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Admin
I agree, this doesn't sound like a programmers design, more a manager that couldn't program passing it off when he ran out of, "Intro to Visual Basic".
The developer of this was proud of their acheivement, "Nah.. don't need PHP.. ASP. what's that? I developed my own".
I'm writing a brand new application for my company.. I'm really hoping I don't appear on here in 6 months! :o This site is motivation enough!
Admin
that is classic!
Admin
No doubt he'll have 50 smart alecks saying he did't quit soon enough.
"I wouldn't even work in that place for an HOUR! " Nya!
Admin
Indeed it does. I recently had the displeasure of working with Domino when I took a Javascript gig from Craigslist. I was expecting to edit .js files locally and upload them to a server... I had to take over the client's PC with VNC and work in Domino's IDE. The IDE itself doesn't seem to include the ability to edit arbitrary text files (external js, css, etc...), so it exports the files from its database and opens the external editor of your choice[0]. Once the file is saved, you must manually reload it in to the database. I wasn't sure if I should laugh or cry.
The client was very nice to work with, which made the whole experience bearable.
Admin
This is exactly like a company I worked with as a consultant. They had a "Tool" that you could use to build a front-end to their "Framework", which they had actually open sourced. Their target domain was so small it didn't matter, it was still a one-company framework. Anyway...
The big day comes and they demo "The Tool", which had no round-trip engineering, it was just a code generator. They sold it as a "GUI Builder". During the demo, I asked innocently how they would move a button 1/2" on the form that was on screen. They finally threw in the towel after 1.5 hours or trying to move the button, to no avail. I had to laugh. If you wanted to change ANYTHING on your UI, you would have to re-generate the entire thing all over again. To be fair they were selling a "GUI Builder", not a "GUI Changer", so I guess the joke was on me. Thank The Maker I don't work there anymore. We use Eclipse, Linux and Java where I work.
Good times. Good times.
Admin
<font size="5">B</font>e happy it is an in-house tool and not sold to customers. You could have been required to maintain it for them.
Admin
Leaving was a good idea. First-generation *Tools* are often clunky.
However, now that he's left the company, he has the perfect opportunity to develop a third-party add-on that supports - say...256 characters. A cleverly timed, rapid-fire succession of new releases that doubles the character limit with each release, could propel The Tool into the cosmic reaches of functionality. Soon enough, they'll be begging him to come back as lead developer for The Tool, or dare I say, The Toolbox?
Admin
"-- Image what you would discover after working there for 5 years..."
The compiler for the language The Tool is written in.
Admin
My my, that wouldn't be DominAptrix would it? I used to work on that and am glad to have gotten out of there alive... RoR is such a nice seachange.
Admin
<FONT face=Tahoma>At least they don't have to sacrifice 42 virgins to The Tool to keep it from being upset...
And here I am thinking of developing an object that encapsulates javascript to be used serverside...
Sheesh what am I thinking???
</FONT>
Admin
I developp a small "the tool" for my company.
A integrated editor is very usefull, so you only need a text browser to change a site. And the site will use templates anyway, so is trivial and natural to code that.
Admin
> In an effort to make life easier, I asked if I could tweak The Tool's interface.
In an effort to make life easier, I would have written an HTML to The Tool translator.
Admin
Actually there seem to be quite a lot of programmers around who are allergic to doing anything in a straightforward fashion, and I suspect quite a few of them would not only build something redundant but do it badly (OK, perhaps not quite this badly).
But management WTFs can eclipse programmer WTFs. A good manager would accept that this was a screw-up and ditch it. A less good manager would try to patch it up. A grossly incompetent manager would perpetuate the WTF by hanging on to it and blocking any attempt to alleviate the worst symptoms. But it takes a very special brand of moronic management to not only hang on to it but to believe that one has something of great value.
Admin
Or the guy that points out the difference between typos (accidentally hitting the wrong key) and plain old bad spelling (Not taking any notice of the huge wealth of written English, that exists around them, to arrive at some kind of competency in the subject).
;-)
Admin
In my schoolyears (about 6 years ago) I once saw a DOS-application for some kind of graphic design (they say it was used even for designing electronic circuits), and saw rather proficient people be fans of it. So, the point is that the application is an interpreter of a PostScript-like language but which has only one type of code and data - integers. Even commands are integers. So, a line command looks like that: -1 20 30 41 15, -1 being the line command code and the others being coordinates. Well, maybe some text was allowed for drawing text strings but I am not sure. Moreover, the program crashed of f*cked everything up, or at least gave out an error message like "Error 358" every time you did ANYTHING wrong, for instance if you provided a wrong number of arguments to a command. One programming teacher was particularly fond of this program because it needed discipline and because "if you did everything right, you would be unbeleivably productive". Like, modern fool-proof programs are for fools and this one is for Real Programmers.
