Morons In Charge

A friend of mine gave me a lead on a contract programming job involving Ruby on Rails and Apache. I spent a day playing with Ruby once, and I have never dealt with Apache, so I don't expect to hear from these clowns. Here's what I think of this job.

This job description is absurd. It's like they want an architect to draw them a picture of a house, but he can only use crayons, and, oh, by the way, the house has to be crooked. And don't forget that you can only use three shades of red.

Ruby On Rails is supposed to be this wonderful programming tool that would enable anyone to whip out a fancy user interface program in minutes. Anyone familiar with Ruby and who also had half a brain could put together a program to do this job in a day.

Since this appears to be a trivial task, and since they are asking for an outsider to do the work, all their Ruby programmers must be busy working on some critical project, or they are all busy going to meetings and talking about how great Ruby is.

Making the flow charts took more effort than writing the actual program would take. Never mind that the flow charts contain big fat errors.

They want to use Apache servers to handle the transfer of the code? Isn't Apache supposed to be some high performance web server program? Why would you need a separate instance of Apache for each each programming station?

Anyone, enough idiot bashing. These guys obviously need someone on retainer they can call to fix their problems. A full time employee may be more than they want, but they need someone versed in what they are doing.

I could do the job, but I would need a month to get up to speed on Ruby and another month to get up to speed on Apache, and a day to do the actual work. And probably another month to hold their hand and get the download stations working smoothly.