> Unfortunately for you, most companies today, and even Linux developers,
> would not like such practices among their programmers. For the same
reason
> that a good programmer comments their code. Are you always going to be
> there to fix problems? I don't think so. 9 out of 10 developers would
pick
> the programmer who wrote well-structured and readable (albeit slower)
code,
> over the programmer who wrote hard to follow, yet faster, code.
The problem was that the Company was pushing hard for the programs, and did
not allow me time to document them - they kept promising me that I could
write the docs later. They were well aware of the fact - I memo'd then
several times about my concerns. If they then felt the need to lay me off
before the docs were written, whose fault was that?
As it happened, my successor was a very close friend of mine - we used to go
out for drinks together every Friday night. The Company was aware of that
fact, and actually told him to "get Ozz drunk one evening and pump him for
info.". He was that sickened that he refused to ask me anything on
principle, even though he knew me well enough to know that I would have
helped him had he asked.
The Company's morals were such that they called me back into the office
during my VACATION to tell me I was laid off! Can you say pissed? I knew
you could...
As for the state of the code, I was writing in a language that many people
would not have used (the Company wanted me to write it that way due to
legacy systems), and I was getting the software to do things that even the
original authors of the language said were impossible. There are still very
few people proficient in it (to that degree), and the Company is now paying
contractors more than TEN TIMES what they were paying me at the time, to
write additional software!
One final point - the user's machines were diskless workstations running
Windoze 3.11, and did not have the memory for large applications. This was
the only way to get such a mammoth system to run on the available hardware
without frequent crashes due to insufficient resources.
Regards,
Ozz.
