I've definitely been there - brought in on a "rescue project" at a large Australian business, called in to take over after a bunch of "cowboy coders" had failed to meet a project milestone. The key proof of their being cowboys was that they'd used Star Trek characters as the names for a bunch of their packages - there was the Uhura module and the Khan module and the like (this was back in Java land). I remember lots of people shaking their heads at the terrible system they'd been building.
Fast-forward a couple of months, and it became apparent to me that while the guys we replaced were definitely a bit amateurish, most of the genuine problems in their code were probably in the end caused by the culture of the client company, which was pretty poisonous*. The Star Trek package names were a bit foolish, but seemed far more like a way for frustrated people to let off steam, than a smoking gun proving these guys were rank amateurs. I never really got proof one way or the other of whether the original developers were "n00bs" or not; certainly they didn't have any sort of decent tests :) But I was a bit ashamed at going along with blaming them for all the project problems, accepting without skepticism that they must have been to blame, when obviously a big chunk of the blame lay with the client as well. - Korny *One example: half way through the project their Enterprise Architecture group, who had never met with anyone from our team, decided to globally ban the Spring framework, because one of them had read that it was all about aspect-oriented programming, and that was a dangerous thing. (This was around 2005? or so - when Spring was definitely mature and accepted all around the Java world). From On 20 June 2012 12:44, Andrew Snow <[email protected]> wrote: > > In my RoRo travels, I've been initiator of, the recipient of, and privy > to, disparaging remarks about "the previous bunch of n00bs" who were the > last developers to touch a project. > > This happens on projects big and small, by both professionals of many > years experience, all the way down to non-Rails shops who slapped a junior > coder on the project. > > But because you don't know the circumstances: > * the budget > * the deadlines > * politics > * promises and obligations > * vague scope > * creeping scope, etc > I think it unwise to pass judgment on the "previous guy", whether to the > client, or to your peers. > > Indeed, it would be bad form for the "previous guy" to mention any of the > above, especially if he parted company with the client in awkward > circumstances. Comments on the previous guy doesn't really give the client > the warm fuzzies anyway. > > TLDR; Lets not rip on each other. Lets keep these thoughts to ourselves > and stick to doing what we do best. > > - Andrew > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]**. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rails-oceania+unsubscribe@** > googlegroups.com <rails-oceania%[email protected]>. > For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/** > group/rails-oceania?hl=en<http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en> > . > > -- Kornelis Sietsma korny at my surname dot com http://korny.info "We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing" - O.W. Holmes -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en.
