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Admin
If I had been Jared, that first conversation with Scott would have had me insulting him deeply and personally, with extremes of socially unacceptable expletives.
Let the flak land where it will.
Admin
Mine would have been to quit. Seriously, "unpaid overtime" means immediate resignation, no questions asked. It's also pretty much illegal over here on the continent but that's besides the point.
Admin
The buzzword zombie strikes again.
Also, enterprise busses are overrated. Here in America we have Enterprise cars (for rent) and in Europe they swear by their enterprise trains.
Admin
"enterprise buzzes" FTFY
Admin
Alternatively, solve the problem BOFH-style, with a supercharged cattle prod, a roll of carpet, a bag of quicklime and a shovel.
Admin
Scott is definitely manager material.
Admin
Looking forward to follow Scott and his career here.
Admin
No doubt Scott and his 7000-line God Awful object will show up again, unless he gets hit by a clue-by-4, but that is not likely to be effective with this kind of person.
Admin
Since the code is in git, there's a reasonable chance that it is practical to fork from just before Scott took a dump on the code. That'd be more of a pain if Scott had forced in deletes of branches, but he's probably not ever going to be knowledgeable enough to do that so it's at least unlikely. But that would depend on the team using git as it is supposed to be used, not as a glorified single-branch subversion.
They probably need to instigate a branch+CI testing regime that's enforced for everyone, so that they can push back against Scott's helicoptered in turds (at least until he works out how to make his code build and deletes all the tests). And specifically lock out Scott from touching that config.
Admin
Jared, Larry and Barry made me think of the old Newhart show.
Admin
I'm Jared, and this is my brother Larry, and this is my other brother ~L~Barry.
Admin
The day it happened, those 3 should have made immediate backups from the nightly backup tapes of the day before Scott trashed everything. They could also keep it running on their own PC's, repeating any ongoing business development, which should be very few given the huge bug load. After a few weeks of hell, all three should have a quit/exit interview with Scott's boss. "Someone's quitting today. Scott or we three? BTW, if it's Scott, you'll be up and running in an hour. Your choice".
Admin
That's the new Newhart show. The old one was when he was a dentist.
Admin
He was a psychologist in the old one.
Admin
Oops, thanks for the correction, DaveD. The dentist was across the hall or something, right?
Admin
So if the god code didn't compile how was it allowed into production?
Admin
Scott was really Scott Adams, bouncing between university projects to create real-life source material for his comic strip.
Admin
Right, they shared a receptionist.
Admin
And if you are a fan of For All Mankind, there's a running Newhart show gag. The first crew of the south pole lunar base, Jamestown, had but one and only one videotape for entertainment. ( VHS). The tape had 6 episodes of Newhart. So whenever any one the three says "Hi Bob." even yeas later the others must reply the same.
Incidentally. the tape was eaten up by the VCR, so now if they wanted Newhart they knew the dialog by heart and would recreate it in the moon base on a slow evening.
Admin
I worked as a programmer in a university department ages ago.
Our local Nobel laureates would have had the dean of the faculty, the chancellor (CFO) and the president of the university inviting that hapless group manager to a meeting in the president's office before the morning was out. The problem would have been solved by the time Scott didn't get back from lunch.
Admin
Most likely Scott was a relative of someone important in this university. Such people aren't fired until they screw up majorly enough to take their patron with them.
Admin
This is strange. I’m quite sure that I can just revert to any previous version in git. Anyway, one thing that will never happen is that I do unpaid overtime because someone who is still employed messed up royally. The correct solution was to fire Scott and use the salary saved to pay for overtime.
Admin
Thing is, that involves having a boss that actually understands what's going on. If Scott is good at bullshitting (and his types always are) and the guy above him can't tell a cup of strange coffee from a creature in star wars it's fairly easy for Scott to just explain any problems away as "just one of those problems that happen with programming". Or worse yet, blame it on his subordinates and get them fired giving him both a clean exit and an excuse for why he needs to spend months fixing things.
Admin
@dfk - he simply (supposition) deleted the Git repo remote and created a new one with just his one commit....
Admin
I'm Jared and this is my friend Sandy. We here at Bona Coder will bend over for your fulfilment.