A few weeks ago a software developer came to me with a problem with some code. My suggestion was to do X. The developer's response was, “No one ever taught me how to do that.” To put this in context my suggestion was along the lines of: “What do the logs indicate or have you looked at a stack trace?” I was not asking the developer to do anything outside of the realm of the normal SDLC.
Skip forward a few days when I provided a developer with a script he could use to do some database manipulation. It was SQL 101 but rather than having the developer look it up I figured it would be quicker to just type it out and send it over. I added the caveat that he would need to modify the code to work in the particular environment in which he was working.
An hour later he was hanging over my desk complaining that my script didn't work. So I walked away from what I was doing to see what the problem was. Sure enough a reference in the script to an object on the file system was never modified to fit the environment. I was embarrassed for the developer when I had to point out that “h:mojobob” did not exist in their development environment. But he wasn't embarrassed at all. It was my fault because I didn't tailor the script for his specific use.
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