What price is a company's reputation worth? Answer: $4600

A reputation once broken may possibly be repaired, but the world will always keep their eyes on the spot where the crack was.
- Joseph Hall

I've been lucky for the last four years as a consultant to not have any major problems with getting paid. So the story of the first client to behave really badly is worth telling.

Back in January 2010 I contracted with an organisation to do $12,000 worth of consulting work for them over the next few months. After two months I sent an intermediate invoice for $9,600 for the work completed so far. Around then the organisation decided due to a strategy change that they no longer wanted the work that I was doing. So they simply went quiet on me and wouldn't acknowledge any email or phone calls. I didn't know what was going on, just got a bit annoyed at the late payment and lack of communication.

Last week I dropped by their offices to sort this out. I received a rather chilly reception and was offered $5,000 as a final payment. Fed up with the five month delay and their lack of communication, I took the offer.

So I lost $4,600, and they lost all my trust and respect. When future clients ask me about that particular organisation's products, I'll probably say "tech is ok, but terrible business practices". Would I work for the same organization again? I'm a pragmatist so probably yes, but with 50% payment or more up-front.

Companies spend thousands of dollars on trade shows and advertising then throw the resulting gains away by treating another business badly. Crazy.

Preprocessor Warning Signs

Using #if 0 makes searching hard

Some symbol is not defined so you grep for it and you find it in a file. But you've forgotten that you commented that part of the file out. So the symbol exists in the source but not in the .o file, leading to puzzled head-scratching. A better idea is to delete the unwanted lines since you can find them in your version control whenever you want them, and perhaps even leave a message about what they were.

Try this to see how many times you've done this:

[mdoar]$ find . -name \*.[ch] | xargs grep '#if 0' | wc

#ifdefs for unit tests mean that the code tested differs from the code used in the product


If #ifdef has to be used to make a function testable, then perhaps the function needs refactoring? If possible, use the build tool to create the tests, not the preprocessor. Some sample quotes at random from the web:

"I don't ever use ifdefs for unit testing because code should never know it's being unit tested."

"Tests must be non-invasive. I don't want to have to add #ifdef UNIT_TEST declarations into my production codebase as it'll end up making a mess and worse, could actually change behaviours. The framework and test code will be in an externally compiled project"

Using computers in another way

It seems to be the final destination for many machines - the doorstop. The lucky ones may become a foot rest or supports for the next generation of monitors. I'll have to bear that in mind next time I spend money on a machine - what else can I use that box for?

On the Naming of Protocols

Words to never use in your protocol name: "simple", "trivial", "lightweight", since the results never are.