Programming Gripe

I have a comment I have used ever since I started in IT/technology support, “damn programmers”.  This covers a lot of the strange and just plain stupid decisions I have had to deal with over the past 20 years.  However, yesterday, I ran into one of the biggest “what were they thinking” problems I have seen in quite some time.

You have probably heard the tag line “What can brown do for you today?” over the past few years;  well, Brown, I would like you to go fine people who actually can think about software engineering, and not just writing code.

They have a very good application called Worldship.  This software is critical to large customers, and also logistics companies for sending, tracking, shipping, and billing anything going out or coming in.  They have released a major upgrade to the software that is required for new rules and regulations in the shipping world.  For the past 5 years this software has allowed UNC path’s for the client configuration, now suddenly with the new version UNC path’s are no longer allowed.

WTF????  The support people said, well we have been having problems supporting UNC paths, so the programmers removed it.  OK, I have no problems moving to a mapped drive for this.  But, in order to install the upgrade, I have to do a complete uninstall of the old software, and then install as if this is new.

Again, OK, I can backup the database, and then restore the DB once the install is done, but wait…..What about the 5 years of customization’s we have created, what about all the import/export jobs that we have created, and are critical to the business process’?  The answer from support, those will all have to be re-created, sorry……….

So, Brown, what are you currently doing for me?  You are causing me 3 times the amount of work for an upgrade, and you are costing my client 3 times as much money as this should have cost.

Where should I send the bill?

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