Re: What stackoverflow is good at

cimode_at_hotmail.com wrote:

> On 20 mai, 13:41, robu..._at_gmail.com wrote:

>> Unfortunately there are some sad consequences of this state of facts.
>> If you try to do something the right way, against so called ´best-
>> practices¡, you are often looked as lunatic and even worst, as counter-
>> productive. So one often has to pact with the devil to meet a deadline
>> or even to save his job. This is really sad.

> Yes it is. That's why Fabian Pascal has lost interest in the subject > as he considers a lost cause.

Yes, but on the bright side, you can sometimes make a nice living fixing crap designs after they've proven to be crap, and you get to strut and swagger and just generally make yourself obnoxious. For example, last summer I was presented with 4,500 lines of code that were supposed to do a job that had to run in 4 hours. With 2/3rds of the ultimate expected volume of data it was taking 6 hours. I won't bore you with the details, but after I found the other 10,000 lines of code and tore the whole thing up and started again, I got it down to 250 lines and it ran in 22 seconds. I was unbearable to be around for some time after that.

The punchline of the story is that when the customer went back to the original supplier and showed them, the original supplier just shrugged and airly said, yes, that's what we do now too.

I don't care. I made my fee. I had my fun. (And I'm having it here again. Life is good.)

-- 
Roy