Look at me, I'm a developer!
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Recently I took a look at our company's website and noticed some images weren't loading.
While it's been a few years since I did anything web related, I was curious. Closer inspection revealed several WTFs.
Example:
<img src="c:\my documents\company site\newsletter.jgp">Yes, that's jgp, not jpg (and it's not a photo).
It seems the PHB decided to have one of the newer employees take over website maintenance duties. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether this was a good idea.
Sent an email to the new guy where I explained some of the basics. Several days later, the images are showing up, but a new WTF: full images are being used as thumbnails. And they're still jpg's. This one might not be so obvious, but I still fired off an email to get this fixed.
Any ideas on how I can approach this. I don't want to be an arrogant prick. We've all got to start somewhere - it's just that I don't think a corporate, public facing website is the perfect "sandbox" for finding your feet.
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@knersus said:
There's an old saying I learnt long ago:Any ideas on how I can approach this. I don't want to be an arrogant prick. We've all got to start somewhere - it's just that I don't think a corporate, public facing website is the perfect "sandbox" for finding your feet.
Ignorance can be cured with education
You need to figure out what is in play with the new guy and base your approach on that. But either way it it is not his fault - it is the fault of the people managing him. They are the ones who need to know the situation and they are the ones that either get him educated or pull the trigger.
Stupidity can only be cured with a hand gun
So the WTF's are deeper than the obvious - why did the PHB give him this duty? Hopefully there are redeeming features for working there.
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Fair enough.
The PHB is always trying to cut costs, especially since we're a small company - we've only replaced an NT box (our PDC) a few months back... Was still running on hardware from 1998. Guess that's why they're trying to consolidate efforts.
I guess I'll approach the fella and tell him to run any changes by me or another dev before going live, so we can review it. Either that, or try and point the bloke in the right direction to educate himself online.
I suppose it's not even that big a deal, but wanted to vent somewhere.
... Though the hand gun idea still sounds pretty neat!
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@knersus said:
<img src="c:\my documents\company site\newsletter.jgp">I don't even bat an eye anymore when I see this.
@knersus said:
Yes, that's jgp, not jpg (and it's not a photo).
Didn't you know? You can convert ANY format (PDFs, plain text files, various exotic proprietary formats, animations and videos, applications/executables, Word documents, Word documents consisting only of a pasted-in JPEG of a screenshot of Adobe Reader displaying a scanned printout of another Word document*, etc) to an image just by changing the file extension to .JPG; he just typo'd is all.
@knersus said:
Several days later, the images are showing up, but a new WTF: full images are being used as thumbnails.
A local auction-house does this. With 22MP+ res images. Oh, and they don't paginate the image gallery either. Which is on the homepage.
It amounts to a DoS attack against any soul unfortunate enough to visit.
*I did not make this one up
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@knersus said:
Any ideas on how I can approach this.
Approach what? Flagging up that the newer employee doesn't actually know how to do the assigned task, or flagging up that the PHB's not interested in any kind of quality assurance?
Really... is this YOUR problem to sort? I know that sounds a bit selfish, but if you've not been involved in coaching the new employee or monitoring their progress, the more effort you expend upo it the more you're distracted away from your real work.
You could easily draw attention to it by mumbling something about a customer struggling to use your company website, or a relative visited your place of work's website and laughed at what they saw.
To my mind, TRWTF is someone letting someone new have change access to the production (public-facing) site. If your PHB's not interested in using a staging server, or reviewing change before approval to deploy live, you've got bigger organisational issues - and you ain't gonna fix those with a quick email here and there.
@knersus said:
it's just that I don't think a corporate, public facing website is the perfect "sandbox" for finding your feet.
That. Keep checking up for the PHB and you'll establish yourself as their safety-net. Let them hang themselves first, and perhaps they'll put a bit more effort into their decision-making process.
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@OzPeter said:
But either way it it is not his fault - it is the fault of the people managing him.
He's got a voice - he can easily point out that he's completely inexperienced at it.