To all fellow contactors

This makes me mad.

Have any of you come into a job and had to sort out problems with an existing system, and when you do get ito the code you find it is written by a complete muppet who can't even be bothered to tab his or her code, let alone comment it to say what it is doing. I've been working on some Client side javascript validation on ASP pages and have had to spend the first week sorting out the code for both before I can even start trying to sort out the bugs.

it really does make me mad that these people earn sh*t loads of money and don't even do a proper job.

I am not a contractor, but i have had to maintain someones code a couple of times.

The worst bit of code i remember was not tabbed, not commented at all, and it certainly didn't work.

The guy was clearly insane as well. He was repeating code left right and center and was using a very complicated loop to format a date, that can be done in one line of code.


On the other extreme, i had to find a bug in another guys code that was so full of comments i couldn't actually find any code!


Ahh, the joys of maintaining other peoples code. I finish my job in a couple of months, and some poor sucker is going to have to look after my code. Good luck to him HAHAHAHA. :D

Hi Iain17

I bet you any money, that with my luck for sorting out other people's mess that poor sucker will be me ;)

On a more serious note, programming is like hand writting. Every on has their own way of doing it, some people are more tidy than other's and some people can write the same thing in one line instead of 5.

The good thing is that I'm glad my code is nothing like my hand writting because I can bearly read my own writing, it's that bad.

My handwriting's the same way. The irony is that my best class right now is English.

Ian.... You have had the unfortunate run in with what us contractors like to call "cowboys".

These are people who are slick when they talk and manage to convince companies to hire them to do the work for 1/3 of the price rather than a professional contractor.

As a result it ends up costing the company MORE to fix it than they saved on the cowboy, they feel ripped off and are very wary of contractors in the future.

These people give contractors a bad name and make it harder for us to get the recognition we deserve.... I see them everywhere I go and I hear stories of how people got burnt.

Try looking at someones application and seeing the executable version not matching the code you have in the repository... and to make it worse, before the cowboy left he checked EVERYTHING out exclusively and then deleted the files...

Everything was hanging in mid air.

I would have to dissagree with you guys. I work as a contractor, and I always comment my code. Sure enough, the code I write is not an easy one to understand, but not because I write it very complicated, but rather a complications of the business logic.

I don't think that they directed it towards ALL contractors, just the ones that deliberately make it difficult to understand.

I dont think thats just a contractor problem, possibly a developer problem, the kind of problem you mention is more apparent in larget companies, I work in a small company that is a contractor for the State( as well as 15 other states) most of the code there is worked upon over and over, being enchanced, the only major problem I've has when working with one of the smaller client's site, which is just regular HTML and what not, but everytime I come accross a new file I havent updated when the client needed changes, it's usually 2048 characters, a line, poorly coded, and out of organization, and this is done by an employee that was here before I got in there, I spend about an hour just parsing it out, then I finally make the update, and save it all formated so the next time I need to update or add a new product, its formated nicly, I've been in my spare time trying to write a Visual basic app that'll automatically parse out the HTML, but it annoys me to find that past works are poorly done(seems typically the people are the by the hour paid, and only there for the summer) Because of the annoyance I've had, all my codes that I write from scratch are easy to read, and heavily documented if needed, just in case I or someone else in the future has to make a change to it, and I agree with you there are lazy programmers, who just get it to be like "well, it works".

Actually... the problem ONLY occurs with contractors.

Full time staff wouldn't "dare" do anything so shonky as they would lose their jobs...

But the "cowboy" contractors (and I do only limit this to those bad apples who have no professionalism) know they are going to be out of there in 3 months time and probably on the other side of the country and so they don't care how poorly their code is written, commented or even reusable. They code it, take their money and run.

Sorry Guy's, I wasn't implying that all contractors are like that (being one myself), I was just saying that alot of code that I come across is Absolutly shite. As for saying that only contractors do it and not full time people, that absolute crap because alot of people that work in the company i'm in at the moment are just as bad and there in house poeple.

There is a difference between being just plain bad and purposely setting out to do the absolute least in the best possible time and LEAVE.

Thats the difference between full time and contracting. An inhouse programmer can be just plain bad... but they aren't going to "purposely" cut corners because they know sometime in the future it would be discovered.

The "cowboy" contractor on the other hand doesn't care because he wont be going back there any more and so he doesn't bother with many things knowing that.

Gen-X,

You haven't worked with State employees yet. Once you get hired it takes an act of congress to get fired. I have worked through code, ORACLE Reports and Triggers at a state facility where not only was the code hard to read, but when I finally got frustrated and went to my project lead found they weren't even doing what they were supposed to do. Most of these reports had been in Production for at least 10 Months.

That person didn't get fired they moved into a higher paying position with a private organization based on recommendation from the state facility. He probably continued to cause problems there to or maybe learned better from a mentor. Most likely he is the one causing lanpbaker headaches.

Good luck on future contracts.

Actually Marita... I have done a lot of work for the Australian Government and even the Defense Department... I know all to well the incestuous relationship they share and of their policies of "non-termination".

I don't consider these people even programmers as the "typical" government employee spends most of their time working out how to do the least work ;-)

You are right on that, Gen-X. I would have to agree that they are hardly programmers. Most continue to code the same way that it was done the first time, not even considering that it could be done more efficiently and effectively another way. But a lot of good talent gets thier start with the Government, They just don't stay past 3 to 4 months, if that long. Have a Good Day in Australia!