When I was in college, I had the hobby of collecting pin-on buttons with geek-related sayings. Stuff like "God is real unless declared integer" and the like.
During one exam, I wore one that read "I'm surrounded by idiots!"
I feel that today.
At The Job, we are realizing that a departed contractor left a lot of buggy code in his wake. As we find the problems, we are fixing them. One of them involved code that filtered out excess notifications based on time and some other factors. The other dev was done with his tasks and so he started looking at the code. We realized that it was not filtering correctly, so he started making fixes. When he was done, he asked how we were going to test it.
This is not a n00b, this is a dev with 25+ years experience. Sure, the project is fed gigabytes of data per day, but we already know that we can test a binary in isolation. So the obvious way to test it is to create a data file with the desired qualities for the filter (pass and block values) and run that file through the code.
So it seems to be to be blindingly obvious that this was the way. But it did not to him. So I ended up writing the generator and running the tests, showing hiom the results, waiting while he fixed things and put the new binary on the test machine, etc, etc, etc.
Sheesh.
I was trying to let him run with a section of the project as his domain, where he would be the SME, and I would stay out of it, but he just does not seem to cotton to the idea that he needs to be proactive and look ahead of the one thing he's currently doing.
All I gotta say is that my boss better put me in for another level bump ASAP
