Posted on 07/26/2013 10:40:44 AM PDT by Kaslin
BullSheet!
System documentation is just like blueprints for a construction project like a house or commercial building. The foundation crew, the framing crew, the plumbers, the electricians, drywall, painting, roofing crews; and more; all are following the same blueprints, even if modifications have to be made to the plans during the project.
A software system thrown together without a similar structured project process; without the project documentation created during each phase; without cooperative effort between the various teams and members, without following a cohesive plan and design, is just a tangle of counter-productive trash.
This kind of mindless garbage is why the USA is in a major depression; and is why outsourcing, off-shoring, and bringing in foreign visa workers by the tens of millions, is even a consideration.
I AM one of the geeks. I just happen to have a Bachelor of ARTS degree to my name. My boss ribs me something terrible when I over-write my RCAs and lessons learned, but he appreciates that he can hand them to his superiors and they’ll be accepted without question.
That makes Sri a vary valuable person, and compensated accordingly, no?
I've had two jobs outsourced out from under me. Both times, neither company was all that concerned about documentation. "We need to document this, WBill, but first, you need to fix these 57 other things. Do the docs in your spare time." .....then, all of a sudden, documentation percolated up to the top of the list. Always. "Make two afternoons a week available to do nothing else", and so on.
First time I had it to happen, I said "great", since I don't particularly mind documenting, and I didn't realize what was going on. Second time, I spent lots of afternoons self-documenting on my resume and cover letters. :-)
And here I thought I was the only POSH-head on FR!
I’d always tell people complaining of my documentation, “Of course its hard to read, the code was hard to write.” But that was back in the days of packing assembly code into 64K blocks.
I have that on my coffee mug.
I knew an old electrician who worked in a steel mill here in Pittsburgh. The only documentation for anything in that mill was in his head. In fact he used to memorize blueprints of stuff done before he got the job then he’d burn them.
“Job Security” to the unionized mind.
He’d also help himself to any company property he wanted as an unwritten part of the contract. And he’d come over and rig your cable box to steal HBO for twenty-five bucks.
I’m not good at it, but I use it every day. I wasn’t very good at C in college either, but I struggled through it.
The term, cognitive disconnect, applies to the condition where reality and one's understanding or perception of reality differ.
If a company has American jack-leg coders who cannot (or refuse) to communicate, document, design, and work cooperatively as part of a functioning team, why the heck would they ever hire another illiterate, counter-productive American over a foreign coder who will at least try to read, write, and speak English, and work as part of a team.
I pretty much work out of a PS console and the ISE most of the time. Never had much formal training, but I’ve managed well enough to make a respectable showing that the Scriting Games the last couple of years. I’m an AD/Exchange admin, but I’ve been getting more and more programmers coming to my cube for help with Powershell and regex.
We use Quest Active Roles Server here (I’m an AD engineer), and the AD management plugins are really awesome compared to just the ActiveDirectory import module for PS. I spend most of my days scripting in PowerGUI to automate processes in ARS.
Good to know there are FReepers out there doing the same stuff.
“Good code is its own best documentation.”
Good code to a certain point is good documentation however, since every programmer has his own style, it is good manners to comment your logic and why you built it that way. Otherwise you are just a rent-seeking punk looking to make yourself indespensible ans the master of black-box spaghetti code. Just saying.
And then there was code documentation. The engineers programming the company’s products had standards to follow, and code reviews to attend. On the lower floor of the building, the IT engineers, mostly by the time I left Indians, immune to all layoffs, even more so than the few blacks who worked there, these guys didn’t have to do chit, and didn’t, not a single word of documentation in their Java and SQL code, and their (white) management didn’t care, resisted calls for standards, disdained talk of code reviews. I was in those respects lucky, working in IT but coding for Engineering, having to document my perl code, and going through code reviews with the Engineering group which also produced software for Engineering, a weird arrangement, having to do with competing personnel budgets and other such political nonsense.
Hated to see them lose Kirk Munro from the team at Quest. Has support and development suffered any for being acquired by Dell?
He probably had to take more history classes then barber classes
And bean abel two cummyunikate is kinder overrrrraited anyways, doncha think?
Rachel Jeantel has a better chance of getting into a law school (as she’s planning to do) obtaining her masters degree in English than in Rocket Engineering!
Are you series? Its a hugh deal.
LOL... I remember being told many years ago that properly written code was self documenting and did not need comments.
I occasionally cranked out some very elegant code, with comments, but when looking at it some years later I often wondered "what on earth was I thinking that day?" Everything makes great sense at the time, not so much after a year or two.
....How hard it is too major in English? When its youre fist language. Arts and cratfts magors is pointless.
How hard is it to major in English when it’s your first language? Arts and crafts majors are pointless.
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