🚀 go-pugleaf

Alan Bowler <atbo...@thinkage.ca> wrote:
> 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.
> 

IME they propose to use people with a lot of experience who will split
their time and may do little or nothing on YOUR project. Then they bring in
inexperienced, low-level people to actually do the work.

-- 
Pete