Thursday, September 20, 2012

We’ll be emailing our code to you at noon and four.

Support said they’re populating the pager list based on who’s touched the code in the last six months. We’ve elected you to be the only person with check in rights

This reminds me of stories about people gaming bug fixing for earning extra money, gaming lines of code to skew metrics about performance (counting lines to determine performance is idiotic. It's the surest way to enforce { } on separate lines, if that's your preference.  And if your line counter is smart enough to ignore those, there are ways, culminating in just bad, do-nothing, code), and any number of policies that don't result in the behavior expected.  I don't even think developers game it for reward in all cases, sometimes it's just to see what will happen.

For example, we had a revolving door on the back of our building with a pass access system.  The first weeks it was in, developers were back there trying to determine if someone could get in while someone else was going out, if two people could get in at the same time, if you could reach back and swipe for the next person as you entered, and numerous other edge cases.  The end result was not changes to the revolving door to fix what they found, but an order from on high to knock it the hell off.

Title: We’ll be emailing our code to you at noon and four.
Snarky: Support said they’re populating the pager list based on who’s touched the code in the last six months. We’ve elected you to be the only person with check in rights.

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