Amazing the Decisions that Get Made Every Day
I was talking to a friend today and he was fuming over a decision that one of the other guys he works with made. Of course, this other person really isn't in a position to make these kinds of unilateral changes, and then have other systems change as well, without at least some discussion with the lead developer (my friend), but that's what he did. It's the Better to ask forgiveness than permission style of work.
My friend tells the story that this guy needed to add a field to a RPC call, and while it was meant to be an integer, he decided to make it a string because he didn't want to get into parsing problems. The "fear of the integer" so consumed this guy that he told others down-stream of the system he was working on to use the string and then parse it as necessary. There were problems because this is clearly a dumb solution to the problem, and they had to change it to what it should have been all along - an integer. But the guy didn't want to change the RPC interface - 'leave it a string' he says. My friend was fuming.
Since this isn't happening to me, I can giggle about this to no end. There's a guy that shouldn't be developing because he's not really a developer, and doesn't really understand why you'd want to make the interface match the datatype - he's one of those guys that would make all the data in a database table two varchars() - one for the name, and the other for the value, and put everything in there. It's almost comical, if you didn't have to deal with the fallout.
So my friend has to spend the next several days unwinding all these changes and getting the right data type in there - in multiple systems, all the while cursing under his breath. Yeah... it's funny if you don't have to be involved in it.