Accuracy

Coding skill alone is not enough to merit keeping a job as a corporate programmer. Your manager expects you to do every phase of your work correctly, without micromanagement from himto be productive without prodding, and to be zealous about accuracy.

Isnt is obvious that a programmer must care about accuracy? In fact, no. I was a programming consultant to a major corporation doing a Y2K (Year 2000) conversion of hundreds of production programs to a new version of a critical software package. The package contained hundreds of programs and millions of lines of source code that had been maintained and enhanced for some fifteen years at the company before the mandated change to the entire system.

A conversion programming project team of about eight outside programmers (contractors) was assembled to implement this change. As a company visitor, I had to share a cubicle with another contractor programmer. We had little project orientation, so we plunged ahead and started dozens of programs to upgrade the application to the new level.

After I changed each program and compiled it, I tested the program against the company database of information to see if my changes and the new software worked properly, as is normal programming procedure. My cubicle mate changed and compiled his programs, but he did not test them at all to see if they actually worked, and the project manager, who had the cube next to ours, did not review our work.

Just before our first project implementation integration test, the project manager received a phone call from the consulting company inquiring about my cubicle mates performance. Couldnt be better, was the project managers warm reply. Soon after that came the first project integration tests where all the project programs were run against the company data. My cubicle mate soon disappeared, and the project manager started closely checking the work of every programmer on his team.