In the last week, I've had to deal with a major change of a reporting system and it's not been all that easy. Thankfully, I've gotten all my stuff working and I've mentioned in a previous post that there are others in the group that have not had it as easily and have made their problems my problems because of their weak skills.
Well, today was yet another amazing realizations that it takes almost nothing to be considered a 'decent' developer - if these guys are employed in this industry. And I'm almost ashamed to say I work at the same place they do.
Today it was simple - they said the interface I wrote wasn't working. I knew it was, but I listened to their problem. I asked them to pull up this monitoring site where they could watch their logins be accepted. Why they didn't think of this, I don't know... they knew of it's existence, and I guess they just thought that they shouldn't have to, or something like that.
So when they looked at this and ran the test app, it was clear that it was getting connected. So, the issue wasn't why it was broken it was why was their request failing. To that, I answered "Timing".
In the new release of this reporting system, there is an unfortunate problem that the instant the login is accepted, it's not really ready to accept requests. You have to wait a bit - or listen for a call-back, in order to know when it's ready.
They weren't, and so they were issuing the request immediately after the login was successful. This request was getting dropped, and therefore not handled, and then the test program was exiting. They assumed my stuff was broken when they really hadn't done any real debugging of the problem on their own.
Where do these guys come from? It's like they read Teach Yourself Java in 21 minutes and then called themselves 'developers'. Oh, I'm sure it might not be that bad, but what did they expect? What happened to the simple skill of debugging? Trying to figure out what's going on inside the Black Box.
It's a lost art, I'm afraid. I fear that with the advent of all the IDEs, the new developers are simply single-stepping their way through code and that's only going to find the logic errors - not the threading and timing errors. It's amazing that they don't even really try.
I could teach my Mom to be this kind of developer... we ought to expect more.