I wrote a god awful seismic tomography tool for geologists the past few months. The gory details: Written in Java, exposed as a web service that takes a path on the server that hosts the seismic tomography tool. The tool is accessed using a swing front end. So the user has to upload their files to the server using ftp or whatever, then login with remote desktop to the server and start the swing app.
These were all my bosses ideas. So I've decided to redo this project the right way over the break and come back to work with a solution I can be proud of! I'm thinking a basic PHP and html/css web app.
When you already know a better, simpler, cheaper, and faster way to meet the stated goals, you can email your boss a counter-proposal, clearly outlining the advantages to your proposed approach.
This might be risky in highly political work environments (or with touchy bosses), but in general, they are paying for your expertise, not your typing skills, and a decent boss will recognize and appreciate your initiative.
I'm guilty of this also, although yesterday when a consultant educated my boss about the existence of Virtualization (which my boss apparently knew nothing about) and I replied "oh yeah, I've got VirtualBox running on my dev machine, I do all of my coding on VM's", I realized that I am doing him a great disservice by not interjecting more. Part of my problem is that my boss tends to interrupt people when they are talking, which puts me off a little bit when I'm trying to explain an alternative technology or method to him. I don't think that he intends to be rude, and at first I thought that he was picking up on what I was saying and making a quick decision, and that is why he tended to shift the conversation or ask an unrelated question. I now realize that he probably doesn't always follow what I'm saying, he just thinks of something else and blurts it out in the middle of my explanation, so I need to be more forceful in getting my point across so that he can make a fully educated decision.
You don't necessarily want to be forceful, but you DO want to be concise. The biggest problems I see programmers/engineers/IT folks have is they tend to ramble on and on about the topic at hand. Managers, and non-technical people, want a relevant, but concise, explanation. Think elevator pitch. What can you explain in 1 minute? In 5 minutes?
That is excellent advice! I am (unfortunately) a 5 minute voice mail rambler, which my wife often makes fun of me for. Make it an elevator pitch, I'm going to remember that.
These were all my bosses ideas. So I've decided to redo this project the right way over the break and come back to work with a solution I can be proud of! I'm thinking a basic PHP and html/css web app.