• (cs) in reply to John Smallberries
    John Smallberries:
    dubwai:
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    I have been fixing bugs and adding functionality to the code for over a month now, and I am shocked every single day at how poorly the application was written.

    I wonder if we work at the same company.  500K is nothing.  We've paid way more for stuff that doesn't even work at all.  But outsourcing development is a 'success', full steam ahead!


    Seriously. We paid about $2 million US for a system that took over a year to write. When it was delivered, it supported about 5 concurrent users (this was a web app, so that pretty much sucked) and ran at a snail's pace. They brought me in, I hired 4 more developers, and it took us 6 months to get the thing usable.

    Just for details: This was a specialized on-line content authoring app. The main problem was the content versioning mechanism. There was a single version number for all the content. Any time anyone made any change, the entire version's data was copied to new records in the DB. A fix to a single character typo would necessitate thousands of inserts into hundreds of tables. We had to redesgn the DB schema to support independent versioning of content sections, then reimplement the app on top. grrrr....

    You're making this up, right?

     

    Right?

     

    [:|]

  • (cs) in reply to vhawk

    Anonymous:
    Top-tier consultancy firms also hires programmers fresh from university or even those that have just completed their wonderfull MC** certification or other worthless money making certification. These people are then supposed to know what they are doing.  The truth is that these people knows very little about real life programming

    Thank goodness for all of those worthless consultants!  Over the last 15 yrs (I've been programming for 24 yrs) I've worked for several top-tier consulting firms all over the US- fixing WTF's, redesigning etc. But it seems over the last 4 years (since .NET maybe) the situation has become pathetic.  So bad coders keep it up... I'm making a very profitble living off of your mistakes [<:o)]

  • (cs) in reply to JohnO
    Anonymous:

    $500K is nothing and at least that project went to production.  We had a project that cost $120M and never got to production.  We literally flushed $120M down the toilet. 

    You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.

  • (cs) in reply to rogthefrog
    rogthefrog:
    John Smallberries:
    dubwai:
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    I have been fixing bugs and adding functionality to the code for over a month now, and I am shocked every single day at how poorly the application was written.

    I wonder if we work at the same company.  500K is nothing.  We've paid way more for stuff that doesn't even work at all.  But outsourcing development is a 'success', full steam ahead!


    Seriously. We paid about $2 million US for a system that took over a year to write. When it was delivered, it supported about 5 concurrent users (this was a web app, so that pretty much sucked) and ran at a snail's pace. They brought me in, I hired 4 more developers, and it took us 6 months to get the thing usable.

    Just for details: This was a specialized on-line content authoring app. The main problem was the content versioning mechanism. There was a single version number for all the content. Any time anyone made any change, the entire version's data was copied to new records in the DB. A fix to a single character typo would necessitate thousands of inserts into hundreds of tables. We had to redesgn the DB schema to support independent versioning of content sections, then reimplement the app on top. grrrr....

    You're making this up, right?

     

    Right?

     

    [:|]


    Sadly, no.

    To make matters worse, the initial contractor went through a lot of developers, so some parts of the system had completely different designs from others. Some tables were reasonbly normalized, while similar tables had hundreds of columns.

    Here's another little tidbit that I had (mercifully) forgotten:

    We asked the contractor to fix a few things to fulfill the contract (or we wouldn't pay) and when we got the code, we couldn't get it to run on any of our servers. We had the contractor come on site, and they couldn't install it either. We ended up taking their development server (yes, the physical box) and running it as our production server.

    You can't make this shit up...
  • (cs)
    • SQL Server was issuing 456,302 locks;
    • COM+ was starting 299 transactions;
    • 1,150 select/update/insert statements were sent to the database.


    WOW that is a lot .. mine has 3 selects or about 8 selects for something complex like an entire links database.
  • PeteM (unregistered) in reply to Gordy

    Anonymous:
    This was in the mid 90s with Y2K looming a few years away. We must have been paying in 30-50GBP per hour for the two (or three) weeks it took him to create this at the end of his contract; a minimum of 2400 GBP (max 6000 GBP) for something that any decent C++ developer could do in half a day; with the other other half day for writing the tests.

    That experience has coloured my view of jobbing contractors. No doubt this is a very unfair view but it has made me very wary of bring contractors in on projects.

    As someone who has been a contractor in the UK for a long time I can say that this sort of thing annoys the professional contractor as much as you. In the late 90's when everyone was panicing about Y2K demand out stripped supply for decent contractors, because of this the industry filled up with clueless muppets which got us all a bad name. After 2000 a lot of decent guys went back to permenant because of the idiots and the way they were driving rates down to unsustainable levels - I was often competing against guys will to work for £20,000 pa. For a while a picked up enough work sorting out the mess these guys left behind but eventually I got out.

    I'm now back contracting and overall I think the standards have pretty much returned the pre Y2K levels although there as still a few idiots out there and enough employers without the ability to select the decent people to keep them employed.

  • (cs) in reply to catapultic

    One alternative to server session variables is middle tier objects.  The object can deliver information from a data cache or refresh the cache when needed.  I have only seen this done with ASP.NET though.

  • (cs) in reply to codewulf
    codewulf:
    One alternative to server session variables is middle tier objects.  The object can deliver information from a data cache or refresh the cache when needed.  I have only seen this done with ASP.NET though.

    The intrinsic Session object is a middle tier object that delivers data from its cache.

    Custom middle tier classes suffer from the same problems as the Session object: state needs to be kept somewhere, since the objects are destroyed after the call returns. Session uses a cookie for this. One benefit that a custom class can offer is a common place to keep the session data, so it will work across a web farm, but the ASP.Net Session class offers such a mechanism, also.
  • Sune (unregistered)

    You should have got the $500 K instead.

Leave a comment on “Your $500,000 System”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article