Mike damerell problem interview

Problem Interview w/ Mike Damerell

Job Title: Sr. Director of Business Integration; report to CIO; IS Strategy, Project Management office; Service Desk; IS budget

Company: MRC

Company size: 4,700 employees; 20+ countries; 4-5b

In-house developers: ~30 employees; ~20 contractors on-shore; ~35 off-shore; group sizes: ~8-10 in Tulsa; rest in Charleston

In-house open-source devs: not sure

Open-source projects used: subversion, linux, web development - niche type products

Budget for open-source: don’t know

How do you decide to buy open-source software?

General struggle w/ open-source:

Interested in codesy.io?

Do you use open-source on projects with tight, frequent deadlines?

Problem ranking:

Other problems:

• Supportability - start using code, upgrade an OS, apply security patch, then it stops working; where to get it fixed? Supported by a group, you can maybe get a fix and apply it, but if the person supporting it now has a new day-job they may not fix it
• Overall strategy where the code is headed, or is it going to fracture (fork) at some point where group A goes one way and group B goes another way

web part where a whole system isn’t affected; I can deactivate small pieces if this happens. risk isn’t as great; saving development time; OS, database, subversion-level stuff is a big impact

quick codesy.io feedback

Not close enough to the development groups to know how developers or managers would use it If you were talking to Matt Brown who’s a manager, he would know how much time he would save or if he wants to put a bounty out Ed Hitchcock - Director who gets into stuff more They would be the ones who would need to take the role of fixing something that’s not working Matt can’t do any purchases autonomously; Ed could probably do $1,000

Interesting concept; still some risk - how quickly is someone going to reply back to the bounties; not watching site too close; alerts to make people aware of the problems and potential payouts

What’s the process to test it and know that it gets fixed? Even dealing with vendor-supported software is shaky sometimes; need to test it