Re: Hell is ... ?

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#623513

From: Alan Bowler
Date: Fri, 18 May 2018 16:24

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On 2018-05-16 2:13 PM, Gareth's Downstairs Computer wrote:
> Hell is being brought in as a contractor to take over the
> company's only product when its author has left to pursue
> his career elsewhere and proved to be a probably-underpaid
> engineer but a grossly-overpaid self-taught junior programmer
> who produced several pages of completely undocumented code
> with a mixture of structured programming and go-to-labels
> all intertwined with no indenting.

Back in my days as a co-op student, I was asked to "finish up"
some details of a program written by a consultant whose
contract was running out.
Well, the program had major design flaws and hadn't a hope
of actually working as written.

Also I spent there were consultants working on
a separate project.  They would come into the computer
centre complaining that their program didn't work
and it must be a operating system bug. I'd spend time
to find dumb bugs like uninitialized variables,
and adding a small delta to a single precision
floating point number until the least significant
bit of the variable was more than the delta.

I've always been sceptical of projects written
by outside consultants ever since.  There recent
fiascos with new government payroll systems
in Canada and Australia have just confirmed
my belief in having permanent in-house staff doing
things.

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From: Alan Bowler <atbo...@thinkage.ca>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: Hell is ... ?
Date: Fri, 18 May 2018 12:24:33 -0400
Organization: Thinkage Ltd.
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