With the Webinar I'm doing this morning, I didn't have a chance to finish today's article. So instead, let's do a classic! Meaninglessness was originally published on April 19, 2007.
As you may or may not know, my day job is a Software Developer at Inedo, and I work on a pretty cool application called BuildMaster that helps software teams build, configure, and deploy their software applications. Years before, however, Inedo was a custom-software firm that was primarily focused on building all sorts of businessy software that does all sorts of businessy things for all sorts of businessy, erm, businesses. Bank stuff, manufacturing stuff, health care stuff, you name it. Most days, it was a challenging and satisfying job; I’d go home thinking, I accomplished something today. But every once in a while, I couldn’t help but wonder, why am I spending my life building cold, meaningless business applications?
A few weeks ago, the fine folks at the IASA invited to speak at one of their webinars to discuss an article I wrote a little while back. It's a free webinar, and runs tomorrow (Thu, Mar 18, 2010) from 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM Eastern:
If you’ve worked at enough companies in the IT industry, you’ve probably noticed that the most talented software developers tend to not stick around at one place for too long. The least talented folks, on the other hand, entrench themselves deep within the organization, often building beachheads of bad code that no sane developer would dare go near, all the while ensuring their own job security and screwing up just enough times not to get fired.
It’s a pretty common programming problem: given two dates, determine how many days are between them. Most programmers have the benefit of built-in library code, whether that’s DateTime in .NET, Calendar in Java, and so on. Some – MUMPS programmers, probably – have no choice but to parse and then re-implement the same “30 days hath September…” algorithm. And then of course there are the few who re-implement it anyway, perhaps because they figured that no one else in the history of computing had ever solved that unique problem.
But an even rarer breed are those that, like Paul’s predecessor, who to use built-in code… but from an entirely different platform. Take this method, found in production code, that inputs two dates and a TimeDifference to determine how far apart the dates are. An easy enough concept in C# that’s implemented with a trip to the database.
When Hassan joined Meteor's IT department in 2006, he was pleasantly surprised to find everyone abuzz with excitement.
Months earlier, the previous CIO retired, and a new Head of IT had just been appointed, bringing with him the mandate that old Pentium III PCs that sat on each desk had to go. With 128MB, they struggled to keep up with Windows NT 4.0 and Office 97. He had persuaded the board to allocate millions to replace every workstation and server, and upgrade the infrastructure to match. The company would move on up to the heady delights of Windows XP SP2, Office 2007 and Exchange 2003.
“It seems every other week,” Samuel writes, “there’s a story about outsourcing gone bad. Maybe we’ve been lucky, but for the past decade or so, we simply couldn’t have survived without our friendly team of offsite developers.”
“You see, I work for a manufacturing company, and our main campus is located a good half-hour away from the outskirts of a suburb of a sparsely populated Midwestern city. Every business in town – from the dry cleaners to the restaurants – is owned or subsidized by the company. Just about every resident works, worked, or will work for the company. ”
"Half the world's IT people hate our company's guts," Aaron told the HR lady. "For once, can we hire someone from the other half?"
"The last round of consultants didn't hate us," she replied.
"This code was left by the Senior Software Consultant," Michael Wheeler writes, "I'm not sure if it's insurance against 'Return' not returning... or a comment that explained why the line of code was left in."
Public Shared Function GetItemFromValue(ByVal ddlControl As DropDownList) As Integer
Dim i As Integer
If ddlControl.Items.Count > 0 Then
For i = 0 To ddlControl.Items.Count - 1
If ddlControl.Items(i).Selected() Then
Return i
Exit For 'leaving this here cause we're in a rush
End If
Next
End If
End Function
“It’s impossible,” Gerald said in a matter-of-fact tone, “simply impossible.”
“Now just so we’re clear,” Craig responded, “by ‘impossible’, you actually mean ‘a big pain in the ass’, but you’re a smart guy who can make it happen, right?” That drew a few chuckles from the handful of other coworkers who joined them in the conference room, but Gerald just sighed. “No, Craig, by impossible, I mean impossible. Not doable. Can’t be done. Im-poss-i-ble. Well I mean, unless you can somehow change the underlying structure of the way everyone communicates on the Internet.”
