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Programmer pilot fish is hired by this organization because he can write a mix of C and scripting languages to pull information from databases and generate web pages -- pretty straightforward stuff.
But that's not what he finds when he starts work. "The new job I was hired for used a big vendor's interfaces and coding tools," fish says. "It was a major enterprise-wide conversion, and the vendor consulting staff was essentially learning to do their jobs as we did ours -- and at our expense.
"Their applications were that new and untested. Nothing worked and the vendor's consultants couldn't seem to give us good answers when things failed."
It's soon clear that things are failing a lot -- which means a lot of try/test/fail/retry cycles. And even when things appear to be working correctly, a high percentage of the time they still aren't right.