I have a similar story. Fresh out of college (in a non-computing related discipline) I went to work as a temp for a gas pipelining company. Their data entry system was obscenely awful- an Access database that was used like an Excel spreadsheet- entering in the same data over and over again in different forms. So, I optimised it. Added some forms. Made report templates that printed out automatically. Eventually I stretched the limits of Access and turned it into a full VB.NET (shudder) application. I tried to get the IT department involved but they refused to have anything to do with it- I couldn't even install Visual Studio Express because I didn't have admin rights on my machine- I had to use SharpDevelop.
All this happened while I was still an "administrative assistant" on a temp wage. After a time, I left- it was time, and in any case they'd said that my work was going to be replaced by an integrated SAP solution that would span the entire company's workflow. I moved on, got a much better job and have been programming off the back of that original job ever since.
This was in 2006. I spoke to a former co-worker for the first time in years about six months ago, who told me to my jaw dropping surprise that they were still running my application. Aside from anything else, I was blown away that the thing still worked. There's a certain morbid curiosity that makes me want to look at the code I wrote back then, I'm sure I would cringe. But hey, it's still going.
Stewart Brand's book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built has a great chapter on MIT's Building 20.
> Building 20 was a temporary wooden structure hastily erected during World War II on the central campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Radiation Laboratory member said, "At one time, more than 20 percent of the physicists in the United States (including nine Nobel Prize winners) had worked in that building".
> Due to Building 20's origins as a temporary structure, researchers and other occupants felt free to modify their environment at will. As described by MIT professor Paul Penfield, "Its 'temporary nature' permitted its occupants to abuse it in ways that would not be tolerated in a permanent building. If you wanted to run a wire from one lab to another, you didn't ask anybody's permission — you just got out a screwdriver and poked a hole through the wall".
this building gets mentioned in a lot of management books and "where good ideas come from" to illustrate a good collaborative environment. it has been replicated by quite a few places with various degrees of success. its main function is that there are no permanent work places so that people are forced to collaborate. This has not always worked out well.
could it be that MIT happened to have a lot of smart people and they created good things while working in building 2.0, and they would have created just as many great things if they worked in another building?
maybe im just extra skeptical because im currently reading "Fooled by Randomness" :)
It's quite possible that the building was special and did have an effect that was lost when people tried to replicate it. Trying to replicate things is usually a losing game.
For example, I bet they didn't replicate its temporariness or the fact that you could make holes in it.
Good point. It can be easy to conflate cause, effect, and coincidence.
The lesson I take from the story is that the smart people had extreme freedom to pursue their research. I don't think a university can just create a dumpy building and hope to produce some Nobel prizes. <:)
This is one of the biggest things I'm grateful my mentor drilled into me: Never make a quick and dirty solution that anyone else (especially management!) sees -- it will become the final solution.
You know, the great thing about learning is that everything you learn turns out wrong. And after that the next thing will be that you learn that it's wrong that it's wrong. And so on.
So guess what, you will probably learn next that quick and dirty is an amazing thing. Sometimes the morbid, buggy stuff is exactly what's needed and a well designed solution wouldn't scale to it's task or wouldn't be used because it's so clean.
This story (and others on this page) should drive home the point about how little most businesses really care about technology. If it solves a problem, they do not care about the hardware, programming language, database, user interface, etc. Look how many business applications still use character-mode interfaces (most banking, insurance, stock/inventory systems, etc). Why? They work.
This is exactly how I got my start in software. I was hired to walk a warehouse at a furniture retailer and take inventory with pencil and paper. At this time I had 0 computer experience.
Soon I was voluntarily transferring the paper to spreadsheets and printing them out. Next was a starbase db with a simple form on a laptop.
A year later I had built a custom system with a mysql database, barcode scanners at the arrival and departure gates and automatic email reports to the owner.
It is because of this that I was able to get to move on to another company to be hired as a software developer without a college degree.
Ditto. I did some temp work for a Big Dumb Company that was trying to manage compensation on a gigantic Borland Quattro Pro spreadsheet. I sold them on converting it to Paradox, bought a book on programming in Paradox and haven't looked back since.
Ha, well it was written in VB.NET, so that alone ought to make me cringe. And I was building on my existing knowledge of VBA, so...
Apparently a few years ago they had a minor panic because they realised they had no idea where the database was actually stored. I'd gotten some MSSQL space from the (outsourced) DB guys- the guy who gave me the space had also, of course, left. Fun times...
i've seen some great software built in vb.net including a real time trading platforms capable of near high frequency execution speeds connected to 10 exchanges simultaneously.
i personally don't care for vb.net because of its notation, but i don't think it's THAT bad. you're making it sound like it was written in vb6
I wrote a manufacturing pull system in VB 6.0 + Access for the application database. That was all they had to work with there ( or more correctly all they wanted to work with.. ) It handled a stupid number of queries per month and was very reliable.
It's important to have good tools, but a robust design beats all imho.
All this happened while I was still an "administrative assistant" on a temp wage. After a time, I left- it was time, and in any case they'd said that my work was going to be replaced by an integrated SAP solution that would span the entire company's workflow. I moved on, got a much better job and have been programming off the back of that original job ever since.
This was in 2006. I spoke to a former co-worker for the first time in years about six months ago, who told me to my jaw dropping surprise that they were still running my application. Aside from anything else, I was blown away that the thing still worked. There's a certain morbid curiosity that makes me want to look at the code I wrote back then, I'm sure I would cringe. But hey, it's still going.