[consulting] Cleaning Up After Bad Developers

[Larry Garfield]

On Tuesday 24 March 2009 8:50:39 am Greg Knaddison wrote:
> The first question is whether to blame the poor site on the consultant
> or the client (or both).  Any consultant with reasonable experience
> has had to take coding shortcuts they are unhappy with, walk away from
> a half-finished proejct, or simply stop supporting an unreasonable
> customer.  Jumping to conclusions after hearing one side of a story is
> rarely a good idea.
>
> Further, human nature is that my code/site/design is always elegant
> and yours is always crufty and overly complex.  We like the familiar
> and we like our own stuff...

Amen on both counts. :-)

I know full well that there are sites I built still running Drupal 5.1 or 5.2.  
Why?  Because the client bid us adieu after the site was built (we can't force 
them to keep us on retainer forever, even if we wanted to be) and hasn't 
bothered to keep the site maintained.  It's hardly my fault that the 4.6 site 
I built in 2005 was still running in 2008; I hadn't spoken to that client in 
over 2 years.  And that site did have core mods (although they were 
documented; it was before the magic of form_alter. <g>)

Sure, there are plenty of sites that were killed by an incompetent developer.  
There are plenty of others killed by an incompetent client, incompetent spec, 
incompetent designer, incompetent server admin... or by all competent people 
being given 100 hours to do a 400 hour project, so corners get cut.  

The better question is, how do we encourage people to be competent rather than 
incompetent and how do we convince clients that a 400 hour project really does 
take 400 hours if they don't want it to be a train wreck.  More competent 
developers out there only helps the rest of us, as we're not getting a bad rep 
by association.  

-- 
Larry Garfield
larry at garfieldtech.com