New-Gen "IT" People ... T

LOL!

I think you are over egging the pudding

I know a lot of completely trashy crap software., especially in the [b]anking sector that is truly execrable.

It wasn't written by senile old white men.

but, IME anyway, said senile white men were generally rather good coders as well as rat-hot bug finders and fixers, while and at least one young, knowitall New Yorker was so bad and uncontrollable that he got slung off sight when he, apparently just because he could and without permission, 'fixed' but actually wrecked the COBOL copy library the project depended on. Its fair to say that I;ve seen badly written, and poorly maintained, software in both banks and the Civil Service (think bugfixes that were not documented in either by comments in the code or in the system documentation. I worked on several sites and saw software staff writing bad, undocumented code and then trying to debug it, but a reasonable amount of this bad code was written by young 'uns, many with strange misunderstandings and never been taught to comment their code either.

On one large project, written in COBOL, we had several on these:

- one young contractor had idea that an ICL 1900 mainframe wouldn't stop and and require engineering attention if a program divided anything by zero. Fortunately he was slung out in under a week.

- another didn't know that if there's no 'EXIT' statement at the end of a paragraph, it falls through to the next one, so where several paragraphs were expected to fall through to the next one, he'd write

PARA-1. MOVE A TO TOT-VAL. ADD B TO TOT-VAL. GO TO PARA-2. PARA-2, ADD C TO TOT-VAL. MOVE D TO TOT-VAL. GO TO ALL-DONE. ALL-DONE. DISPLAY TOT-VAL ...

Several other contractors knew him from other projects and said he'd written code like that as long as they'd known him.

That's OK, they're only using IT as a stepping-stone to management. :-p

Call them "PHBs in training".