Computer programmers...
For those programmers who think it's a dirty secret to not comment or otherwise obfuscate your code? Thank you. It's an amateur mistake to think that this is a secret.

All you've done is provide real programmers with the justification to extend the contract by several months in order to re-write the code, "as it's clearly in such a mess". Even the most tech-illiterate IT manager, when confronted by such a mess of uncommented code, finds it hard to argue otherwise.

Real programmers include comments and indent code properly. Those comments, however, may only be of use to someone who's familiar with the program flow and its position in the overall system being developed. Thing is, showing code like that to anyone else gives the impression that it's easy to follow and full of helpful comments, until they try to modify something and it all falls over.


As for over-estimating timings, that's a standard practice. Again, if you think that's a secret, you're deluding yourself. Take the time you think it'd take to do the work and multiply it by 2.5. That will take into account all those disturbances like people talking to you about other work, fixing the little niggly problems that take so much time, changes to the specification, etc. It's not a secret, it's effective time management.
( S tr app y, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 9:36, Reply)