I helped automate data entry once into a horrible piece of shit system.
It was a web UI that was slow to load, slow to work with, and its speed varied between "slow" and "fuck you, I'm going home".
Not only was it slow, it was also unforgiving of mistakes. It did on-the-fly validation, but you had to maintain the order you filled the fields. A mistake in the middle noticed too late? Tough shit. You start over. Or you do nothing wrong, but when you submit your form, the system says that it's overloaded, which means you have to wait a bit and start over. It probably meant that the number of concurrent users just went up from 1.
In other words, all hallmarks of a raw prototype implemented by an intern who saw an ASP.NET tutorial the day before that went into production.
There were several big ass spreadsheets to retype data from, and a deadline.
So I thought, kinks can be ironed out and quirks can be worked around with some Python and Selenium. These two rarely complain when put to work, and they have a lot of patience.
So I spent almost a whole day helping my friend in need. The deadline was saved.
But it didn't give me any satisfaction. It was a thankless piece of work I was happy to lose after it was no longer needed. My friend was grateful, their higher-ups took it for granted. I felt nothing but burned out in the end. All I got was a heavily editorialized story on TheDailyWTF. I should probably make a tshirt, or something.
It was a web UI that was slow to load, slow to work with, and its speed varied between "slow" and "fuck you, I'm going home".
Not only was it slow, it was also unforgiving of mistakes. It did on-the-fly validation, but you had to maintain the order you filled the fields. A mistake in the middle noticed too late? Tough shit. You start over. Or you do nothing wrong, but when you submit your form, the system says that it's overloaded, which means you have to wait a bit and start over. It probably meant that the number of concurrent users just went up from 1.
In other words, all hallmarks of a raw prototype implemented by an intern who saw an ASP.NET tutorial the day before that went into production.
There were several big ass spreadsheets to retype data from, and a deadline.
So I thought, kinks can be ironed out and quirks can be worked around with some Python and Selenium. These two rarely complain when put to work, and they have a lot of patience.
So I spent almost a whole day helping my friend in need. The deadline was saved.
But it didn't give me any satisfaction. It was a thankless piece of work I was happy to lose after it was no longer needed. My friend was grateful, their higher-ups took it for granted. I felt nothing but burned out in the end. All I got was a heavily editorialized story on TheDailyWTF. I should probably make a tshirt, or something.