Re: Oh, the joys of being self-employed

On 2010-06-28, Brian Kantor <brian@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Seebs <usenet-nospam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dunno. I'm only working on that project at all out of blind furious rage
at a previous consultant anyway. Someone screwed him really badly, I
rescued things, and I want to get things cleaned up a bit.

It is unclear which of <<your client>> or <<the previous consultant>>
did the screwing and who was the screwee. The appropriate BOFHly remedy differs depending.

The previous consultant.

My client hired someone to produce some stuff. Previous consultant said
he could do it, delayed, hemmed, hawed, refused to provide prototypes or
work-in-progress, and about 8 months later, I got called in to do part
of it. Which rapidly expanded from "can you fix up some client-side
validation" to "can you implement all of this functionality against this
crazy back-end". Eventually I ended up replacing pretty much the entire
thing. A reasonably representative sample of the stuff I found made the
front page of the daily WTF. By which I mean, part of the database
schema -- which was an order of magnitude simpler and clearer than the
code for the client side application.

It was in an unfamiliar language, and I think it says a lot that the language
was not the largest barrier to understanding it; in one case, I did manage
to track down a missing feature, which had been implemented in three different
ways, in three different places, and only one of them was even in use.

It was full of stuff where different modules would do exactly the same thing
in very different ways. To put it in sh terms (I figure lots of people here
will read sh fluently), imagine:

foo1.sh:
echo "$foo\n$bar\n"

foo2.sh:
echo -n "$foo"
echo ""
echo -n "$bar"
echo ""

foo3.sh:
nl="
"
baz="$foo"
baz="$baz""$nl"
baz="$baz""$bar"
baz="$baz""$nl"
echo "$baz"

Now imagine that this code is all in one of those "build your GUI by dragging
and dropping and write code" environments, and that there are at least five
or six different things roughly similar to this. And some of them are in
things that are roughly "source files", and others are in bunches of code
which you can only see by right-clicking buttons. And that some buttons, the
code you get by examining the button isn't the code called when the button
is clicked.

And imagine that the entire thing was done by someone who charged 2000
billable hours in about six months.

.... And no, I don't think the code reflects that much sleep deprivation, I
think he was just either a poor liar or an extremely poor estimator of hours.

So, yeah, not my favorite project ever. On the other hand, there really is
a feeling of satisfaction for having gotten stuff mostly back in order.

-s
--
Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nospam@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!
.

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