Posted by Vince Morgan on 04/08/07 01:22

"Bernhard Sturm" <sturmnixspam@datacomm.ch> wrote in message
news:ev8cm3$kr0$1@aioe.org...
> Hmmm.. I don't want to be offensive, but I have heard such stories in
> the past quite many times. It's the typical story of an 'organically'
> grown structure of a website.
> The needs of a website change, and nobody wants to spend some money,
> because someone 'handy' and half-knowledgable is at hands to 'fix' or to
> adapt the site to the grown needs.
>
> However, as a professional myself, this is not a fruitful way and leads
> to a lot frutstration. Guranteed. As you just seem to witness. The fact,
> that you state that 'web technologies are not my thing' should give you
> a warning. If it's not your 'thing' then why are you trying to do it? In
> many terms this is unwise, and you will provoke probably more harm than
> doing good for the company in question. IMHO: ask them to spend some
> money on it, hire a pro and let him do it.
> It's all a question of priority: if they think of themselves as
> professionals in their business, then they should also work with
> professionals. If this is not the case, and they don't consider the site
> as important for them, then you are on the perfect right track :-)
>
> cheers
> bernhard
No offence taken Bernhard.
I'll relate a short story if I may. Well, I guess I'm going to anyway :)
The director of this company has a son who is a C/C++ programmer. He is
responsible for coding, and hiring for a relatively large firm that writes
secure transactional software for financial institutions.
Some time back the director told me that his son had told him that he had
recently interviewed over a half dozen candidates for a position as a C
coder. One of these candidates had been coding in C for ten years, and all
of them had impressive qualifications.
He presented them with a block of code consisting of four interelated
functions and asked them to spot the errors. These were very basic errors
that any C programmer should spot immediately.
None, and I do mean not one, found any whatsoever..
I do not consider myself a C programmer, I write mainly C++ and thought I
had probably forgotten most of what I had learned of C long ago. However, I
spotted the errors immediately, and to his (son's) embarrasment also noticed
that he had used an incorrect type for a string length parameter that wasn't
meant to be one of the errors. I still don't consider myself a professional
C programmer by a long shot.

The company paid good money for the site in question and to be perfectly
honest it was a piece of &*$@# by any standards.
So, I think you may be able to understand why this company has very little
faith in "profesional" web developers
My previous experience with html was in the days when a child could learn
all there was to know in the time it takes to peel an orange, and prior to a
certain very large software develloper trying to continualy re-invent the
web wheel for their own commercial purposes. I lost interest rapidly when
that began to happen. And I am to this day quite disgusted with what they
have "achieved" in this regard, and the pain and grief it has caused to real
profesionals like yourself. This is the primary reason I consider it "not
my thing".

As I mentioned previously, I was asked to have a look at an apparently small
problem with some php code on this companies web site. It wasn't difficult
to fix, but having now looked through some of the script I couldn't help
noticing how porely written it was. I then began to look into the html, and
was appalled.
Having related the above I'm sure that you can understand why this company
has very little faith today in web devellopers.
I do realize that there are some extremely articulate and profesional web
devellopers out there, as there are also excellent C programmers, however,
as my dad once said, "there are a lot of fish in the ocean, but sometimes
there's a lot of water between them".

Your are right Bernhard, no doubt about it. And I've had my share of grief
already with this. But I was offered the job of fixing it, and foolishly
perhaps,I accepted the challenge. I'm afraid I am now in this now to the
end, and as much as I agree with your sentiments and judgement, I need to
learn the solutions whether I like it or not.

Thank you again,
Regards,
Vince

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