Alex R. was the architect of a brand spanking new system that was to read inputs from numerous other internal systems, crunch a whole bunch of numbers, record everything in a database and spew forth a massive report file. He spent months designing the major details of the system, and more months designing the various sub-components. From all this came a variety of business-level data structures which spawned POJOs and the underlying DB tables to store assorted inputs, flags and outputs. He did a fairly thorough job of documenting all the interfaces, and provided detailed specifications for all of the next-level methods that were left as TBDs in the design.

Java Programming Cover

The project manager then assigned units of work to numerous offshored junior developers who managed to get virtually everything wrong. If they couldn't understand what a spec required, they changed the spec to reflect what they actually wrote. This caused Alex to start versioning the requirements document in order to catch the changes by the junior developers so that they could be rolled back.

After a while, the number of junior-developer-caused issues was piling up and Alex suggested some training sessions on certain ways of doing things to reduce the chaff he had to deal with. Management turned him down because they couldn't afford to take developers off of coding tasks for purposes of training; there was a schedule to keep! The fact that oodles of time were being wasted on them building the wrong stuff only to have to have why it was wrong explained and then have them go back and re-do it - sometimes 6 or 7 times - was irrelevant.

So how does one deal with idiotic management like this?

Alex thought that he had found a way to expose the problem and (hopefully) force something to be done. He would put in something (that any experienced developer should be able to spot as a simple code formatting issue) that the junior developers would never spot. The code would work correctly, but it would stymie them so that they had to first understand it before they could change it. He used the following coding style in a variety of locations throughout the codebase and waited: 

  List<Widget> widgets;
  for (int i=0; i<limit; i++) {
      // Do stuff
  } while ((widgets = getWidgets()) == null);

For those not familiar with Java, the closing brace of a for-loop is followed by an implicit semicolon, so the while (expression); statement is unrelated to the for-loop. However, the junior developers didn't know this, and couldn't find any documentation on a for-while statement. Although they were able to create little test programs, they didn't understand how the while-expression controlled the for-loop (it doesn't). In this case, the underlying DAO either returned a populated list or threw an exception, so it was effectively while-false (the function call and assignment occurred once) and was just syntactic nonsense that confused the junior developers.

They couldn't recognize a Java 101 code format issue and they were sufficiently stubborn that they refused to simply ask Alex what the code was doing. They were even foolish enough to openly discuss it amongst themselves on a conference line - agreeing not to ask for help until they figured it out - before a meeting with Alex and his boss began.

After 6 weeks of them floundering around on it, the offshore manager finally brought the issue up with Alex and his boss, at which time Alex explained what running the code formatter would show. He then pointed out that since they didn't know the basics of reading Java code and preferred to waste massive amounts of time rather than just asking about something they didn't understand, it was clear that they didn't have the wherewithall to make technical decisions on a larger scale, or change the design documents as they saw fit.

He continued to point out that until the junior developers showed marked improvements in their understanding of simple code, they should concentrate on learning to do basic programming instead of trying to be architects. To this end, he again offered to have ongoing training sessions where he would attempt to raise their skill level.

Of course management backed the cheap offshore labor. It was at this point that Alex realized it was a lost cause, so he fixed all the for-while snippets and updated the latest version of the detailed design document with a new opening paragraph:

  To Whomever Inherits This System:

  Detailed design documents were created by experienced people. Management decreed
  that junior developers could ignore them, at will and without penalty. The state
  of the code reflects this.
  
  Fair Warning!

Then he committed it, secure in the knowledge that the junior developers would never bother to look at it again once he was gone. Then he gave two weeks notice.

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