Disney Lawyers Please Look Away!
This title pretty well sums up my job description as a contractor at the Indevin winery for the last 12 years. Yes there were long nights, moments of rapid development, followed by the long tail of testing and bug fixing, but generally after all this was done I was just there as a re-assurance that if anything went wrong I was on-hand to fix it.
So is this a bad thing? Why engage a contractor indefinitely and keep them on working at 10% of their capacity after the work is done? Let’s dig further..
Dumbo did not need the feather to fly, it was always just a placebo that made him confident to try something different without fear that a mistake would injure him. I think for a startup, or a small progressive company, having such a person in this role is actually a necessity to giving them the ability to make rapid changes and adapt standard operating procedures without worrying about writing complicated specifications to get what they want.
In my case with Indevin the requirement was normally just vaguely explained it to me and I gave them a first draft of what I thought they wanted as a working product. That was usually enough to climb the next ledge and find the next gap in the system, and if it failed I always made it so they could roll-back. Any company not having this kind of ability would likely not try for that next ledge or be too slow and miss the market opportunity.
But working like this is not for everyone. Big corporations and governments would never allow such ‘reckless behaviour’ and their auditors and possibly their public shareholders would likely be very concerned if they were caught doing it. In a way they would be right to be concerned because every time you change a system it is also a gamble, and does require a certain amount of luck; Luck that the key expert people know what they are doing and stick around for the duration of the change, luck that the basic tests on the code produced catch the main problems, and does not introduce mistakes, and also luck that both the people specifying and using the system are invested enough in it to give the developer the feedback they need.
The rewards of improving the efficiency of your operation or being able to grab that new market opportunity before your competition does however generally makes it worth the effort; Finding or building a team that can identify these areas, authorise them and rapidly implement them is what separates good companies from so-so ones.
