BOFH: The Boss, the floppy and the work 'experience'

... my sole output for two months a couple of years ago is in fact just over 500 lines of code - the majority of which was cut-and-pasted from a web example. I think I knocked the whole thing off in one afternoon ...

This. I didn't think I had it in me to become a BOFH, but ... this.

Also, I think they've employed the same security system on the DevOps here. AGILE seems to be, somehow, the wrong word.

amazing. The intern sees through him and lives to tell the tale. few have that privilege.

Sounds like a provisioning system I once wrote. Everyone thought I was a god (obviously I am!!) but for some strange reason, as soon as I left, someone come in, looked at my code and rewrote the entire system from scratch!! Seemingly my self-documenting code wasn't :-)

And yes, most was cut 'n' pasted from the web. After all, why reinvent the wheel !!!!

Ah, I remember when I left my last workplace.

And they asked me how one of the access control integration features worked.

This was after I'd given them my "hand-over" time (chargeable because of the circumstances), during which they basically announced the intention to replace every system in the place with "their" systems. Which were universally just off-the-shelf products, in their default configs, losing almost all the features I'd had requested over the years and which the company were now reliant on, and each replacement system cost about 2-3 times more than the purchase price of the kit they were replacing, not counting their ongoing annual licence fees, etc. Oh, and with consultancy fees on top. If they'd had that kind of money available for projects when I was there, maybe they wouldn't be saying goodbye to me after 5+ years...

Well, I wrote the part that does that useful feature you demand, but which you couldn't find on the software feature list of your white-box, off-the-shelf junk that costs twice as much. Yep, it does basically what this story says - pulls in from AD, correlates with access control, does some jiggerypokery based on a number of complex company-specific conditions that you can't select in the interface, and then changes entries to make it all work automatically and seamlessly. A handful of SQL combined with a bit of scripting, but it worked.

Their techies didn't know how to support it.

Their engineers couldn't understand it (and, hell, it was only SQL and a script, come on!)

Their consultants couldn't match it.

They talked to the manufacturers of the system. A model that could do that existed, but required complete replacement of the whole system and software upgrades for everything, and didn't really work the same (I know, because I'd wrote integration scripts for that too), and was basically the same scripting in a prettier interface.

Then they talked to the access control people we used until they took over (who they were supplanting with their own contractors), the same people who put it in the original system and supported it. Guess what they told them?

"Oh, yes, we can do that - there's this guy who works for one of the places we support who wrote a piece of software to do that for you. We can put you in touch with him if you like, he's sold it to our customers a few times, and he's really good friends with our engineers."

(Guess who that guy was...)

For £1000, you can buy the license rights to my code so you can find ANY SQL coder to take it and do what they like with it.

For an extra £1000, I'll document that tiny little script I wrote so even non-programmer idiots can understand it (they'll try to change it and break it, obviously, but that's not my problem).

For £1000 a year, I'll provide support and "upgrades" for that script to continue to do what it currently does (new features or changes in working will cost you more, obviously).

Oh, clauses on intellectual property created as part of my work, you say? I refer you to the amendment in my contract that your predecessor put in after I insisted that they do so because that exact piece of code that I wrote was so valuable and they rescinded all rights to it. Leaving you only with "the right to use that particular version, on that system, for that company, without warranty or support, for free", which I gave them. Which is basically all you've got already - there's the script, it works.

I estimate they must have spent thousands at least fixing that, or doing without that functionality entirely (which all staff were dependent on). But it probably cost them 20x more than that to replace everything they'd seen with their white-box hardware, and they would have lost a lot of functionality and configuration along the way so it would be lost in the noise and chaos.

And, yes, every decision made while I was there was in collaboration with the bosses - when presented with "You can pay £10k for off-the-shelf that anyone can manage, or I can knock you up something equivalent for free with the caveat that nobody will support it", they always take the gamble knowingly. They saved TENS OF THOUSANDS by doing so, even if you include the above costs. Those bosses were really techy IT guys and understood the risks, but more often than not said "It can only be ten lines of code, or so, surely?" and then had me make it. We melded really well together.

When those guys were forced out, and the attention turned to trying to get me out (I was actually warned by one of those nice bosses it was going to be tried), I took on an IT audit (still have a copy of that), proved my systems were good, got them through to a good point of the year, and then when they failed to meet a single recommendation of the audit (that I aced) that was written for them, I left. And the only people left carrying the can were the "We can replace ANYTHING for less cost!" consultants that were brought in to replace me.

P.S. Had another job to walk into by that point, by word-of-mouth, via my ex-boss... Oh, he was good...

Incriminating Evidence

get said Intern to commit or admit to an act that is usable for blackmail ( CEO's Daughter on work exp in accounts usually is a good one) or frame them if they are not future PFY material.

if they play the game then go to option 1) if you have to frame them go to option 2)

1) let them in on the secret and give them a machine and a copy of Risk to play for the remainder of their placement.

2) give the incriminating frame up evidence to HR. then wave goodbye to Intern.

(I did a months work exp Decades ago that for some reason got extended to three months. I was good at Risk by the end of it. and learnt lots about IT as well ;-) )

Alternatively ...

Just produce 400 pages of ALGOL code and ask the lad to implement it in Java, if he tumbles to the fact that the code is something else entirely just say, "Oh it must have been renamed, I'll see if I can find the previous version ... but don't worry, I've still got the flow charts ..." which of course was old faxes and now resemble Egyptian hieroglyphs after being left in the light for 10 years.

maths trick

When subtracting two numbers that are the same except for some transposed digits (say 35 vs 53), the result is always a multiple of 9. The difference between 53 and 35 is around 20, so pick the multiple of 9 that's just less than that. So 53,000 - 35,000 can be quickly calculated as 18,000 with no need to do awkward carrying or the like.

Had a very clever bloke years ago at a previous employers who had written an audio conferencing program that allowed you to route the output of meeting rooms to different areas of the company (and also externally). He'd also designed the switch boxes that the software integrated with to allow selection of company sites, ISDN controllers/dialers for the stand alone ISDN cards and everything. It worked fine (we never had a problem with it in many years of happy use) and the old adage if it ain't broke don't fix it came into play here. You basically used the GUI to pick which sites you wanted to route the audio to (or dialed the number) and from and pressed the big go button on screen.

He retired when we were taken over and the new owners took one look at the Heath Robinson esque switch boxes and non web-based software and said we'll find a replacement. There were rumours that the new set up was chosen by the work experience who was tasked to find something as part of his 'experience'.

Were they true? I couldn't possibly comment.

*There were several software packages (and switch) as they couldn't find just one as a replacement. The fact that these didn't do exactly what we wanted them to do and they weren't as reliable is another matter.

A good introduction to the desirability of decent documentation and comments in the code is to give a new graduate a reasonable task. When complete, move the graddy to something else, then after six months ask for some not-insignificant mods to the original code. That's the point at which the penny usually drops that what was obvious at time of writing is no longer obvious and that better comments are required in case it's necessary to revisit the code after it's been forgotten.

PMQs are a similar con too, .... but they aren't meant to be joke, are they?

Cheers, Simon T,

That tale reminded me instantly of ye olde song and dance routine practised at midday every Wednesday when the Commons is sitting ..... Prime Minister's Question Time, where fudge and waffle triumphs over questions of substance and import.

1..2..4?

What happened to episode three?