Ok, we’ve all been there haven’t we?
You’ve had to take someone under your wing and show them the ropes. You try your best to teach them well and to be patient.
To make a long story short..6 months ago got asked to mentor a girl who had no experience in databases or development. She was given the task to make a few changes to an Access DB. Simple enoguh, sure…
Well, due to both her and I having multiple projects on, its been slow going. At first I spent weeks analysing the fully undocumented monstrosity..and I pretty much told her what she needed to do. Once she learned a bit, I let her try things out on her own..always under my watch. She did well.
Well, 2 months ago, she was ready to go live but we found a problem with the underlying data, so had to wait for someone to rectify that. So, 2 weeks ago..the data is fixed and its time to put the changes on the live app. It took her a long time..and then when she was almost ready to go she says “its not working right”.
So..I tell her to go over what she did, make sure she didn’t forget anything and get back to me..
Skip forward 2 weeks..I have spent 1.5 days looking at it, and its completely banjaxed.
Nothing we changed is working…
I asked her for her old test copies that she was using over the past few months so i could try and trace what change had gone wrong..
she deleted them all because they were taking too much space on her machine.
I asked if she had the very last one, ya know, the one that worked fine after all the changes..nope..gone.. al she has is the original, and the copy of the live that she put the changes on (which doesn’t work).
So, I ask for the documentation, which I originally stipulated had to be done as she went along, and each step she took and each change was to be written down for future reference..
She didn’t..she’s got a 2 page document that she did “from memory”.
So, because its been 6 months since I really did any hard work in this app, i’m having to start from scratch and poke around again.
My head is melted and I want to die.
If I had my way, Accces would be unilaterly wiped from each and every machine on the face of the earth.
