[Just found this draft post that I was waiting to post for some reason... it is from the middle of last year. Almost just a rant but I typed it up so I may as well post it.]
Liaising with customers, particularly ones who are managers of their company - highly experienced in their own field, though not in IT - can sometime suck.
I constantly find myself having to explain in detail why something cannot work that exact way or why something is a problem that needs to be worked through. Their opinion seems often to be that I don't want to do it or that I say it can't be done because I don't know how. Usually it seems to stem from the problem of what is easy for humans, or obvious to us on paper is not something that the computer can do or represents some information that the system does not have.
An example from today: Employees have 4 digit employee numbers, their cards have a single digit issue number that is used after their first replacement. When they lose their card again and get a new one the issue number increments. So employee 1234's first card is 1234, their second is 12341, third is 12342 etc. (Whoever thought this kind of arrangement was a good idea needs their fingers broken.)
There are two problems that I tried to broach today (right now, before they break the system). There will soon be the need for 5 digit employee numbers (we are up to like 8500), there seem to be some people with more than 9 cards (21, 51!). The system (of course, as it stands) cannot tell the difference between employee 10001 and the second card of employee number 1000 (also 10001). The second card of employee 10001 (100011) and the 12th card of employee 1000 etc.
Trying to explain that the system cannot just take off the last 2 numbers when the person has had more than 10 cards and take of the last 1 number otherwise, did get a little frustrating. Basically when there are 2 dynamic length fields in a composite id, without any other information it is not possible to reliably extract them.
No comments:
Post a Comment