Laying off people who weren't and aren't contributing anything productive
Saying that UK public services are inefficient is one thing, probably true.
Saying that the layoffs can be confined to people who "aren't contributing anything productive" and be extension health, policing, education, research etc will not get worse at all is an entirely different thing, and I don't think it's true.
Well, the UK is currently testing the opposite ridiculous notion - that by laying off lots of government workers (when there already lots of people looking for jobs), reducing benefits to everyone (which hits the poor far harder, of course), and cutting funding to education and research, you'll somehow help the country recover from a recession faster and better.
How many frameworks is the right number? One is too few. One hundred is too many, it will just fragment people's skills.
Experimentation and inventing your own wheel is good for learning. But most of the time those wheels shouldn't see a wider audience - unless they have something new to offer.
Are you in the business of writing software that never gets used? I have, and I hated it. Quick feedback means quickly finding out if you're building the right thing.
there is a lot of anger towards the agile movement because it was sold as a tool to pointy haired bosses to impose, rather than a grassroots movement among engineers that embraced flexibility.
the interesting thing is that the agile movement started as exactly the reverse of what you said: as a grassroots movement among engineers that embraced flexibility, not a tool to pointy haired bosses to impose.
If your experience is the opposite, you've been had by someone, and you're blaming agile.
whenever unit tests or test driven development comes up the proponents act like anyone not doing things this way is incompetent. I think the reverse is true
The reverse would be "anyone doing unit tests in incompetent", which is not a defendable statement. What are you trying to say?
Looks like in cases like that the bug tracker is making the underlying problems more visible. In that case, removing the bug tracker is not the way forward.
"The first Macintosh was introduced on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command-line interface. The company continued to have success through the second half of the 1980s, only to see it dissipate in the 1990s as the personal computer market shifted towards IBM PC compatible machines running MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows."
You can't successfully own code that you don't control.
I believe that the best outcome for both of you would be 20% of time set aside for refactoring and increasing test coverage. Sure you'd want more but features have to roll out too. Management may not realise that refactoring that much is necessary.
You may have to pad out estimates of new work, and say things like "in order to do that we'd have to understand the guts of the foo subsystem, and make sure that we don't break it while we change it, so we'll have to put tests around it while we change the code" while mentally adding a week's time refactoring and adding unit test coverage to foo to your estimate. Grease the moving parts - things that change once tend to change again, and you'll be happier the second time around.
If you can't even do that, ask them what they mean by "take ownership". Maybe they just want you to the go-to-guy for that particular monster. Say what would do if you really owned it. If you are completely overruled, you may have to be blunt and point out that this is not ownership in any non-bullshit sense.
If that fails, as the wise man said: if you can't change your company, change your company.
It takes a lot more that just http. I'd need to know the URL schema if you're restful, or the method names if you're SOAPy. Then there's the format of the data (SOAP, JSON, XML ..) and the expected data fields in the data sent and received, etc.
All words are cool if you don't know what they mean. If the reader knows what it means but the writer doesn't, the effects are less predictable and desirable.
He mentioned in passing that writing a typical README requires just the right amount of planning upfront
"just the right amount of planning upfront" is exactly what Scrum should do. It's not full-circle at all, it's another approach to current good practices.
Banks - their back-end processing is often in Java.