AzamSharp

Bad Programmers Create Jobs
published on 7/28/2009 7:39:08 AM

We all hate bad code. We also hate the guts of the developer who write bad code. What would you say if I told you that the current job you have is because someone wrote bad code?

The purpose of this post is not to advocate that idea of writing bad code but to present a fact that bad code produces jobs in the software industry. Let’s consider a scenario where a bad programmer worked on a project and wrote stinky code. The project started with high velocity but slowly and gradually reached a complete stop. The reason for this change in momentum is because bad code is preventing the developers to be productive and it is taking a whole day to make a 15 minute change.

Few developers on the team got fed up with their own code and looked for more Greenfield opportunities in the real world. At this time the bleeding company hired you, the agile developer to fix the problem. You took a quick look at the 5 year old mess and suggested a complete rewrite. The client refused the idea and suggested that new features should be implemented in the current system.

As expected a 10 minute change took 8 hours or one whole day. The client was not happy but was still declined the complete rewrite of the application. After several months of this sluggish pace the client finally gave up and ordered a rewrite.

Few more smart agile developers were hired and the project was underway. Someone implemented the module in a hurry so he/she can go to the bar and drink a glass of beer. This whole thing started because someone did not care about his/her code.

I had the same experience at my last job. Someone decided to store all the ASPX pages in the database. The pages were fetched using SQL query and later an XSLT style sheet was applied on it. When I was asked to add several changes to the application I told them I rather eat dirt. Later, it was decided that the application will be a rewritten. This created a new project for me only because someone did not care about the code that they wrote.

Look at the project you are currently working on. The probability is high that you are cleaning up the code which was implemented by someone else. I think it is realistic to say that this is the Circle of Programming Jobs.

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by Aly Boghani on 7/28/2009 10:26:02 AM
I agree with you completely. I think your previous job was trying to create a cms from scratch and then add admin screens to modify it. It looks like the idea to store content in db was good but approach and/or architecture were terrible. I have seen and witnessed a lot of times custom cms approach. Back to your point mentioning technical debt. Regardless of how clean app has been written, there will always be technical debt which will fuel additional programming work. Thanks for a great post.

Aly
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by Mark on 8/5/2009 5:17:50 PM
Nice.

My new team has a ton of VB.Net, Winforms and MS Access code. I would rather stick a fork in my eye (eating dirt would be too easy) than touch their code.

The previous place I was at had a bunch of apps that were developed that had XSLT that called XSLT that called ... . It was almost impossible to debug and change. I'd rather cut off a limb ....
by Godwin on 8/6/2009 8:36:16 PM
Programmers who try to do stuff like in the example you showed are the ones who eat up some companies.
They write code like that because they want to learn more at the cost of dooming the company.

They believe they can learn more and get better experience. Some believe that they get better jobs by learning through writing code as they want.

It's very tough sometimes if you hire the wrong people who end up like parasites.

It creates jobs...but drains someone's money too.
by Mohammad Azam on 8/7/2009 7:47:40 AM
@Godwin,

I think that those programmers mentioned in the above post don't want to learn. That is why they write bad code and doom the company. If they wanted to learn more then they have researched before writing the code.
by Zohaib Ali on 1/5/2010 8:51:00 AM
Its the exact situation I'm in. Same type of CMS application where data is stored in DB and there are access applications to update it and XSLT and XHTML is involved.

Great thing about it is its recently converted from ASP to ASP.Net using Microsoft tool. The solution opens up in VS2008 but there is alot of VBScript, ASP code going on in there.

I haven't had any exposure to any CMS systems before so I can't even recommend them anything at this point. Any thoughts?

I'm only here for a short period so hope these sweet months go sweet and I don't have to fork anything anywhere :)

Great post!

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