The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

chubertdev · 2013-03-20 Reply Admin

hookahmasta:
Someone already mentioned this up-thread, but it seems strange that a fortune 500 company business unit is allowed to go rogue and hire their own IT people and develop their own solution on the down low. Are they running these Access databases/applications on a desktop machine? There's no way an organized corporate IT unit will give the business a server to do whatever they want. When it inevitably blows up, there will be some uncomfortable conversations between high level execs as to what happened.

You would be very, very surprised. I've found that job titles don't have much to do with what a person actually does in very specific circumstances like that. Although, it is funny that the title has more with what the person knows how to do, but it doesn't prevent them from doing other things.

2013-03-20 Reply Admin

dynedain:
But they don't care if you use Eclipse vs. Netbeans vs. VisualStudio as long as you deliver good results and mesh well with the project team.

So, you could have different projects targeting the same platform, possibly benefiting from using shared code, and you think a sane dev shop would allow people to mix project file formats, compilers (either brand or version), etc. at their own whim, ensuring any work done has a much higher change of not being able to integrate with other projects if need be? What if dev A has to fix project B written by dev B, but dev B used VS9 and dev A only has Eclipse/GCC set up, but has to fix a bug in dev A's code? What about the different formatting conventions causing havoc with revision control diffs/checkins? And you think this is a sane dev shop? You may want to re-evaluate that.

2013-03-20 Reply Admin

"... but has to fix a bug in dev A's code?"

Dev B's code, obviously.

2013-03-20 Reply Admin

I have the same setup in my job: i'm an "analyst" but must support legacy MS Access / VB6 apps (which make up 80% of the internal apps) by "data maintenance". Any "development" and my position gets eaten by central I.T., moved to another city and all support for the systems disavowed.

Since the business would come to a halt ~2 days after our Hackcess apps. stopped working, we "discretely" built a standalone machine with Visual Studio etc. on it and are migrating slow-time to .NET / sql server.

And how do we still claim to be doing "data maintenance"? We modify the existing MS Access apps on the live network to download the latest version of the .NET app from blob data on an sql server into a users temp folder and then execute. No "development" sir, no no, just maintenance of the same ol' Access database, nothing to see here...

2013-03-20 Reply Admin

snoofle:
Lorne Kates:
dayneo:
Interesting that all the developers that make it onto the WTF always seem to "update their resumes" at the end. Are they ever able to hold down a job?

Tom's resume:

FFS Corp, Accountant, 2013-03-19 9:00am - 10:37am

Familiarized self with legacy Access application

Took initiative to install developer tools Technologies used: VB, Access, .Net (C#), Visual Studios, Oracle, Microsoft Office Suite

Inedo Corp, Programmer, 2013-02-14 9:00am - 9:15am

Applied interpersonal communication skills with team lead

Made risk/reward assessment of usability of legacy reporting system Technologies Used: Crystal Reports, PCs, multi-line phone systems

WTF Inc, Programmer, 2013-02-01 9:00am - 12:22pm

Championed adoption of ticketing/bug tracking system

Championed adoption of version control system

Championed adoption of integrated development environment Technologies User: BugTrac, JIRA, Bugzilla, a shared Word document, Hg, SVN, CSV, Source Safe, a shared network drive, Visual Studios 2012, Visual Studios 2008, Visual Studios 2005, Notepad

Education (in progress) Computer Science, UoP - 26 December 2012 - 01 Jan 2013 Computer Science, UoW - 5 Sept, 2012 - 8 Sept, 2012 Computer Science, UoNY - 16 June 2012 - 18 June 2012 Accounting Diploma, G College - 10 Jan 2012 - 17 Jan 2012

As someone who actually works at WTF Inc, I can tell you - with certainty - that nobody named "Tom" works here!

2013-02-01 9:00am - 12:22pm Not anymore

2013-03-20 Reply Admin

He could have been draining the Access data to MSDE/SQL server express/MySql and use Access as frontend if budget for proper SQL server is not allowed. This would have solved a lot of the performance problem.

Callin · 2013-03-20 Reply Admin

Karen glared across her desk at Tom. “Did you install a Microsoft product on your computer?”

“Yes,” Tom replied, unsure why she radiated waves of fury at him.

“Why would you do that?”

2013-03-20 Reply Admin

ObiWayneKenobi:
As an aside, WTF is up with the notion that internal IT must be treated like a consulting firm with hour tracking and "billable" hours? You work for the same company! It doesn't cost you extra to request a project be done.
Worst of all is this disturbing new trend of having your IT be a spin-off company owned by the same guys but with a different name so you can have "IT Services" external to your organization but they still technically work in the same building and for the same users.

