windows because that software is 
written with full intention of tossing it in the garbage in 2-3 years when 
the next version comes out - we should compare with other 400 places whose 
software is intended to work for say 10 years at least.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)

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