More than one hundred, was the reply.
I don't know the breadth of the Pearson product, nor do I know if the number
of people includes project managers, QA staff, support staff, etc, but wow,
that is a lot of people. At a previous employer we had a team of about 50
(with roughly 25 programmers) that wrote and supported and entire ERP
package with multiple platforms and languages involved (i.e. RPG+DB2+IBMi on
the backend and .NET on the front end). Just wanted to note that so you
know I have lived some in that space.
I would be curious to know WHY they need that many people. For example, is
the technology stack they have developed hard to develop, test and deploy?
The more tiers you introduce the more complex it gets and the more personnel
you need and the more probable that there will be issues and failure points.
How many times are we required to adopt new technologies because of bad IT
direction? For example, there is no reason you shouldn't be able to have
your AS400 exposed to the internet AND support your intranet 5250 users.
But many times people choose to adopt a .NET front end and then do messaging
back and forth from the Wintel server to the AS400. The cost in dollars and
time in going that route can easily go into the millions for a small shop of
10 or less developers because of the number of complexities introduced and
the half-life of knowledge needing to be maintained. The perceived
advantages are all offset by the amount of time it takes to make a change to
give your business the competitive edge.
One language, one database, and one OS will work better for almost ANY
software stack vs. mixing and matching. Even if that means adopting an
entirely Microsoft stack. Ok, I am way off the topic now :-)
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/
midrange.com
