work rant

i hate working on code written by consultants. why? because they don't always know what the fuck they are doing. nor does anyone else know what the fuck they did.

the problem i face is the necessary assumption that what i was given as a base was functioning correctly. i fear that assumption is, unfortunately, false.

it doesn't help that the design of these host systems sucks. really, really just sucks. why, for instance, create a spouse segment, and then store the spouse information in the "additional insured" segment? and if you decide to treat a spouse just like a second insured, why not get rid of the obsolete record layouts? fer fuck's sake, why is deleting so god damn difficult? isn't that what versioning tools are for? to retrieve stuff that might have been deleted if you find you still need it?

perhaps i'm anal. perhaps it's because i learned from anal people. but well-structured code is much easier to figure out. consistency. spacing on the lines. neat and tidy. so much easier. and jesus, why is every freaking working storage variable an 01 level? did they just want to make initialization more of a pain?

i hate this. i wish i could have written it from scratch. there are vast swaths of commented out code. why? why? for me to make any sense of what's going on, i have to clean it up. waste of my time, frankly.

ugh, i sound like one of those sticklers for standards. but, frankly, if you aren't going to be the only one working on a module, they help.