We’ve all heard the phrase attributed to FaceBook “Move quickly and break things.” Some people have turned it into a totally fraudulent development methodology called Agile. Today I got to have a lovely exchange with what could charitably be called “offshore support” from Dice.com. I had come across a posting of interest and wanted to identify all of the other pimps hawking the same contract. Why? Because, even though the pimp flagged the contract as “CON_IND” they don’t actually work 1099. This kind of abuse is rampant on Dice and it appears nobody gets punished for it.
I dutifully included the link of the post which does not show up when searching for keywords contained within it, but does show up when you search for the title. I was very explicit that this post does not show up when searching for content within it. I got back an auto-insult response just use
"star" AND "xml"
see the attached image of all the results I got.
Comprehension 101 is not required for either Dice technical support or Agile developers. Read the story any way you want, hack out some code along with a worse test re-enforcing your totally incorrect reading of the story, then hurl it into product. Jenkins will sign off on it because your automated test worked!
It was just going to be one of those days.
The search has been busted on Dice ever since they rewrote/redesigned their site, what was it, two years ago? Hasn’t even come close to working correctly. I’ve actually given up looking there because the site has been so broken for so long. Half the time when an Indeed.com alert comes up for something on Dice, doesn’t even take you to that posting. Every time I mention anything about this to Dice technical support I always get someone who failed Comprehension 101. You would think a board for IT workers would be smart enough to never ever under any circumstances use either an off-shore development team or Agile. Both create disaster.
So, someone pointed me to this:
You will notice the top says it supports “Contract Independent” which on Dice is 1099, something this company doesn’t do yet they flag their posts that way to get more eyeballs on them. Here is a clue for all of you low lifes who are doing this on Dice, 1099 workers with EIN don’t roll to W-2, they can’t! You aren’t going to be successful, you are just going to piss everyone off and they will write blog posts about you shrinking the pool of consultants willing to work for you by the minute.
While it is true running this query did produce results:
If you actually run that query you will find it is missing the posting of interest. They also seem to have matched on XML only, getting confused by “start date” or some other such innocuous phrase. If you run the query which should return every matching contract, well, see for yourself:
Removing the state made no difference so I didn’t feel like stuffing yet another image into this post.
These debacles happen with Agile and pretty much only with Agile. Anyone who actually creates “The Holy 4 Documents” up front does not have this problem. Why? Because “The Holy 4 Documents” are what the QA team uses to write provable test cases. You don’t let the developer who hacked a bad interpretation write their own test and you sure as hell don’t turn something into production based on an automated test.
It took a long time, mainly because I mostly stopped going to Dice, to identify a perfectly specific test case, the kind of test case a valid QA department would have created and tested before this got put into production. What I suspect happened with testing is the same thing first level support did.
Well, I ran a query and something came out. Musta worked ayup ayup ayup
Ask yourself this: If you live within 60 miles of a nuclear power plant or are about to go in for surgery where they use a robot, do you want either development team using Agile?
