Paranoid decisions and OMG customers

DRANK

I used to be a consultant for a long while, and that meant that I worked on a lot of customer projects. That led to me seeing and acting is some really strange ways.Sometimes you go into a codebase and you can’t really believe what you see there. I think that this is similar to how an archeologist feels, seeing just remnants of something and having to deduct what were the forces that drove the people who built it. In some cases, what looks like bad code is actually a reaction to a bad policy that people are trying to workaround.I think that the strangest of these cases was when I was working for a customer that refused to let external consultants to use their internal source control system. Apparently, they had sensitive stuff there that they couldn’t isolate or something like that. They were using either Team Foundation Server or Visual Source Safe and I didn’t really want to use that source control anyway, so I didn’t push. I did worry about source control, so we had a shared di…