A few years ago a friend of mine was working on a small to medium intranet project for a large customer. About 6 months in to this little gambit he heard about a poison pen email one of the architects had sent to several of the project stakeholders (many of them non-technical) criticizing their use of Flex for the UI of the app. He then provided a laundry list of reasons why he considered this a very bad technology choice.
- His criticisms of Flex were mostly all technically wrong - like “Flex uses JDK 1.7, which isn't deployed to the SOE, and requires a direct connection to the mainframe at all times“
- He had been one of the principal architects on the project from the get go and had had ample opportunity to set the technical direction
- His means of distributing the criticism, as a scaremongering “we're doomed” rant to a non-technical audience without any “next steps” meant the team would be fighting fires for months to come
- They weren't using Flex anyway
While I don't want to ascribe to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, I can't help but wonder if we shouldn't consider adding a CompleteFuckingSociopath “bit” to go along with the Bozo “bit”.