Date   : Wed, 03 Nov 2010 15:49:24 +0000
From   : jgh@... (J.G.Harston)
Subject: No wonder CompSci graduates are unemployed

Mark Usher wrote:
> The problem is, cobbling together some of these workarounds isn't
> supportable in the long term and creates even more of a mess.

These are examples of one-of repairs of broken systems to get them
to a future maintainable state. I didn't even save the insert-comma
program, once I'd run it its task was done. These are all examples of
how a flexible enquiring mind can think past an immediate problem and
move something to a situation where that problem won't reoccur and
future problems are more easily fixable.

> Many of these problems I just throw back at the vendor, I bought it, it
> doesn't work as should, fix it properly. I know this isn't always possible

Unless the vendor no longer exists. "I'm sorry, Housing Department, but
the Bambleweeny Computer Company no longer exists, so all your tenant
payment data stored in the Sub-Meson Brain is irretrevable trash."

I saw a very imaginatively designed system to get Sheffield Council's
council tax data out of the weird propriety 1970s mainframe system by
rigging up a PC to look like one of the mainframe's propriety non-RS232
terminals and progressively examine all the records and capture back
all the data, storing it in an accessible format database.

> By the way, splitting a name on the first space is a very poor way of
> denormalising a name. Yes, it would save some time, but the resulting list
> would still need to be checked and probably amended manually.

Yes, it changed a 6-hour retyping task into a 5-minute verification
task.

-- 
J.G.Harston - jgh@...