• ph (unregistered)

    Great note!!

    as reported recently re a major outsourcing company and how they engage their guns for hire - if there's a pulse and a heartbeat we hire them!!

    and obviously large corporations and government are full of them!

  • mark_e (unregistered)

    funny the timing of this article...

    I've started a contract last monday after being out of the business for 4 years. I can understand perfectly the authors POV but, remember, legacy systems can take a while to ramped up to speed.

    For example, this current contract is a 14 year-old system that is cobbled together using Delphi and xBase tables...no SQL(!), and I am, or course, being tasked to write reports that no one else wants to grind through. Fine, thats why they pay me, but now 8 days into the contract, I am sensing from my boss that he is getting impatient about completing my first report, which was speced late Friday.

    We are talking 5 FULL class libraries and about 12 custom components, all talking together. While I've made good progress, it very irratating to me that the manager is expecting me to be done with this COMPLETELY NEW report in two days. Just remembering the Borland VCL stuff is time consuming.

    Anyway, bad apples are everywhere...lets not group all contractors into this bin, please

  • Felicia (unregistered)

    Yeah he would have been messed up after i was done with him!!! Sorry bastard!

  • Some Random Texan (unregistered) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    I bet he was typing all the comments just to make it look like he was working. And probably since he thought someone would ask how many lines he has written.

    Do contracts cover this kind of incompetence? What if he did choose to bill them? Could they just decide he was worthless and not pay him, or would there be a legal case?

    I think he might have been typing comments because he couldn't figure out the current code, so he was "documenting" it in an attempt to figure it out.

    When he realized it was more complex than his freshman VB6.0 coding homework, he bailed but left all the comments.

    I say this, because when I was in college, the early CS degree dropouts left those kinds of comments in code when working on a team.

  • Some Random Texan (unregistered)

    He didn't ask for pay, but at the same time, he cost the company in opportunity cost, because the work could have been done by then.

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