Can someone in the corporate world please explain what the point of this is? Other than to make your IT staff miserable by pretending they're consulting (or worse, actually offer consulting to other companies based on what your internal IT has done for you) when they're not? Is it some kind of tax scheme?

I've seen so many companies now that don't tell you that the tech job you're applying for isn't with Initrode's IT department, it's actually with "Initech IT Solutions" which just so happens to have only a single client, Initrode, and just so happens to have the same management structure and senior management as Initrode.

Sounds like they are trying to make IT a modular unit. Maybe up to the point where it can be replaced by another similar IT modular unit, like say, an outsourced IT department.

2013-03-21 Reply Admin

I would call it more a case of turf protection.

IT often has to draw lines that other groups aren't happy with. Some examples:

"Yes, I know you want to do Project Y now, but you didn't schedule/get executive support for this work, so we are currently booked for Project X."
"Yes, that application looks nice, but we do not have a resource with training to support it, budget to increase headcount to bring in someone with experience, or bandwidth to bring someone up to speed."

Answers like these can be perfectly valid, and they can be perfect cop-outs. The users may well be suggesting the wrong (or unnecessary solutions), or they may be suggested necessary solutions that upper-level management won't buy.

In any case, when told, "No," users will sometimes decide to proceed on a project on their own.

Assuming nothing has been lost to making the story anonymous, however, IT may have had a point in this case.
The story says that the accountants built the system, but that none of them are sure of what it does. That is not indicative of poorly-defined requirements and weak knowledge transfer, which tend to cause ongoing headache in business processes.

As a final point, IT has some reason to push back against providing support to implement a system they know is trouble, since a minor support role (such as providing a database) can easily be transformed to "ownership" of said system.

2013-03-21 Reply Admin

Lorne Kates:
WTF Inc, Programmer, 2013-02-01 9:00am - 12:22pm - Championed adoption of ticketing/bug tracking system - Championed adoption of version control system - Championed adoption of integrated development environment

Holy hell, that's the first three things I did at my new job (Trac, SVN, Jenkins) and only SVN is being used by anyone other than myself! Every other improvement I suggest is just ignored.

2013-03-21 Reply Admin

Oracle=Microsoft now?

2013-03-21 Reply Admin

Holy hell. I don't know whether to be awestruck, or incredibly disturbed.

2013-03-21 Reply Admin

Sanhadrin:
dynedain:
But they don't care if you use Eclipse vs. Netbeans vs. VisualStudio as long as you deliver good results and mesh well with the project team.

So, you could have different projects targeting the same platform, possibly benefiting from using shared code, and you think a sane dev shop would allow people to mix project file formats, compilers (either brand or version), etc. at their own whim, ensuring any work done has a much higher change of not being able to integrate with other projects if need be? What if dev A has to fix project B written by dev B, but dev B used VS9 and dev A only has Eclipse/GCC set up, but has to fix a bug in dev A's code? What about the different formatting conventions causing havoc with revision control diffs/checkins? And you think this is a sane dev shop? You may want to re-evaluate that.

Project files does not belong in the repo. And even if they are there, if the devs are not completely retarded a different IDE does not mean any problems. Just turn of auto formatting and off you go. If your IDE cannot generate a project from existing source, it is broken. If a dev cannot read code sufficiently to work with a plain text editor, he needs to get his shit together. It is not the fault of the dev environment, but the dev itself if shit happens in your described scenario.

2013-03-21 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
PiisAWheeL:
5/10. Was tempted. I see you did get a few bites on it already.

He's the kind of guy that would fight a speeding ticket by saying that "Speed Limit" could refer to a minimum limit.

I thought a "speed limit" meant that was the maximum number of methamphetamine hits you were allowed to take while driving.

2013-03-21 Reply Admin

dynedain:
jay:
ObiWayneKenobi:
In most sane dev shops, developers have free reign to install any tools they need that help them do their job, and only need to approve it if it's going to cost money.

Well, I suppose that depends on your definition of "sane". This statement is almost surely totally false if you leave that word out. That is, I sincerely doubt that it is true that "In most dev shops, developers have free reign," etc. I've never worked for a company where that was true.

In every company that I've ever worked for, there is a fixed set of tools that the developers are expected to use. And personally, I don't think that's insane at all. Suppose we have twenty developers all highly skilled in, say, Java. Then a new guy is hired who prefers PHP.

In my sane shop, devs all have admin access and can install what we want. But we don't just hire a PHP developer and ask him to do the work. We assign Java developers to Java projects, and PHP developers to PHP projects. And within the project, the tech lead calls the shots for the languages and frameworks used.

But they don't care if you use Eclipse vs. Netbeans vs. VisualStudio as long as you deliver good results and mesh well with the project team.

But the whole premise here was that he was given an Access app and decided to rewrite is using .NET and Oracle. That's the context in which I was writing. The issue is not that he wanted to use Notepad++ instead of vi, but that he wanted to use an entirely different programming language and database engine.

