My job went to India and all I got was…

November 5, 2005  

… four weeks’ notice. Yes, yesterday I finished up my last contract in Amsterdam, rather prematurely. We got into work on Monday to be told that the project was cancelled, nearly half-way through the originally planned timeframe. Not because the project was going badly, not because they were unhappy with the team but because it had become obvious we weren’t going to meet their original deadline (made long before any of the team had joined) and were unable to budge on quality or functionality. So my job didn’t go to India per se, but this being a re-write of an existing application they’re going to try and make do with the horror of the previous version and outsource its further development to India. Good luck to them. Now what am I going to do?

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2 Comments


  1. Pamela
    November 8, 2005 at 10:28 am

    Well, it’s pretty much a startup company who’ve not made any money in 3 years and their venture capital runs out in March, so times are tough – despite the fact that they’ve got some great product ideas and lots of customers waiting to use them. They allowed their only two developers to play around with “research” for 6 months before actually getting serious about the project and hiring the rest of us, but it was already too late – and you’re right, the agile process made this obvious from the start. Eventually they hired a CTO to actually do some management and within 2 weeks he canned the project and recommended alternatives.

    As for us, I don’t think they’ll make the mistake of trying to run such a project in-house again so we won’t be crossing our fingers for another job there. We’ll most likely be returning to Oz next month – Matt will see if he can get back into the agile world there and I will doing something different, which could be anything from teaching dance to starting a web design business with a friend…

    Thanks Robert :D


  2. Robert Watkins
    November 5, 2005 at 2:10 pm

    Ah… the flip side of Agile Development. Exposing actual progress instead of hiding behind “90% complete” can do that sometimes. It’s even a win, of sorts, but I’m not sure the sequel will go well.

    My condolences, and good luck with your next contract. :) On the bright side: if they really were happy with the team, maybe they’ll see about bringing some or all of the team onto a not-so-fatal project.