Indeed. I've (relatively) recently joined an "enterprise" (large bank), and the code they've written to handle a lot of batch jobs of various types is pretty hairy (think thousands of lines of ksh). They use things like CA-Unicenter to manage all these jobs (scheduling) on a collection of machines with 50 or so production database instances, but the whole setup is what we call in French "une using à gaz" - i.e. you have pipes going every which way, with various pieces interconnected in various ways, and where only a few people really understand what the dependencies are between the various bits...
Me, I just manage their Sybase databases... :-)
Michael
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I've been amazed at the stuff I've seen inside financial companies. They are the example everyone loves to use of where one would have to write serious code with real accountability, pretty much the definition of the "enterprise" market that J2EE is aimed at, and yet they tend to be such a mess when you get inside...
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Likewise. A few years ago I spent a week working with some consultants from a "household brand name" computer systems supplier, helping them write what they call Adapters and Connectors for part of their middleare product range.
The Connectors are the bits of glue that interface to the external systems and hardware. The Adapters perform the translation between the format of the information gathered from or supplied to those external entities, and the internal middleware comms protocol.
You have never seen such a lash up in your life. Most of the connectors and adapters are written during the post-sales installation and deployment phase, by post-sales engineers (who are usually more saleperson/liason than programmers). They get hacked together at the customers site and tested on-the-fly. I was supposed to modify two pieces of code that "were written by the guys in XXX office for a similar job", and adapt them to the task at hand. You cannot beleive what hookey, inefficient, polling loop nightmares they were. Really quite unbelievably bad.
Luckily, I got moved on by cirumstances before I had to make a decision about whether to speak up or shut up.
Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?
"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.
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Well - having sufficiently good credentials (at least with my direct bosses!) I definitely speak up, and I try to clean things up (a little) in the areas that concern me.
Michael
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