Admin
And they think this monstrosity is on-sellable? There's free CMS' out there that are a layered clusterfoo like this one.
Admin
aren't*
Admin
Maybe it should be called "The Fool" ?
Admin
LMAO!!
Admin
It's not the size of the tool, it's how you use it.
Admin
Imagion what it would be like if they discovered Notepad or vi...
Admin
there are 3 types of people that need to be eliminated in the IT world.
- managers of developers that are under qualified for the decision making position they hold. ( and i am not saying everyone needs a degree or a piece of paper, "under-qualified" also meaning no experience)
- then there are the manager types who think that they can invent these kind of things so that in the future they do not need so many developers, so down the line they can save money
- there are also too many out there who code to keep themselves in a job by inventing crap like this deliberately to keep themselves in jobs (we've all heard the one about a contractor deliberately putting in large loops that just eat time, and when asked to fix performance, he hums and haws for a week then removes the loop)
(consultancy companies often come under all 3 of these types)
Admin
Talk about hitting the nail on the head. You are absolutely right. I've always been an advocate of not giving a shit whether someone has a degree or not (Mainly because I've spent 16 years writing software, and I never got a degree), as long as the person is capable of doing their job, and doing it well. The worst is having managers that have NFI about software development or have development experience, but not in the language(s) being used at the company.
Admin
No, the real WTF is that he was offered the job in the first place, withoug discussing his technical skills and seeing if they were a good fit for the company.
Admin
I don't see how you conclude that - no mismatch in technical skills AFAICT. (Or was that a poor attempt at sarcasm?) The mismatch was recruiting someone who wasn't prepared to waste his time doing something pointless and soul-destroying. Which was inevitable, and remains inevitable, as long as the company thinks their Tool is wonderful.
Admin
Something to remember is he noted he needed a job at the time. A lot of us in the IT world end up in situations where we just need a job. At one point I myself ended up having to accept a job as a PHP developer, just to make ends meet, when by nature I do C and C++ ... Luckily I only had to stay at that job a week before another offer came in for a job more to my liking.
Not to mention a lot of companies are highly proprietary, have their own libs, etc, so most of a candidates experience is moot. Case in point, my current job. It took me 6 months to get them to let me use Boost here because they wanted nothing but their existing libs used (Which were really crappy), so even if he had asked what the job was about, he may not have gotten any kind of informative answers just on the basis that the company seems really anal about sharing any kind of information at all about their tools, libs, etc, to anyone that isn't an employee and better still, they don't even trust their employees enough to see source codes until they've been their awhile.
Admin
Consider the following:
You are in charge. Your company needs a specific solution developed. Your company has a team of developers, however, they have not previously created a similar solution.
The question is: do you build it or buy it?
There is only one right answer: your compnay should buy it. This results in much higher quality because you will be buying a higher version. Think about it...
Admin
More often than not, yes this is usually the best course of action. But you also have to remember there are a lot of other issues involved here other than just using something that is tried and true. A company also has to consider the cost of the product, the license restrictions, can they copyright something they made using it, do they have to buy a license for each person that uses it for development, do they need to buy a vendor license to use the software for their own customers, how many people do they have to lay off to buy the software, what kind of learning curve is involved in using the software, what kind of support options exist for the software, do they have to pay additional fees for the support, the list goes on.
Sometimes the more cost effective thing to do is to make it yourself. Granted a lot of times the people given the task of creating the software aren't nearly qualified enough to make it, companies are out to make money, if they can save millions of dollars by making it in house, then thats what they are going to do, at the cost of potentially harming their reputation, having their people deal with the late night bug fix calls, support calls, etc. More often than not it costs less to make the software themselves, pay for the man hours to make it and support it, pay for on-site visits, etc, than to buy something that exists, deal with the licensing, and so on. There is an evil scenario to both sides of the fence :)
Admin
"Sometimes the more cost effective thing to do is to make it yourself."
Yeah we did that initially. Then the boss got wowed by sales talk and now we're paying for extra licensing and supporting both internal and external products which do exactly the same thing. Yay.
Moral of the story: If you have a stupid boss, don't let him talk to sales people.
Admin
No, no no. This isn't 1999 any more. Every good web designer knows you should print the page out and place it on a <div class="wooden">, using CSS for positioning.
Admin
They have developers with 2+ years of tenure?
Admin
That hits too close to home for this lurker. Domino can do magic in the right hands, I run an entire company on it. Those who dis it usually haven't been through the necessary learning curve.
