I work at a small (4-5
people) web/software company. We're involved on this ASP website
(backend in C#), where we're doing the front end and there's this
programmer on the end of Skype who's writing the code behind it. From
my perspective it's been one WTF after another, but with my limited
knowledge I'm asking you, gentle wtf spotters, if you can confirm and
enlighten me:
1. AJAX has to be installed on IIS - considering this is a group of technologies and not a "thing", wtf?
2.
There's a form that needs to be submitted from somewhere else on the
page. Apparently we cant do document.getElementById(
thformname).submit() because the onclick handler of the normal submit
button fires off something to the server. I suggested moving that into
the form's onsubmit, but apparently "we cant do that". If we assume
that the normal submit button just submits the form (and there's no
ajax malarkey) could there be anything "invisible" that ASP or .NET expects to get
back that might be circumvented by submitting the form from somewhere
else? (In a maintaining state kind of way)
..of course the
real WTF(tm) is that the page designs were sent through in drips and
drabs, so identifying the common parts was very difficult. This led to
bad assumptions being made about how things should lay out, and a ton
of javascript to tweak individual elements into position on different
browsers. The frontend's being written by the placement student, the
backend by a guy who's from a C++ background and has done little web
programming, the designer's strong point is print rather than sites,
and the issues I have with my manager's managing ability are being mentioned by all parties.
I'm torn
between "thank god I was busy on something else, or it would have been
my project" and "If it had been mine, I'd have done it better...and
maybe got them to use php" (commence flames)
3. Dammit
I had more, but I've lost the will to live.
BTW I dont know all that much about ASP .NET. I've used .NET
to write a couple of windows apps in C++, and i've maintained some ASP
code in my time, but that's about it.
Other potential WTF's:
Had to explain to our designer once what anti-aliasing was. "No I cant
just put this over the top of the image, it's antialiased to white!".
She still gives us stuff like that.
Web site design is a
picture - mock up if you're lucky (read: click slideshow) - or if
today's gonna be a great day, a pdf containing all the pages with a
sentence explaining what the page may do. You have to guess what fonts are for example. I might start insisting on a
wooden table background...
My boss's interview technique is a
list of questions, read almost robotically from a sheet without making
much eye contact with interviewee (I was taking notes in a couple and
felt very awkward, I can only imagine how bad the candidates felt). The
programming test is pretty much "write some sql to select all the rows
in a table called blah". The practical test is "can you implement this
form from this picture, and make it email X telling them blah", which
as ive touched upon is more information than you normally get.
Am I expecting too much from a small web company?