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Admin
I like this! A tinge of very familiar pain struck me as I read it.
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I prefer bagets to begats. They don't leave such a bad aftertaste and cost less.
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almost frist
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I do have to wonder though, did no one have to validate the new system beyond his demo of it?
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Hahahhaah, good joke Kattman!
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so why did they let him change a working well documented system?
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:)
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Really? Management (which actually does have a purpose) let this guy run amok for two years without any evaluation of what he was doing? Typical University IT team perhaps. I never worked on one, but have only heard stories. In the end, maybe everyone got what they deserved.
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It seems that things weren't going so well at Dave's new job. A month later he called, hoping that they might need a little more consulting help. "I've got a lot of free time, now," he said.
snif I love a happy ending.
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Actually, the article never said that is what he was hired to do. He just took it upon himself to do the rewrite because he thought he could apply a little "I can do it better".
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You know, I'm honestly surprised that Dave didn't just turn off the old batch files. I really expected him to delete them, and then search out any backups and delete them as well, and rifle through all the previous begatters offices to purge any possible paper copies.
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If it ain't broke, fix it until it is.
Seriously though, I do hate the whole notion of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". There's some truth to it, but frankly if we all took that approach, we'd never invent anything - including the computer. We used candles for hundreds of years, they were simple and they "just worked". Sure, they occasionally set things on fire but so does the modern lightbulb (well, possibly not the energy saving ones).
The point is, if there's a better way to do something then you should probably do it, but that also means you should do the doing part better as well. Get a list of bullet points of the proposed and the old system, deciding what the pros and cons are. Does the old system have a lot of cons? Then an upgrade is due. Does the new system have a lot of cons? Then scrap it and try again.
These kind of antics hold everyone back. A good, solid design with a good testing process would have made the new system 10x better than the old system but instead, 10 years down the line when Batch scripts suddenly no longer work (Change of OS? NEW OS? Overzealous security software?) they'll be stuck on either outdated systems or scrambling to get something half as good up ASAP.
Planning. Do it.
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This is why you don't let a person or team just go into a hole and write a bunch of code for several months. I can't stress enough how Agile development would have mitigated this process. When you work in small sprints, it guarantees that you will get a complete product that works, with documentation.
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You're new here aren't you?
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Reality and commen knowledge (let's not call it sense because that isn't common) are not the same. More often than not, I have heard Dos Bat files simply called batch files and in this context I would tend to relate them the same, if only to add to the WTFery.
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By comparison, electric light bulbs are almost zero-maintenance, very much brighter, don't flicker or blow out in windy conditions, are smoke-free, and cause fires only rarely.
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It's the carpenter; not the hammer that makes the difference.
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Give me a good batch file any day.
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So you threw VB in there just because WHY? VB showed problems with programmers so much easier because "everyone" could pick it up. It had error handling just like any othe rlanguage, but since "everyone" could program in it they never used it. Problem wasn't the language, but the programmers, VB just made it easier to spot the problems later because it was more easily read.
Just don't get me started on those "hey I can read this I must be a programmer" types. There are far to many of them still banging on a keyboard thinking they are writting good code.
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Only somewhat true. Some hammers (like Objective-C) have a striking surface made of low-density polystyrene foam, only one claw, and there's a wasp nest attached to the handle. It actually works better if you hold it upside down and use the wasp nest as the striking surface, but that's against the manufacturer's terms of use and they won't let you sell any products made with a hammer used in such a fashion. Unfortunately the company that makes these hammers has an awesome marketing team, meaning a lot of us carpenters get forced to use it because the client says so. And then they wonder why it takes so long to build something.
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Also, Java ain't being as bad as some scarecrow is saying. Very often I am geting code, however, that needs me massage it to be clean and catching all exception.
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It's not actually wrong?
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So what's a BPM tool, anyhow?
Bowel-like Program Movement?
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TRWTF is management not correcting what was obviously a bad hire. It happens - substandard people get hired. The wrong way to deal with it is let them sit in the corner and hope they don't cause too much damage. Only two options: Fix 'em or Fire 'em.
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#3. Documentation is obvious lie.
Has anybody here work on complete documented system? I bet Rs 500/- from my next salary slip.
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I agree completely about Perl - while it doesn't necessarily make it as easy to write -large- maintainable applications as some languages, I've certainly seen decent-sized scripts in perl that were entirely pretty and easy to figure out. Perl kinda gets a bad rap just because it makes it so easy to write unreadable garbage if that's what you're trying for. That said... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL_programming_language
Technically Turing Complete! (Yes, I do know you were actually implying that only about languages that were designed to get work done in them, rather than languages designed intentionally as parodies, but I like nitpicking.)
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Sure, that sounds good in theory, but I worked with an actual Agile dev team. They turned out plenty of awful code and had a project basically thrown away by the client after months of work because oops, they forgot to gather requirements first! So when they triumphantly unveiled the first demo (that the client knew nothing about), the reaction was "...yeah, this doesn't really work for us, and by the way how much of our money did you spend on this?"
By contrast some of the very best code I've seen was turned out by single programmers working alone "off in a cave", with a coherent vision and the skills to realize it.
(The dirty little secret of all the coding fads like Agile and XP is this: no technique on earth can make bad programmers into good programmers. Only becoming a good programmer can. And if your team is made of good programmers, it doesn't much matter which technique(s) they use, as long as they're all in sync together.)
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In my experience, when an Agile development effort fails, it's because the team wasn't doing Agile correctly.
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You're talking about XCode aren't you?
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"It wasn't a terribly pretty system, but it did have a few very important features: It worked."
Sometimes a piece of code will be defended in the comments with this phrase and the poster will be decried, yet it passes unmentioned this time.
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I endorse this view in full & total.
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Having worked at a university in the past, this story is entirely credible. You have to understand how a university is different from a Real Job:
The university's money doesn't mostly come from satisfied customers. It comes from vague threats of violence against reluctant taxpayers. So there is no need to show a profit, or a return on investment.
Given the lack of motivation to spend the minimum amount of money as productively as possible, managers' self esteem is directly tied to how much money they spend not how much they make for their employer.
This means if you have an opportunity to hire someone you do so, in order to build your empire and keep those salary dollars flowing through your hands in future years. It is not important that the employee produce good work inexpensively, since profits and productivity don't matter.
By the same rule, you'd never want to fire anyone because that takes you down the ladder a notch. Besides, you can't fire a government employee for anything less than mass chainsaw murder fully recorded by the security cameras. Or hate speech, i.e. saying anything not Politically Correct.
Under this system (non-capitalism) it is amazing anything works at all.
But of course capitalism is TRWTF. So what are we to do?
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That's a really lousy thing to say, though.
"Agile didn't work!" "Then you did it wrong!"
That said- Agile is a good way to get a team in sync. It's not a project management technique, it's not even a "coding fad"- it's how you organize a team and keep them headed in the same direction.
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I just laughed out loud in my cube
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