Developers are from Mars, Managers are from Venus:
Yesterday I received a forwarded email describing communication gap between developers and managers in very funny way. It is well designed and worth to read. Here I am giving few selected, to read complete version click here (Originally version written by Chad Z. Hower aka Kudzu).
A Developer Says
I saved 2 bytes
What a developer means:
I spent 4 hours on a 5 minute task and the code is five times bigger than it was before. It does save 2 bytes, but its only used 3 places in the program so I shaved 6 bytes off of our 45 megabyte footprint.
What a manager hears:
I have room for more features!
I reused some code
What a developer means:
I cut and pasted some stuff.
What a manager hears:
He used an existing library, great!
Its not a bug, its a documentation issue
What a developer means:
Its a bug, but its really gnarly to fix it. Let's just document it as designed behaviour and maybe we can even convince them its a feature.
For a real life example, please see:
http://butunclebob.com/ArticleS.UncleBob.OutlookUgh
The official response is even better:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010565301033.aspx
The author of this one has a job waiting for him in Government if they ever leave Microsoft.
PC Mag has fun too:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1356794,00.asp
What a manager hears:
We can't have too much documentation can we?
A Manager Says
I just read about x. I want the whole team to use x.
What a manager means:
Manager Magazine says buzzword x will make you guys program faster and save me money. I really don't have a clue what it really does or if it applies to our situation, but I am sure somehow we can apply it to our 4 million line code base, by next week.
What a developer hears:
Uh oh, his monthly magazine arrived. I'll have to talk to the guys in the mail room again.
If it will take you 4 weeks, 4 of you can do it in a week, right?
What a manager means:
4 weeks = 4 developers x 1 week = 4 weeks x 1 developer. Why not? It computes! Algebra does not lie.
What a developer hears:
I guess he thinks 9 women can make one baby in 1 month.
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