[pjbster]

Even if the organistion is fully signed up to the knowledge building philosphy, it can still be derailed if the staff aren't up to scratch.

Around 12 years ago, my employer tasked me with building a quote engine for a new product they wanted to sell online. The engine needed to produce 4 additional quotes (2 lower, 2 higher) to either prevent potential walk-aways or to offer upsells to capture potential additional revenue.

And it struck me at the time that this sort of hand-wavey selling tactic would be just the sort of thing that was likely to change so I put all this logic into a pure function - pass in an original quote request and the function returns a collection of alternative quote requests.

And, sure enough, a couple of years later, the business decides to change the approach and offer 1 lower quote and 3 upsells. And they give the job of implementing this to another developer.

I was still at the company and was known as the original developer (my name was in a comment at the top of the file, for a start) so I was asked to review the code changes.

I was surprised to learn that the other dev had left the pure function untouched and had, instead, written a bunch of new logic to generate the alternative quotes. Not based on the original quote request but on the collection of alternative quotes returned from the original function. Furthermore, this new logic was placed in main procedure - mama's finest spaghetti in the making, right there.

So I rejected the change and told the dev where to put the actual logic. Then I waited for the re-review request to come in.

What happened instead is that the code went live anyway - the dev had simply re-raised the review request and assigned it to another dev who rubber stamped it.

Looking back, I don't think all the documentation in the world would have prevented this behaviour. A better approach would be for the company to pass the changes to the original developer and to pair with another dev - like Fred Brooks' Chief Programmer plus Assistant recommendation.

I was never approached for an end of year review for this developer and I left the company before them. It's not personal but I'll resign on the spot if a company I work for employs this developer in future.