#developer fail

[kuroarugo-blog]

An explaination

I work with an idiot. There's no other way to say it.

He is "educated" yet unable to grasp simple concepts, nor figure out problems resulting in Google being his best friend. Answers are Copy+Paste jobs.

He is getting paid more than the rest of us because upper management thinks that because he can fix the bugs and lack of features in our code application, he is needed. He is not.

He wastes our time on an almost hourly basis asking stupid questions or getting us to look at something that we had told him the answer to, but he refused to listen insisting that we would have to look at the data to see what he was seeing. Ended up, we were right. Farewell past 15 minutes.

He refuses to be acknowledge that he is wrong and only after a lengthy discussion will change his tune, but then say it was originally his idea to begin with. He still asks for help to implement.

He regards his language of choice as the one language, and all others are inferior and shouldn't even exist. He also complains about the limitations of his language asking constantly why it isn't working how he expects it to be or how it "should" work. Ends up he's just doing it wrong to begin with, and the language actually does support a solution to his problem.

He refuses to use 3rd Party components / classes that are commonly used and supported by the community claiming that the support level isn't to what he would want. Takes forever to write his own implementation, only to complain about it not doing everything the others did.

I'm almost about to walk, but the company I work for has been far too good to me for me to do that to them, but I can't stand to be in the same building as him most days. The worst part is that you can't say anything negative against him in fear that you will be crucified for trying to hurt his feelings and jeopardize the stability of the company.

There, I've said it.

[kuroarugo-blog]

UX failure blamed on the user

So it's now the users fault apparently for not doing what the designer wanted them to do. This is according to the developer that ranted about the element that users were meant to scan a bar code into, which in turn would fire off an event once chr(13) was inputted.

Not here is where I think he is wrong. The users are not at fault as the input they are "failing" to use is half way through the process, a process they would do a few hundred times a day.

Now anyone that knows anything about workers that use the same program in and out every day knows that they get familiar with the same process and can do it almost blindfolded, knowing the exact amount of tabs, and returns needed to complete the task with little to no effort.

This to me is an extremely good thing as you want your employees to work at an efficient rate. The problem we have is that the points in which the user has to physically scan items are separated by a time where they don't need to, so the user will put down the scanner, start typing and continue typing.

When they get to the part that they need to scan the bar code they don't because it's a rather small input and it's quicker for them to type it out and keep tabbing. But this apparently is the wrong thing to do. The developer would rather impact the operational flow and require the user to add an extra second or two just to force them to use a scanner so the input field will work the way they programmed it to.

Wrong. The input field should react to not just the data input but also other states, like losing focus on the input. Do a quick check of the data in the input field to see if it matches what is expected to be there and fire off the process upon losing focus. Quick simple fix that doesn't impact the flow at all.

But alas, this is beyond the ability of our developer and he would rather not spend any more time on the issue. He would rather see the user be forced by management to do it the way it was originally programmed.

[jesuisdeveloppeur-blog]

Quand le {client|patron} demande s'il pourra toujours modifier les champs directement dans la base de données

[willpower232]

Developer fail of the day

Generating a 1.83GB text file which would have kept getting exponentially bigger because of an accidental infinite loop in a terminal command.