Enviromental Issues
Not what you think!
I started a new contract yesterday at [large company you will definitely have heard of]. It’s short term - very short term and I’ll be lucky if I can stretch it out to a week and my primary job is to sort out an application they’re seemingly having difficulties with. At the moment it seems more like a case of users expecting it to do something that it’s not currently doing and was never designed to do.
What surprises me is the setup. Any work I do is going to be directly in the live production environment. There’s no development area, no testing area, no staging area, no nothing. Sure I can create a development/test application and work on that but it will be on a live server being used by 1000+ people so if, in the highly improbably and unlikely event I make a small, teeny weeny ickle coding error that happens to crash the server…
Oh yeah, and rather than go through the hassle of creating a seperate ID for me to use, they’ve given me full admin and access rights to the system.
For the next week, I get to play God. Fear me!
It’s OK, programmers never, ever make those teeny, weeny little coding errors that crash servers. I for one have never made a web application unavailable by working on the live code, nor have I rolled an executable that was completely unusable due to something that would have been obvious had I had a decent test rig available. Development and testing environments are completely surplus to requirements for competent programmers.
And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything. And you’re probably management.
Good luck being God
Comment by QE — February 13, 2007 @ 10:42 am
It’s great, the way some companies have simply no clue, isn’t it?
Have fun being God, even if ’tis only for a week. After all, just think what The Big Fella managed in seven days (allegedly)…
Comment by Lyle — February 13, 2007 @ 12:23 pm
Fear you? We already do!
Comment by Gordon — February 14, 2007 @ 1:55 pm