Admin
The problem is far too many developers (Using any languages) like to think themselves as development gods. People who think they don't have to read books and tutorials and help files, and want only their libs and utilities and what not used. I sit on an IRC channel full of over 300 C++ developers at any given time and its amazing how many people come in there refusing to learn how to use something and/or prefering to use just the things they made even when their frustration levels would be dramatically decreased just by opening up a book or loading a website.
Admin
This sounds awfuly close to PeopleSoft's student admin system at my former University. They have (or had) a framework called the PeopleTool that are sold to end users (universities) for further development. The unversities (one I studied at, and yet another I worked for) then budget a number of ambitious "projects" that span usually 5 to 10 years. Those projects quickly become blackholes that suck in any available funding that would otherwise make student administration any easier.
Currently the school's deploying another online training system that's based on, you guessed, another Tool that allows the users to create course content pages and stitch them thru an 'advanced' navigation system. The content creation is embedding word documents in IFrames, and the generated navigation URL has enhanced students' obfuscation resistance by leaps and bounds, although many become dislexsic in the path of using the system.
captha: genius - enough said
Admin
Sure. In fact they ONLY have developers with 8+ years. And they have never used anything but(t) The Tool.
The problem is that they can't keep anyone new that gets a whiff of this sTool.
Admin
Admin
hah... remminds of a friend of mine who was troubleshooting an issue with a customer. He asked them to send a screen shot of the error message, of course expecting them to use the Print Screen to grab an image.
What they did instead was take a digital camera pic of the monitor, and emailed. Customer apologized for the delay saying it took the a day or two before they remembered to bring in thier camera.
Admin
What is the reasoning behind maintaining the anonymity of the companies that do this kind of crap? They should be publicly embarrassed for this, and I personally want to know the name of the company so that I don't ever accept a job from them!
Admin
Witango. Funny. I used to work for the company that bought witango from Everywhere and after a couple of years of instability (and no sales) they sold it.
Before they sold it I converted everything to ASP :). Then to ASP.Net!
Admin
Ouch.
[image]
Admin
As a software engineer in a consulting firm, I routinely see stuff like this.
It's barely a WTF anymore.
Remember the old saw about knows and not knows? Something like
"He who knows, and knows that he knows is a leader, follow him."
"He who knows and knows not that he knows is asleep, wake him."
"He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is ignorant - kick him.".
"He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is your worst enemy."
Something like that, anyway. I regularly run into the last case. I've had idiots bald-face lie to me about technical issues, even as I indicate all the reasons why they're full of it. As a consultant, the person most likely to give you trouble is the staff member who hasn't a clue but knows that they don't have a clue. They'll carefully structure things to divert attention away from themselves - and towards you.
Watch it - they're more common than you realize.
Admin
so, the question is, who's going to take one for the team and get a job there for a couple of years so we can see the tool source code? i'm sure there's some real gems in there.
Admin
When I was a school, one thng was paramount:
"Remember the rule, guard your tool!"
CAPTCHA = genius
How'd it know it was me?
Admin
I know exactly which company you're talking about (I think) and what city it's in.. and my wife escaped there early (she was a writer - "content developer").
Admin
This sounds amazingly familiar. I once worked for a company that had some similar monstrosity called "Harm-00-nize". As far as they were concerned, it was the best high level RAD evar(!!!!) and could even changer your oil and cure your Aids.
It did a lot of the same stuff like storing functionality in the database among other things and abstracting the bulk of the HTML. It also stored all data for an application in one table! Ultimately, the boneheads attempted to use MySQL like an OODBMS so it was slow as Christmas as well. Once they realized just how challenged the system was from a performance view point, you should've seen how fast they scattered. LOL!!!!
If I ever see anything like that again, I'll run screaming.
Admin
Sounds like Pega Rules Process Commander to me....
Admin
Was the name of the place you were working "The Company", cause i've heard they are working on a project to detrone windows and make us all forget about linux, mac os and any other os : "The Operating System", that only runs on "The Computer".
Ok almost luch time here in Germany, i guess i'm take "The Car" and and "..." and ride to "The House" to get "The Meal" cooked by "The Wife" ...
$THEDONKEY$
Admin
From the description of 'The Tool' I can understand why they don't want developers looking at the code. I'm a developer and if I had created something that embarrasing I wouldn't want anybody tooking at my code either.
Or maybe they are afraid nobody would steal the code!
Admin
Nah. I wouldn't say that.
Container in this that and the other thing starts to sound like how one builds UIs in Motif. The 128 character restriction with no carraige returns sounds like a poorly designed database for the purpose. The removal of BR is just puzzling.
Admin
It's totally domino! OMG I remember spending days on stuff such as: "How do I remove this extra linespace?"