[ale] Over on thedailywtf

[KingBahamut]

"A little more than a decade ago, *Ian Mc* worked for a consulting company
that just landed a large contract for COBOL/Oracle conversion project. An
early adopter of outsourcing, Ian's company sub-contracted most of the
programming work to a certain overseas programming company with a staff of
"highly proficient" COBOL programmers.

Months passed and the deadline the first module to be demonstrated and
delivered was coming up fast. Ian was the point person to present the module
to the client and, due to a slew of client and management blunders, he never
had a chance to see the completed code before the demonstration.

At the client, sitting in front of a green screen terminal, Ian got his
first look at the code. He expected a simple compile with maybe a few error
corrections, so imagine his horror when it threw so many errors the compiler
terminated with a "too many errors" error. Ian took a closer look at the
code and realized he was up a certain creek with out a paddle. The code
was absurdly bad, closing cursors before they are opened, reading without
opening them, etc.

After the embarrassing gaffe at the client was finally over, Ian inquired
with the overseas coders to see if they even tested the code before
delivering it. "Of course," the lead programmer proclaimed, "we tested it on
paper."
Unbelievably they didn't have COBOL or Oracle installed on their development
workstations or servers."

All I can do is laugh, repeatedly, over and over.
-- 
KingBahamut
Founder of the GWoS
All Around Geek
"I could tell you the probability, but you wouldnt like it."
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