No, for once, this isn’t actually a post about bicycles. Although if that’s what you’re looking for, here’s our garage this morning. I think that’s 11 bicycles, although at least three of them are not ridable at the time of this photo, more are slightly not ridable if you’re tall folk.
This came across my IRC window recently, and I much appreciate Ry for the random link:
15:38 <@Ry> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed
I hadn’t heard of Parkinson’s Law of Triviality before, I just bought the book. The associated FreeBSD list post is great and a must read. Especially the ASCII popups.
The most interesting part is thinking about how much I care about what other people do. Which isn’t a lot. Unless I have to deal with the consequences of it, I really tend to keep my opinions to myself unless asked for them. There are some exceptions; I’m an evangelist for things like puppet, deb packages, and open source as a whole.
A few months ago we bought a piece of software at work for tracking projects. It’s not Microsoft Project. Really, we went from one unknown piece of software to another, because we hired a PM who had used the latter. Of course, nobody talked to IT when they bought it, so they bought the version that uses a file on a network share rather than a database for storage. I’ve kept my mouth shut about the stupidity of this choice, because it doesn’t matter. I feel like others would cause a stir in the aftermath. I have complained about it a lot in department, but that amounts to my buddy Eric, and occasionally our lead software dev/chief architect Pete.
It’s not my software. When Eric came on full time he asked where we keep track of our time (he was a consultant and had to bill us). I think he was a little surprised that we don’t. When he saw this project management software, where people keep track of their time, I think he was glad that we don’t. It’s icky. But it’s not our problem, well, most of the time. When it breaks, it’s our problem. That’s still rare enough for me to not get upset about being expected to support software I had no opportunity to voice my opinion of in the purchasing process. Partly, that’s my fault. I make an effort to not be seen, because I don’t want to go to meetings. Why don’t I want to go to meetings? I’ve never had a very concise list of reasons, I’ve always felt they were a waste of time. But the bike shed argument is spot on.
I only care about other people projects that affect me. If they’re looking for my opinion, they’re welcome to ask me. Otherwise, I have no business mucking around arguing about the color of their bike shed. Whatever works for them, is just fine.