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ScienceFairProjects

I've seen plenty of projects get top-heavy with new, fun, shiney technology, but never had the right term to describe them until now.

Science Fair Projects

Your Project Is Not The Science Fair describes plenty of projects I've lived through.

Have you been on a Science Fair project lately?

--DaveSmith 2006.06.14

Are you kidding? It seems that my lot in life is to be surrounded by science fair projects. At least it seems that way to me as an ISTJ.

This week I am involved with a one-person company that (who) is a favorite of many of my users. They love to sit and chat with this one person and describe their science fair ideas. He happily obliges them with little gadgets.

This person does good work. His products work, are reasonably priced, and are built quickly.

I guess my visions of science fair come from the chit chat way in which money - tax-payers money - is spent.

DwaynePhillips 15 June 2006

What was funniest about the project was what the managers of the internal department for whom the system was being created most wanted out of the system: a way to assess with complete impartiality on a monthly basis which user had been most productive in his or her interactions with customers. And why was this important? So that the managers could fairly decide to whom two free movie passes should be awarded.

For all the great and wondrous technology and the immense complexity of the system there was absolutely no way to perform that calculation.

Science Fair Projects seem to happen for many reasons, not the least of which is a failure to determine what are we really trying to accomplish and how much is that worth to us. It is a conspiracy in which many parties conspire based on personal, likely conflicting, agendas rather than a dispassionate and honest assessment of what is truly needed to get the job done well enough.

DennisCadena 2006.06.15

Back in the heyday of the adoption of "client / server computing" into the enterprise, this was pretty much ever enterprise-scale system I saw. At least these perverse incentives involved:

• Customers / sponsors get shiny toys to show off. "My system is cooler than your system."
• Vendors, the big ones like integrators, generally have - um - "shared revenue" arrangements with their technology suppliers. Effectively they get kickbacks for placing technologies at customers.
• Technicians of course get resume enhancement by having the newest, latest, and bestest stuff on their vita. Lord knows that any idiot with six months' Ruby experience is going to be better at building stuff than someone with decades' shipping working stuff on time in any other language you care to name.
• Implementors, meaning anyone actually on the hook for making good on the promises made, tend to grab technologies in a fit of silver-bullet seeking. At worst, by piling on enough new stuff, they can't be accused of failing to try everything, and / or they get to claim that they got clipped by the novelty of the technology.

In all these cases the countermeasure is the same. What's the point? When we focus on the point of the exercise, this kind of thing goes away, except for the infrequent cases when getting some experience with a particular technology (or technique, or etc.) *is* the point.

- JimBullock, 2006.06.15 (Can I have that with extra blinking lights, and a cherry on top, please?)