[ale] Over on thedailywtf

[James P. Kinney III]

On Fri, 2006-05-26 at 13:50 -0400, KingBahamut wrote:
> "A little more than a decade ago, Ian Mc worked for a consulting
> company that just landed a large contract for COBOL/Oracle conversion
> project. An early adopter of outsourcing, Ian's company sub-contracted
> most of the programming work to a certain overseas programming company
> with a staff of "highly proficient" COBOL programmers.
> 
> Months passed and the deadline the first module to be demonstrated and
> delivered was coming up fast. Ian was the point person to present the
> module to the client and, due to a slew of client and management
> blunders, he never had a chance to see the completed code before the
> demonstration.
> 
> At the client, sitting in front of a green screen terminal, Ian got
> his first look at the code. He expected a simple compile with maybe a
> few error corrections, so imagine his horror when it threw so many
> errors the compiler terminated with a "too many errors" error. Ian
> took a closer look at the code and realized he was up a certain creek
> with out a paddle. The code was absurdly bad, closing cursors before
> they are opened, reading without opening them, etc.
> 
> After the embarrassing gaffe at the client was finally over, Ian
> inquired with the overseas coders to see if they even tested the code
> before delivering it. "Of course," the lead programmer proclaimed, "we
> tested it on paper."
> 
> Unbelievably they didn't have COBOL or Oracle installed on their
> development workstations or servers."
> 
> All I can do is laugh, repeatedly, over and over. 

Bad programmers and bad design. The geniuses at NASA have their code
that runs the shuttle proven on paper before they type a single line of
code. 125,000,000 lines and 7 errors. There has been no error in any
system that runs the shuttle in flight due to any programming issue.
> -- 
> KingBahamut 
> Founder of the GWoS
> All Around Geek
> "I could tell you the probability, but you wouldnt like it."
> 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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