I am the sole software developer in a company and I answer directly to the owner of the company. We also use the services of an outside developer. The owner isn't a developer but 'wrote software in qbasic' many years ago. He has reasonable abilities to spec projects. The outside developer doesn't answer directly to me, and my boss is really a micro-manager and wants to keep it that way.
The outside developer likes to use layers of abstraction (frameworks and wrapper classes), but has implemented them when I was stuck on months-long projects. When I return, the boss now wonders why it is so time consuming for me to do maintenance on projects (including one that I initial wrote from scratch).
I'm unhappy reverse engineering his code and I'm having trouble articulating the fact that I must learn a complete different interface from code that looks alot different than what I wrote in the first place. At the same time, the outside developer looks like a hero. Suggestions on how to articulate this to a technical/yet non-technical boss and how to put a lid on this happening in the future?
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60answers:
2I don't know if you can get away with this with your boss.. I could with mine, but not everyone can.
First, this has to be done respectfully, and the suggestion I'm about to give should be within the scope of a longer discussion. When it comes to the point of having to explain the difficulty of working with this developer's code...
Type up a paragraph in English, have someone type up the same sentence in some language your boss does not know. (Chinese, Spanish, Klingon, whatever.) Give your boss a (language) - to - English dictionary and explain that while you are technically capable of translating this outside developer's code into something useful, it takes time, just like it would take him time to translate from (language) to English using the dictionary.
Perhaps this would work best in the context of trying to establish standards for working with outside agents and potential new hires.
At the risk of sounding patronising, be careful that it is not just your perception of what you think your boss is thinking, which may be quite far from the reality.
Your boss may be wanting you to explain the situation not because he does not trust you, doubts your competency, or wishes to belittle you; but rather to understand where the difficulties are so that he can make an informed business decision on whether it is worth you reverse engineering this code- or perhaps be better to leave it as is and move on, on different aspects of the project.
Being honest and explaining that you have limited experience with these frameworks/wrapper classes may "buy" you time to not only learn these frameworks (which will hopefully benefit you greatly in the future), but may also mean that you are appearing to embracing and extend upon the other developers code, which is good team spirit if nothing else.
At very least, ask your boss to ask you if there are aspects of your explanation that he needs further clarification on. Keeping nice clear lines of communication will help everybody move forward faster.
Hope that helps!
Gav