Actually, it was worse than that: there were seven different specialized accounting and ofice management packages (Real Estate Brokerage Management, Legal Office Management, Medical Office Management, Dental Office Management, Condo Property Management, Rental Property Management, and Commercial Property Management) all based on the same Access 2.0 codebase but each having separate development streams because of Access's lack of a library manager. This was only the start of the horror, however.
One of my early jobs in that company was to help migrate this mass of code to Access 97. It should tell you something about the company in question that my first real assignment with them - and I am not making this up - was to rewrite the manual, before the code had been reworked, and before I even knew what the packages did, and there wasn't time enough for me to be trained on the old version beforehnd. The result was no better than one would expect, and we were to get all sorts of grief about how useless out manual was, especially since it was shipped 'soft', as a Word/Doc2Help document. Not coincidentally, I also learned to hate Doc2Help with a passion during this time, as it never seemed to work right and repeatedly mangled the documents it was supposed to be formatting.
But to get back to the Access 2.0 to Access 97 upgrade: since I didn't know VBA at all at the time, this amounted to crash course OTJ training, picking it up as I went from the manuals and whatever books I could find that were any good (Access books, and VB/VBA books in general, are notoriously bad as a rule; eventually O'Reilly put out a few decent ones, but that was only a short time before I left the job entirely). Needless to say, it was a rather nasty experience, though I picked it up quick enough. My reaction upon reading about DAO was, IIRC, "What demon out of Hell came up with this?"
Actually, Access per se was not the worst thing about that job, although it certainly contributed to the attitude which underlay it. The lead programmer (who was a partner in the company as well the sysadmin for the small ISP that they also ran, and was thus occupied much of the time with other things) was the sort of faux 'wizard' that is common in VBA circles. When given the choice of rewriting a function ten times for each case separately or writing a function to handle all cases, he could write the special-cases faster than he could think out a general solution, so the same code would be scattered across the system like so much confetti. The resulting maintanence nightmare was left for the line coders like myself to deal with. What made this particularly hellish was that often, much of the code was behind the forms, so finding ever case would require you to go through each group of form snippets manually. Add this to the library problem I mentioned before, and it is easy to see that a single change appearing 5 times in each program would have to manually propagated 30 different code locations! It's no wonder that the final version ballooned from 850K to over 18M during the upgrade process...
Not only that, but the release date, which was too optimistic by at least 6 months, was strictly adhered to; as a result, the customers, having paid a minimum of $1500 for any of the products, were unknowingly receiving what was at best alpha-testing versions of the programs. We burned and labelled the disks manually, with the shipping date on the label so we would know what revision of the code the person had when they called in with a problem! At one point, we were shipping two or even thre revisions per day. No wonder users were up in arms - a fact I knew, since I was also doing phone tech support for the program. This wasn't just a matter of blind scheduling, either; the owner of the company had made it a policy not to test the software (his exact words were - and I am not making this up - "We will test no software before it ships"). One time he threatened to fire me when I spent too much time doing so!
As you have doubtless guessed, the owner was one of biggest idiots I ever knew. When he eventually canned me for failing to perform a requested miracle (write a new manual from scratch before the UPS pickup at 4pm that day), I was relieved to be done with it. I was later told that the next day, realizing that I was the last programmer he had other than the already-overloaded sysadmin, he went to the two web developers they had on staff and said - I am not making this up - "So, can you two be pick up Access by next Monday?"
It was rumored at the time that the owner's brother, a major East Bay slumlord, was financing his younger siblings' forays into business as a way of keeping them from getting in the way of his own affairs. This seemed entirely plausible to most of the dozen or so employees, as none could imagine that the company was actually making a profit. Eventually, long after I left, the whole mess was bought out by some investors, who were in turned bought out by a bigger company in the same field, and somewhere along the line the entire product line vanished without a trace. I have to say that this is probably for the best for everyone involved. |
