Re: Performance Review

Here is an unplanned downtime analysis done b y Gartner done a few years
ago.  (My chart was developed in Freelance Graphics, and my e-mail client
is Notes, so they may me highly compatible on my client, but not on your
e-mail client.  If it doesn't come through, please send me a private e-mail
and I will send out .pdf pages to those requesting it.)

(Embedded image moved to file: pic12121.pcx)


Here are the details:

Gartner Measurement Analysis of 240 observations from 190 firms
   Un-scheduled downtime
   Except for S/390, clustered systems are not separated
   On average less than 10% of the installations studied implemented
   clustering
   Vax - 50% of these installations have clustered servers


The data was published in the late fall of '98.  It looks bad for NT.


Al


Al Barsa, Jr.
Barsa Consulting Group, LLC

400>390

914-251-1234
914-251-9406 fax

http://www.barsaconsulting.com
http://www.taatool.com


                                                                                
                                         
                    MacWheel99@aol.com                                          
                                         
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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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pic12121.pcx