• Undocument Bespoke Applications

    From Blue White@21:4/134 to Bob Worm on Thursday, February 15, 2024 08:34:02
    Oh, yes. A hundred times... and usually said dev then leaves the
    company and nobody can maintain this completely bespoke thing they
    left behind with no documentation

    In the development shop I used to work in, we had a mainframe dev team
    and a "distributed" dev team (i.e. their stuff ran on servers and PCs).
    The problem you describe usually happened in the latter group, but was
    usually triggered by a manager who decided that X-newish language was the
    way to go, i.e. java or whatever M$ was pushing at the time.

    I have probably mentioned this before but a lot of their devs were the "point-and-click" type that had difficulty maintaining code that required
    any "manual" coding that the "framework interface" would not provide them.

    We did sometimes have similar issues on the mainframe side, but it was a
    lot less of someone using newish things and a lot more of a case of some
    of the devs not being familiar with common utilities (like syncsort) that
    could really help then get simple tasks taken care of more quickly than
    writing their own COBOL program to do so.

    > As one of my university lecturers used to say - there's a difference
    > between being clever and being smart...

    Indeed. We had a few COBOL devs that liked to make things much more
    "clever " (read "difficult to maintain") than they needed to. I think it
    was called job security. ;)



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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Blue White on Thursday, February 15, 2024 06:50:00
    Blue White wrote to Bob Worm <=-

    Indeed. We had a few COBOL devs that liked to make things much more "clever " (read "difficult to maintain") than they needed to. I think
    it was called job security. ;)

    My first IT success was replacing a guy who tried making his code
    obtuse in a quest for job security. I was tasked with fixing a 350-line
    program to reflect a data format change, and instead re-wrote it in
    around 100 lines of readable code. With comments.



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