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Admin
They might be time pod travelers, but at least they're not so backwards that they forbid introducing source control.
Hardly interesting in the long term.
Admin
Interesting @accalia there. How do you accidentally replace an "n" with a "t"?
Oh look, some gramming, too!
Admin
They're right next to each other?
http://www.computerhope.com/help/dvorak.gif
Relevant: http://bash.org/?670375
Admin
A happy ending!
Admin
At least they seemed willing to change. Most places like this in my experience would see no reason to use any of that newfangled stuff and fire the person who kept pushing for it.
Admin
Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/1530/
Admin
Ive been reading articles for quite a whole on the site.. it's good for some entertainment. However.. this article tickles me the wrong way.
You know beforehand that it's all very much ad hoc business.. and you know the coding most likely will not follow industry standards (hence : The Galapagos). The fact that you get surprised by having no source control.. is very surprising to me. You ought to have made that assumption already. (at my current employer it's excately like that, where I'm given free range to change it)
Therefor.. having all your logic in a single file with thousand of lines.. is to be expected in this context. (doesn't happen that often, but if you're inside a company with 20-30 years legacy and a gray IT developers.. you can suspect this to happen)
My Real WTF is the incapability of Calvin dealing with different situations..
There might be a single exception, but it's never perfect anywhere.. Dealing with imperfect solutions.. is what a professional does.. A professional doesn't throw the towel in the ring after seeing things, he should've known beforehand.
I'm sorry, but Calvin.. you wouldn't get hired.. it's an indication of a "dont want to" attitude. It's amateurism in my eyes.
Other posts are entertaining, but this one I find almost insulting to the original company.
Admin
FTFM
Admin
I cant help but to read I-Twerk(s).
Admin
More like relevant: http://bash.org/?5300
Admin
That too..
Admin
Damn you both. I clicked the link and then Random. I'd forgotten what a deep, dark hole Bash was.
Admin
Yer welcome.
Admin
Admin
The article says:
followed by Aren't those two contradictory? C# is only 15 years old, yet he learned it didn't he? I realize he calling out to VB dlls for some stuff, but there's still apparently 100K lines of C# code written. I expect the VB dlls would be either to ease the rewrite or for legacy support.For example, start with a C# shell of a class that just calls the original VB code. Then slowly rewrite each original function and method in C# and call those instead of the VB ones. Eventually you reach a point when there are no more calls to the original VB code, and you can stop using it.
Similarly, an old application would use a lot of older libraries, which may not be available or directly accessible from newer languages. To keep providing that legacy functionality you need to be able to keep using those libraries.
Admin
I was also surprised by that - VB.NET would have been a lot more fitting.
Admin
What, having basic requirements and standards? Like source control? Like code sanity?
It's like telling a construction worker "what, you want a helmet on your head when demolishing a building? I'm sorry, but you know it's a very ad-hoc business, and I don't know how you can be surprised by us not following standard procedures. You know, I feel you have this kind of a 'don't want to' attitude."
Admin
A job in his field, close to home, in a stable company? Check. Company gives him leeway to implement his ideas and the resources he needs to do so? Check. Stable codebase that 'purrs like a kitten' but still has lots of low-hanging fruit to harvest? Check.
He's got the opportunity to look like a superstar for not a lot of effort. If the pay is acceptable too, I'd say this guy won the lottery, in the short-term. His only danger is being bored in a few years once he's gotten things lined out; a small market sometimes means a dearth of new projects.
Admin
Should it be 'INWerks'?
Admin
There goes the american dream. Going back to the middle ages. In a few years he might be able to see them running from the explosion of their meth lab or moonshine distillery.
Admin
That's why you select Debug or Release mode before building. Duh!!!1
Admin
I thought maybe you were a troll, but it's clear you're a self-absorbed maniac.
This isn't about not having source control. This is flat out source anarchy. The one person working on the code doesn't even have control over it. Builds are created right on the production server, in the production environment. There's no excuse for that. That was never OK... not in 1995, not in 1945.
You don't even have good reading comprehension. Calvin stayed with the company, and helped fix their issues. He dealt with it. I wonder how you can deal with walking, what with the fact that when you were six months old, crawling worked just fine, so why change?
...
Admin
Granted, I did miss the part, where he stayed with the company.
It's just not a WTF. 20-30 years old coding with people, who are actually open to change. To find these practices surprising is the real WTF.
I mean.. if he didn't live right next door.. he would quit, because they used 20 years old working code? Again: not professional
There's loads of 20 year old codes, which can be entered as WTF.. but they arent.
You haven't read it correctly yourself either. My issue was about him seeing this as WTF, which again.. it isn't. It's just not worthy to address very old legacy code as WTF..
