RE: Efficiency AND Effectiveness. I just had to share this.

Bad code is bad code...I should know...I've written enough of it over
the years. :)

I think a lot of it comes from only knowing certain techniques and then
using them again and again. And, as we all know, you can use old
techniques with a new language or system. 

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: RE: Efficiency AND Effectiveness. I just had to share this.
> From: "Fisher, Don" <dfisher@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Wed, August 24, 2005 7:50 am
> To: "'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'" <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> Such brilliance is not limited to the Oracle community, Steve.  I've seen
> many examples of this type of genius during my career in AS/400 shops.  This
> type of thinking was endemic to IT shops in the 1970s and 80s.
> Unfortunately, there are a few from that era that cling to that mentality.
> 
> Donald R. Fisher, III
> Project Manager
> Roomstore Furniture Company
> (804) 784-7600 extension 2124
> DFisher@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 
> <clip>
> My wife has, for over 2 years, been project leading, for her dept. (she is
> in finance) a project to automate their current system, not a biggy. Now
> they had it in the USA for 12 months and not one working program, this was
> mainly because the MIS manager did not believe you needed to talk to the
> user to know what they wanted, I think he is cleaning toilets now. Anyways
> the US washed their hands of it and the UK took over, so they did a little
> talking to the user and they are now in UAT. 
> 
> So my wife is the ONLY one on the system working at home and asked me to
> time (what they call a report but it is a display) a report, Invoices not
> yet invoiced, 1 country, 2,000 records, 38 seconds. All countries 51,000
> records 2Mins 47seconds. I think we would all agree not acceptable. Also
> there is no way that the user can ever see more than the first 5,000 records
> bit of a problem for the UK who had 5,500. 
> 
> Now we come to the clever part, when they first ran this last week it
> crashed because 6 users ran it at once, so they changed it so each request
> was queued. Now we move from the merely clever to the brilliant. But if it
> doesn't run within 60 seconds it is cancelled and a message is sent asking
> the user to try again later. They decided that this info was too good to
> only give to the requestor, everybody should get the message (merely a case
> of lazy programming I think). Well in a meeting about this my wife pointed
> out to the MIS manager that there could be 1,000+ users on when this goes
> live and with the response times she was getting that everyone would be
> getting messages all the time, and now from the brilliant to the sheer
> genius, his immediate reaction? He started calculating how much extra disk
> space they would need to buy to handle it!
> 
> A shining example of analysis, design, and testing. Talk about skilled
> professionals! I mean, you would need to take special courses to be so bad,
> wouldn't you?  Where do they get these people from?    
> <clip>
> -- 
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