VDI humor

I can only find this humorous because otherwise I'll become violent. The other day I was in a meeting. Several interesting personalities were present. Here's the plan: IBM counterparts will be present here and we're to help build them "machines" for them to be able to use with all the software that we use to develop. First, they want us to try to get our software packaged. We were told before not to do that. Company policy. Now they want to do it. Why? Because they want to be able to push this software to 2-3 desktops. How long does it take to package something? Months. How about we just give them the install instructions? Guess they'll have to settle. We want more info on these "VDI"s. (and I use the term loosely, because one character doesn't want us to use the word "image". He gets angry when we use that, so we call them "VD thingies".) In fact, contrary to what we were all told previously, there is NO image for these machines. Nor can one be made. Can someone else log in at the same time? No. So why aren't we using Citrix on a Terminal Server? Or Citrix published apps? Alleged "technology issues". (FUD alert)
Someone has a brainstorm: let's ask IBM what they normally do! Answer: the client normally sets up Citrix. Huh. No kidding. Why don't we do that? Just not the way we do things around here....

The start of the IBM disaster

Today is a kickoff of sorts. Within a month, we will all be spending 2 hours of our mornings talking to people in India. I hope to learn Hindi in the process.
What seems disastrous to me is this: The current structure has a manager and more than 10 systems analysts. The manager is a business analyst of sorts, but all the systems analysts are also business analysts. The systems analysts are slated to be layed off, but a small number will be retained as business analysts, assuming they are willing and available to do so. There doesn't seem to be any transition plan there. People will leave and take their business knowledge with them. Wouldn't it be more logical to either hire new business analysts and have them train now or to start transitioning people into business analyst roles now to absorb as much info as they can? Just not the way things are done here.

Software source

When we buy software here, we like to copy the CDs to the NAS for ease of use and in case the CDs get lost or scratched. This is pretty standard practice. Yesterday I heard an amusing story. One of our developers (and only one) is using an old version of Powerbuilder. When queried, she said that there was a version of Powerbuilder on the NAS, but that was not the version she was using. To make matters worse, she didn't HAVE the source for the version she was using. Apparently it had been corrupted. Her solution? Well, it lives on 2 of her desktops and a laptop. Let's all pray that nothing happens to those machines.

Outsourcing

Well, our company has been doing badly, so they decided to cut costs. First they cut a bunch of people, which just gave me more projects. That wasn't too bad because I like new projects. They cut the budget so that my future new projects got cut. Bad. Now, they decide that they are going to outsource our jobs to India. Nice. Good luck with that. Then they get rid of most of us and keep a few losers to be business analysts. Except that they can't figure out who's supposed to do what. Instead of asking IBM how they typically do things, they just decide to do things from scratch. So I'll either be spending the next half year teaching someone how to take my job away or finding another one instead. Monster.com, here I come.