Now if the question is: "Which is a better platform for a non-trivial application, Access or .NET/Oracle?" I would answer (b) in a heartbeat. If I had a period of temporary insanity and took a job in a shop that developed serious applications with Access, when I woke up I would certainly be pressing to change the platform. But I wouldn't just decide to do it and go off on my own. Because as nice as that might be for that one project, if everybody did that, the place would be an unmanageable nightmare.

2013-03-21 Reply Admin

Swedish tard:
Sanhadrin:
dynedain:
But they don't care if you use Eclipse vs. Netbeans vs. VisualStudio as long as you deliver good results and mesh well with the project team.

So, you could have different projects targeting the same platform, possibly benefiting from using shared code, and you think a sane dev shop would allow people to mix project file formats, compilers (either brand or version), etc. at their own whim, ensuring any work done has a much higher change of not being able to integrate with other projects if need be? What if dev A has to fix project B written by dev B, but dev B used VS9 and dev A only has Eclipse/GCC set up, but has to fix a bug in dev A's code? What about the different formatting conventions causing havoc with revision control diffs/checkins? And you think this is a sane dev shop? You may want to re-evaluate that.

Project files does not belong in the repo. And even if they are there, if the devs are not completely retarded a different IDE does not mean any problems. Just turn of auto formatting and off you go. If your IDE cannot generate a project from existing source, it is broken. If a dev cannot read code sufficiently to work with a plain text editor, he needs to get his shit together. It is not the fault of the dev environment, but the dev itself if shit happens in your described scenario.

Perhaps this depends on the language you're working in or the type of projects you work on. This is certainly not true for many projects that I've worked on.

An IDE's project file often includes more than just a list of files in the project. All kinds of information can get put in there that cannot be trivially recreated in another environment. Just for example, in a Visual Studio "solution" file, there is information about which modules from which projects are accessible by other projects. An Eclipse project includes information about which files are included in a jar and whether and how other jars are included within a jar. It also describes the order in which libraries should be searched. Etc.

If we switched to a different IDE, could we re-create this information? Of course. But it would require studying the project and making intelligent decisions, sometimes very subtle one. Depending on the complexity of the project, this might take just a few minutes or it might take many hours. Mistakes could introduce subtle bugs. If you have developers using different IDEs, then this would mean that every time you do a checkout, you would have to review all the project-level info to see if you needed to make changes to parallel what was done in a different IDE.

chubertdev · 2013-03-22 Reply Admin

jay:
chubertdev:
PiisAWheeL:
5/10. Was tempted. I see you did get a few bites on it already.

He's the kind of guy that would fight a speeding ticket by saying that "Speed Limit" could refer to a minimum limit.

I thought a "speed limit" meant that was the maximum number of methamphetamine hits you were allowed to take while driving.

That one doesn't work either, surprisingly.

bridget99 · 2013-03-23 Reply Admin

Isn't "Accountant" a better job than "Developer?"

This sounds like a missed opportunity to me.

2013-03-23 Reply Admin

Updating his resume to include his one-day stint at the Fortune 500 company?

Scarlet Manuka · 2013-03-24 Reply Admin

ObiWayneKenobi:
Incidentally this is also why I am leery of any job using VB.NET. Nothing wrong with VB.NET as a language, but your average PHB thinks that VB.NET = VB6 = VBA = VBScript so you run the risk of a shop that uses Access or VB6 and "thinks" it's VB.NET. There's a lot less ambiguity if you're applying for a C# position and they can't try to weasel you into supporting Classic ASP or whatever because "You know VB, right?"

C, C++, C#... they're all basically the same thing, right?

2013-03-25 Reply Admin

OSS Man:
If Tom wasn't so stuck in his Microsoft world he could have migrated the application to MySQL and his choice of any number of languages. So his greatest failings are a lack of imagination and an inability to think outside of his MSDN DVD stack.

Yes, because Oracle is now owned by Microsoft.

CAPTCHA: appellatio. When you have an appetite for fellatio.

2013-03-25 Reply Admin

dayneo:
Interesting that all the developers that make it onto the WTF always seem to "update their resumes" at the end. Are they ever able to hold down a job?

It's the job that is unable to hold down the developer.

If you aren't part of the problem (e.g. because it's your first day on the job) you are part of the solution, but why bother? Down the street at Someone Else Corp. they don't have the problem to begin with.

2013-03-25 Reply Admin

drstober:
Most of the times that I see this it is the direct result of accounting monstrosities. In large companies, getting IT support to develop a solution for you costs lots of hours at a burdened rate. Compared to slicing a few hours out of your budget to have someone clodge together something it's a huge difference.
The problem I see is that there's a huge gap between tools to make user's lives easier (and consequently letting them spend time analyzing data vs. manipulating it) and enterprise, designed by committee, IT solutions.