For your example.. if I started crawling and people were surprised I was crawling at 6 months old.. that would be a WTF. Not that I was crawling, but their surprise. (altho a lot of parents are surprised when it happens) Please think a bit longer.
Admin
Really, really hate dvorak.
Admin
Mostly because we don't (generally) pick on targets this easy. That's also why there's a general "no student/inexperienced intern code" rule.
On the other hand, if you didn't learn anything beyond crawling at the age of 30, we would be rightfully freaked out. Most people would also not want to familiarize themselves with you any further.
Admin
Heh.. somehow "On the other hand, if you didn't learn anything beyond crawling at the age of 30, we would be rightfully freaked out" is quite amusing.
But I want to keep it short.. didnt want to be rude, but I kinda misworded myself.. so my apologies.
I've got the same situation, when I started with my current job. Nothing at all (it was setup 10 years ago by non-developers and started from within Excel) Still in the middle of setting it all up.. being source control and such.. but I never considered it a WTF. (there's code snippets that are, but in context it's still pretty fine)
Admin
....and they lived happily ever after.
I like these programmer's fairy tales!
unfortunately - the real world works different
Admin
I walked into a similar situation a couple of years ago, and quietly introduced source control and separate development and test environments. Followed shortly by SQL query parameterization.
My higher-ups didn't understand exactly what I was doing, but they did notice that:
And yes, that turned into a happily-ever-after gig for all involved, because they had never had a competent guy in my chair before.
Admin
At least it's not TV Tropes.
It would be horrible if there were some kind of crossover between the two.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Website/BashOrg
Admin
I'm stuck in a place kind of like this, except much newer.
Things we do have:
Things I wish we had:
Admin
Having a single file with 100k lines of C# code doesn't necessarily imply that he learned anything.
Admin
I've been to places at all parts of this spectrum. From no source control, no backups, no testing, no backout procedures, to having the whole modern schmeer. The new stuff is somewhat helpful, much of the time, but the only constant are the people and the dumb processes that make progress difficult to impossible.
Admin
Even if something is expected from a certain sort of person or environment it can be a WTF. You're right that it's not surprising that they didn't use source control. It's still a WTF.
Admin
Of course he's a troll! He's posting here, isn't he? Also, you say troll and self-absorbed maniac as if those are two separate things.
Admin
http://i.imgur.com/U7Ghu2s.gif?noredirect
Admin
You just demonstrated the WTF. Non-developers working on code IS a WTF. If you're running a business, you don't do your own plumbing, electricity, or construction unless your profession was in one of those things, so why do people tend more to give it a pass when non-experts try to code something? It's one thing if someone dabbles in it in their spare time, but when you're running a public facing business, you kinda want professional experts to do what they're trained to do.
The WTFs in the article are as such:
1.) Automatically deploying upon building in your development environment (or, in this case, probably using your development environment as your production environment). There's NO excuse for this. None. There wasn't an excuse for it in 1995, and there certainly isn't an excuse for it now.
2.) Never looking ahead and keeping current with technology. These guys are lucky they survived Y2K... although given their setup, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an unwritten story where their business was offline for all of January, 2000 because they had Y2K bugs that they had to patch. Not to mention the very probable security holes that are present in old technology because they've outlived their lifetime. Again, there's no excuse for an 15-20 year old outdated system because you can't be bothered to keep up with the times. You can't be a tech company and think that's acceptable.
3.) A monolithic garbled clusterfuck of spaghetti code that manages to work-around all of the benefits of object oriented programming. VB5 was object oriented. C# is object oriented. They decided to completely circumvent that because they're a bunch of idiots. Again, that sort of thing is not acceptable in 1995, nor is it acceptable now. If you're going to use a platform and language, you've got to use them correctly, or else you're going to have major problems later on, as these guys no doubt had.
The guy in the OP is, in fact, a professional, given that he had such a WTF feeling when he looked at code that was very clearly engineered by non-professionals. It's no different than if a plumber had the same feeling if he/she came on-site to look at some installation that the business owners thought they could do themselves and find that they're using empty paper towel tubes instead of PVC pipe and believe that, because all they need to do is replace the rolls every week it's "purring like a kitten."
The only non-WTF in this story is they were open to change and vast improvements to the way they were doing things before. Such a happy ending isn't always the case on this site, and I'm glad the OP found what became a great job, and I'm sure his patience and professionalism is what convinced his colleagues to comply with his wishes to bring them to sanity.
Admin
That's not how people in the South talk
That's not even how people who make fun of how people in the South talk do it
Admin
What next, are you going to tell me that people in Hesse University in Dresden don't always quote the Book of Five Rings?
Admin
A certain large company (no names...OK Xerox) published a web service for a new SAAS which generated a Java file of about 80 000 lines and was steadily expanding by the time I stopped trying to deal with it. WTFery is not confined to small companies in the sticks.