I just started reading Daily WTF and it’s really scary. Occasionally, they publish an article about someone’s experience at some business that handles money (bank, market trader, etc) where they have some mission critical piece of software that barely functions. The current year is hard coded, there are individual tables for each fiscal year, and the problems go on and on. Often we have experience with software that doesn’t work properly or crashes constantly on a daily basis.

A lot of self taught programmers and “classically” trained (if such a thing exists in our field) that don’t know their goto’s from a hole in the ground. The question needs to be asked: How many of these kinds of people end up starting their own consulting or software development business? When a businesses needs to have some custom code written for their in-house order tracking/billing/”add extra feature here” software they pick the cheapest bid and get what they paid for. It’s too bad we don’t have some kind of website where normal businesses can review contract programmers before they are hired.

This does explain why my credit card information has been stolen THREE times over the last year…