Sometime you come across posts or pages that really amaze me.

At times like that I am amazed at the amount of bunglers that are in this line of work. I am amazed at the poor level of self-knowlegde these individuals posses. And I am amazed at the arrogance & cockiness with which these people go through life. And last but not least I am amazed at the ease with which these people seem to twist the facts without any remorse or sense of shame at what they are doing. I cannot conclude otherwise than that these individuals have been hiding behind, or rather are glued face first onto a solid brick wall, since apparently all the do’s and don’ts in the industry (or in general for that matter) got lost on them over the years.

Coming across an article like this:
http://maximporges.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html, shows I’m not alone in this and I couldn’t agree more (only the locations are different).

Anyway I’m getting side tracked, the main reason I’m writing this article was a page I came across yesterday.

The person who created this page was involved for a few months on the Behrloo project. He was responsible for the development of some ‘locations’ as we call them, which are one of the central pillars of the Behrloo interface (the others are a controlpanel and dialog area). In general his attitude was very unprofessional, arrogant, condescending. Even if you are really really really good, there is no reason to be like that, let alone if you produce low quality output.

A few examples:

• I came into work, my sources wouldn’t compile anymore while they were fine the day before. After 2 hours of digging, I found that he didn’t agree with how I implemented something, so he ‘fixed’ it. Faulty ofcourse. That’s not all, he left a comment as well, ‘hulk not like, hulk change code, if hans not like, Hulk smash Hans’.
  Do I need to mention the room got a whole lot smaller within the space of a few heartbeats? I was ‘this’ close to physically assaulting him. Luckily my testosterone levels are low and I’m a nice guy (LIES!)
• He would fix bug A, and as a consequence bug B would be reported. He’d fix bug B, bug A would surface again. He practically told the reporter to choose. The reporter was the client, needless to say this did not instill a lot of confidence in TriMM as a company.
• The client would report something like ‘deleted emails are not kept’, which is a valid statement since almost every email program saves deleted emails until you empty your trash. His reply would be ‘deleted emails are deleted not kept!’

In his defence, he did a lot of work during the months when there was absolutely no chance for me to do it, including the functional design of those locations, so that wasn’t were the problem was. In addition he did those mostly by himself, very independent as well. The problem was the unprofessional attitude, and the lack of self insight which makes people go ‘I can’t do this alone, I need to ask someone for help’.
The Flash community has a lot of those kind of developers, people who learned to hack along, but whose skills aren’t up to the task of scaling. Once the complexity grows, hacking won’t cut it anymore and chaos ensues.

3 weeks before the end of the deadline, we decided to (read: had no other option but to) let him go. Lucky for him, since he just started freelancing, he only had to return one week of pay, but I had to work 70-80 hours weeks and rewrote all his locations within the space of those 3 weeks in order to deliver a quality system on time (I have to admit I felt less heroic than this sounds ).

This was all in 2005 as well by the way. So why am I telling this now?

Because I happened to stumble upon his portfolio page. Which states he helped writing Behrloo. Which posts all of Sebastiaan Dorgelo’s 3D work with his name on it. Which makes the reader think he did a good job with which we as a company were satisfied and happy with. Which in general gives a completely false impression of the work he did, the work we did and his part in it.

I always learned that overdoing your resume is a dumb thing, since they’ll find about you in the long run anyway, but the people that think likewise are scarce. Problem is, a lot of times I show up at a network meeting, or speak with someone in the same line of work in our area and we get to the topic of a lack of good flash developers, I get to hear, “Oh I know someone that’s really good, his name is …”. Guess what?

Give me a hammer and I’ll tear down your brick wall.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 at 6:37 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.