7
PaperTrail
231d

Worst coding procrastination story?

Not necessarily coding, but anything that has to do with writing support reports for an application/feature. Good news is we have a dedicated dept for maintaining reports now, but there was a time developers were required to write and maintain reports (Crystal Reports). Starts out as data in grid, but de-evolves into ..
U: "This value here...can you make that red if its a Thursday before a promotion release on Friday and I forget to update the promotional percent?"
<month later>
U: "Why is this value red?"
<explain why it's red>
U: "That is so stupid, I wouldn't ask for such as feature. I never forget."
<month later>
U: "OMG! I FORGOT TO UPDATE THE PERCENT AND WE LOST OVER $100,000!! THE REPORT WAS SUPPOSED TO FLAG THOSE VALUES IN RED!!! I HAVE THE REQUIREMENT DOCUMENT!! ITS ALL YOUR FAULT!!!"

Not to mention the hours...HOURS worth of meetings filled with "Can you move the value a little to the left, a little more..NO! Too far! Now, make it bold...bolder..uggh...I said bolder, I thought you guys knew a lot about computers."

I eventually ignored the report feature with "I'll work on it later". 'Later' never showed up. Users eventually exported the data to Excel to write their own reports and now exporting data to Excel is a standard feature of our apps.

Comments
  • 1
    Yep, export features are important.

    You can't compete with atcual spreadsheet software without reinventing or embedding one. Most of the time easy-to-use exports into the format used by their spreadsheet application of choice are what the users actually need and want.
  • 1
    Everything ends up either as a data connection in Excel or someone copy/pasting stuff into Excel. Every-single-fucking-time. It’s just the way it is. Just your generic all-purpose frontend. I am old now. So I think it’s fine. 🤷🏼‍♂️
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