Software developer did what I was told.
I worked at a pipeline company that supported hundreds of clients. Part of the mission was gathering information from internal sources and create client specific reports which were required to be available at the start of their business day by web. Once, when the site’s team lead was on vacation, the off-site manager asked me to provide a design change which included providing downloadable PDF reports as well as several other changes. Up to this point, this company had not been utilizing my software engineering skills, I was just maintaining their existing software product as a programmer. I was excited to show them what I was truly capable of producing. I put in over 60 hours that week researching the requirements, the customer usage patterns, hardware resources required, development plan, including staged implementation. All that’s needed for creating a great design document. And it was a great design document!
When the site team-lead returned from vacation, he went ballistic claiming that the design was trash and totally useless. He then sketched out a plan that poorly covered about 25% of the requirements and which didn’t consider hardware usage and availability. My current guess is that he felt threatened by my abilities.
But I was told to implement team lead’s plan as he documented it. So, I did what I was told. While my research indicated that less than 5% of the clients bothered to review the daily reports unless they were tracking down a specific problem. 760
Time to create each report was 10-20 seconds. So, part of my plan was to create the customer’s PDF report files as requested during the business day when the computer workload was lite. And once they downloaded the PDF, delete that PDF from disk. The team-lead’s replacement design required the PDFs to be created for all clients every night. He also failed to add the cleanup process, leaving the PDF files on disk.
You can see where this is going. It added a massive amount of computer to the nightly processing, delaying the finish of the daily processing. And it took a couple of months to fill up the hard drive. But the team lead said my design was trash and I should do what I was told. I never offered any solutions to that company again. I just did what I was told. When the hard drive fills up, not my problem. If the nightly processing could not be completed in time, not my problem. Now adays, we would call this "Quite Quit". 760