The Problem With Agreeing to Help Another Project
I've been suckered into helping a non-developer pretend to be a developer and write this critical piece of code for trade processing. It's a bad idea from the start, but I knew the probability of him getting it right from the start, without any help, was so near to zero as to be indistinguishable from zero. Some may think me cruel, I think of it as honest assessment. This guy is a good natured, decent guy, but has no formal training in developing at all. Everything he's learned is from hacking around on the job. While that's nice, it's no basis for making a critical component. It just isn't.
So I agreed to help. And help I have. I've been sucked into cleaning up the code many times - each one because he's gone off where we left off and started to add in a new batch of functionality. Lots of copy-n-paste, but not even getting a clear and concise set of requirements from the functional stand-point. What's supposed to happen on these inputs? What about these? Some he knows, and some he doesn't. So I have to help there too.
But today it was a new dimension in this as I got called into his manager's office who clearly didn't know I'd helped this guy to the level that I have. To be honest, the code it 80% mine, and 10% the guy before me, and 10% his. He really doesn't know what's going on, and it's not because he's dumb, it's because he didn't code it and didn't spend any time figuring out what the code is doing.
So we're in his manager's office and he's saying things like "We developed this." Hold on there, Professor... Let's be careful about the use of the pronoun "we" here... I wrote a bunch of it, based on his somewhat dodgey specs. If there's an issue about what it should be doing talk to him - if it's about how it's getting done, then that's me. But this manager is not known for his precise language. He's considered somewhat of a micromanaging developer-wannabe, and as such he's throwing around "we" way too much for my taste.
But he gets mad at me when I say "Watch the 'we', I wasn't in it at this point" to which he gets angry and says "It's our code - that means we built it." Yikes! That's a leap I'm not willing to take at this point in time. So we go back and forth. Finally, we get to the point where he's telling me the specs that I didn't get from the guy I was helping. I put them into the code in all of 15 mins and the tests work wonderfully. Surprise.
It's this getting suckered into this project and then yelled at for not making it perfectly without any specs that makes me a little leery of helping these clowns ever again. After all, it's not my job if this guy can't deliver anything that works. It's his. At some point, if this place doesn't start to turn around, it'll be every man for himself, and at that point I'll be fine, but he's going to be looking at the door.