A recipe for instant success
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You have a project you maintain, written in Perl.
The fixes are late because the only developer that knew it has quit a year ago and works on it when he has time and inspiration.
But you need to have it fixed now. Yesterday. Whatever.
So you tell your two new hires who both are C# developers (junior) to switch their focus to this Perl project.
They turn to the Perl developer that has quit a year ago, to help them around. The problems start right away, because for some reason the devs are trying to get their local copy of the project up and running on Windows, and the project was developed on Unix and deployed to Unix. Instead of asking how to run it properly, they are asking how to fix their ActiveState shit they have got chest deep in.
Now instead of spending 3 hours to fix the actual bug, the developer-that-has-quit has an alternative to teach these C# developers how to use Linux and how to program in Perl. I also suspect they have no idea how MySQL works, too.
This is a fucking amazing management style, I must admit.
Filed under: read Fred Brooks' Mythical Man-Month and recite it by heart or I'll find you and kill you
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You have a project you maintain, written in Perl.
No, I don't. Thank goodness.
Filed Under: Writing in the second person is TRWTF
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It probably is. I'm too tired now to give a fuck. Maybe I'll edit it on weekend, or something.
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Further down the rabbit hole, Larry Wall appears, he says only "You're Doing It Wrong™", then vanishes into a cloud of .NET assemblies...
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Why would the creator of Perl vanish into .NET assemblies? Surely he'd rather hide among a field of regex?
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Who said he was there of his own free will?
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Sergey Brin?
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This is novel; how do we know this?
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If I told you, I'd have to eat you
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What you filed this under.
I see it.
Filed under: I have to like the post for that reference, my religion demands it
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The fixes are late because the only developer that knew it has quit a year ago and works on it when he has time and inspiration.
I would expect that a developer that quit has not had the time or inspiration to work for his former employer since he quit. That is generally the point of quitting. How is the manager roping him into training junior developers, presumably for free?
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I would expect that a developer that quit has not had the time or inspiration to work for his former employer since he quit. That is generally the point of quitting. How is the manager roping him into training junior developers, presumably for free?
Internal transfers at large employers can do all sorts of things that sound nonsensical at first but which actually make lots of sense.
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Filed under: read Fred Brooks' Mythical Man-Month and recite it by heart or I'll find you and kill you
QFT
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They actually pay him as a freelancer.
