pointy-haired

There are always lots of rough patches reflecting pointy-haired boss decision making process, and there's cruft that builds up.

Message to pointy-haired executive: Google robots.txt Ironically, not only does the foxnews.com/robots.txt not block search engines, it has sitemaps for helping them.

Cobol didn't convince pointy-haired bosses that technology which only 10-15 years before was considered an academic curiosity ought to be standard for business application development.

Management styles range from the likes of Dilbert's pointy-haired boss to a hierarchy so flat that it's almost invisible--until it's time for somebody to get fired.

Now we know where Dilbert's pointy-haired boss learns his new buzzwords from!

Obviously some pointy-haired boss wrote this post.

The backlash if mostly against the consultants and pointy-haired-bosses that cherry picked from various Agile practices the things they could grok, and implemented that as a cargo cult solution.

So was this basically a team of 'bandits' secretly using a non-endorsed VCS to collaborate and get shit done, and then pushing to VSS to keep the pointy-haired boss happy?

I agree everyone has their own definition, but the one you are giving is a pointy-haired definition, where the only metric is LoC and a successful demo of some feature.

This sort of standoff with pointy-haired managers is always politically tricky.

First: This kind of personal manager a hate object in German programming and engineering circles in about the same way the pointy-haired boss does in US ones.

The essence of a pointy-haired boss is someone who has a lot of ideas (which may be good or bad), but is so entrenched in middle management that they have no idea how to actually get things done.

Software guy: "Here's your new efficient CRM server!" Pointy-haired guy: "Where's teh xml?

Whether or not these will be "programmers" in the traditional sense is a bit fuzzy; it's conceivable that - someday - non-technical pointy-haired-boss types could come up with specifications if AI-driven software-building tools can sufficiently understand natural languages.

"Java took the enterprise by storm" Smalltalk's demise no doubt had a lot to do with Sun's marketing people convincing a bunch of Pointy-Haired Bosses that garbage collection means that you have no memory leaks, as well as that Java was the only way to do cross-platform development.