Having clodged together some of these monstrosities, I always heavily caveat that I'm not a real developer before starting, during development and after delivery. I know real developers and have done some personal study on coding and software design, but I'm not a professional. I also try to push the customer to move to an IT developed solution.

At the end of the day, I've got happy users that have a tool that does what they need, but I'm sure it would make most professional devs want to gouge their eyes out.

Agreed. There is no middle ground. Write it yourself ( like finance did ) and just get something up and running or bring in IT and spend more time/money than you have.

2013-03-25 Reply Admin

An IDE's project file often includes more than just a list of files in the project. All kinds of information can get put in there that cannot be trivially recreated in another environment.

You're no longer talking about IDEs (Integrated Development Environments), but rather about LIDEs (Lock-In Development Environments). Unfortunately some naive developers don't know or care how or whether the system works, as long as it runs within their IDE.

But in any sane shop, there'd be a build script that can create a working development environment (not IDE-dependent), including any necessary configuration. Doesn't matter what you have in your IDE, if it isn't in the build script then it doesn't count.

Do you also expect the end customer/client/server to be running the program within an IDE with the exact same configuration?

2013-03-26 Reply Admin

I once had to write a multi-user project instrumentation tracking application in Access and VBA (a port from an even more monstrous combination of ancient software). While my supervisor agreed with me that there were better tools out there, the company's IT department didn't want to give the department permission to install Visual Studio/add a few databases to the existing SQL Server installation - and they'd been asking for years. They didn't care about the fact that even the free Express versions would've easily got the job done (there was probably about 2GB of data total in there, and even that was split up in separate databases for each job site).

At least I had the decency to comment, document, and use linked tables on that behemoth...though I still feel sorry for the poor sap who will have to port it when they're finally able to convince IT.

2013-03-27 Reply Admin

bridget99:
Isn't "Accountant" a better job than "Developer?"
This sounds like a missed opportunity to me.

Nobody holds more power than IT. You must from the eighties.

ObiWayneKenobi · 2013-04-01 Reply Admin

Diogenes:
dayneo:
Interesting that all the developers that make it onto the WTF always seem to "update their resumes" at the end. Are they ever able to hold down a job?
It's the job that is unable to hold down the developer.
If you aren't part of the problem (e.g. because it's your first day on the job) you are part of the solution, but why bother? Down the street at Someone Else Corp. they don't have the problem to begin with.

This x100. Sure, you might get lucky and as "the new guy" be able to show the company the error of their ways and get that big migration away from VB6/introduce modern development practices/rewrite that spaghetti code monster/expose your incompetent CIO and take his job, but chances are you'll also just be ignored and/or told to just do as the boss says, if not fired for trying to fix all the problems because nobody else in the company notices the problems.

Or you can go and work for a company that doesn't have any of those problems: They don't list a job as "VB.NET" when it's really VBA; they use cutting-edge and modern development practices; they mercilessly refactor code and all developers get unlimited resources for books/training/conferences; the CIO is either a developer himself and knows how it works, or else knows to trust the dev team and shield them from upper management.

Most of the time, it's not worth it trying to fix a company that has so many things wrong for them. Even if you don't just get ignored for being the newest member of the team, a company that has LET so many things go wrong doesn't have a clue about the right way to do it, else they wouldn't be in such dire straits to begin with.

If a company has to misrepresent a job (e.g. saying it's .NET when it's VBA because both has VB in the name), or outright lie (e.g. you will be working for a subsidiary company that offers "services" to the parent company, but they make it sound like it's just internal IT) there's a fundamental issue at the core of the company and its leadership as they believe it's okay to be dishonest to employees.

2013-04-10 Reply Admin

ObiWayneKenobi:
s73v3r:

And a manager willing to lie about how someone was classified is probably also willing to lie about what they'll be doing. Plus, if you're the developer for a non-technical group, asking those things isn't that helpful, because they aren't going to be able to answer you.

Exactly. Sometimes you just have a scumbag manager that lies. I had this happen twice:

... snip ...

I just hired with a new job under the premise, that I would be allowed to refactor their big-ball-of-mud code as I see fit. Now I am running into a lot of red tape with a manager about just doing the most basic readability / maintainability changes in that code.

What do I do? Jump job, just after 2 months?

2013-05-31 Reply Admin

Karen wasn’t interested in giving Tom any technical direction, so he dove in. The first step was get some space on a real database to migrate the data to. - http://tedbg.com He could then gradually move features into a .NET app and work with the users to make sure the new application mirrored what they needed from the old one. It was a little “cowboy coder”, but it would be a huge step up from what they currently had.

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