Why is it that jobs that seem like they ought to be easy take ages to do? As a recent example I had to put up a new rotary clothes line in the back garden so I got hold of a support that can be screwed into the ground. Takes 30 seconds to install it said on the packaging and I can believe it… if you haven’t got a back garden like ours appears to be. It seems that after building the house the builders spread about 6 inches of top soil on top of rubble and then turfed it. When I tried to screw this thing into the ground I got it about 6-8 inches in before it stopped. In the end I had to dig a hole to remove the large stones and then repack the earth back in. So a job that should have taken about a minute ended up taking most of an evening.
A similar thing happens with software especially when the final system cannot be properly simulated. We put email support into two projects and it went in without a hitch; it pretty much worked out of the box. We then copied the same code over into another project and it took days to get it going. It worked a treat in QA but once in Production it wouldn’t work. Same setup, same servers as the other projects and it just didn’t want to work. In the end it turned out we had been given an incorrect email address and we had got a TCL list incorrect but because it was a production system it took a while to find this out.
Sometimes you just have to get someone else to give the code a quick look see. Several times colleagues have asked me to check their code and the fault just sticks out like a sore thumb; the difficulty then is to try not to act all superior because sometime the places will be swapped over and I’ll be the one who can’t see the fault in my own code and be banging my head on the desk thinking…’It should be this difficult’