Dilettante Dev Wrote Rubbish, Left No Logs, And Had No Idea Why His App Wasn't Working
The Register, Friday, May 16th, 2025
Self-taught coders who work in HR and have a doctorate in English tend to do that
Bosses often ask IT pros to clean up messes made by amateurs, and in this week's On Call - The Register's reader-contributed tech support column - we have just such a tale to tell.
We'll Regomize the source of this story as "Bryce," who told us about an experience in the late 1980s when he scored a job working as a developer on Pick OS, a hybrid OS/database that had a decent following in the minicomputer age.
Just three weeks into his new job, Bryce was sent from his home in Toronto, Canada, to fix a client's system in Vancouver - thousands of kilometers away on the other side of the country.