>This evening I had the pleasure of looking at a system unconnected with work. The system is critical to the client and put together by a Computer Science graduate and I was asked to give an opinion unofficially for a friend.

Oh my god.

I knew I was in for fun when the schema had tables with mixed upper/lower case – and field names with spaces, percentages, dollar signs and all manner of exciting characters. The system had comments only in what (I presume) was the first part of the system. There was nothing useful in the comments but the programmer declared his genius (not making this up) in taking the work of somebody else and ‘sorting it out’.

Hang on – pain in the eyes.

OK. Back.

The schema seems to have come from the school of “I have an access database and I’m not afraid to use it”. People who think because they know how to use Filemaker Pro or Access or similar revel in their new found status of “Programmer”. No, you are not a programmer. Frankly I’m probably not a programmer any more either but at least I know when code is wrong. if I know how to use Excel does that make me an accountant? No. If I know how to use Paint it doesn’t make me an artist. You have used Access and (I’m sorry) on the evidence shown the only status achieved is “wank stain, second order”. Your exclamations to your poor suffering client (Yes, they showed me the emails), that “Enabling numeric analysis of this data will require some days work in installing the necessary mathematical modules” is wonderful. Your problem is you only knew how to use a varchar (strange, I’ve seen that a few times before) and you’re now realising why data has types.

But take heart. You may not have a clue what you’re doing. And you may struggle to put your trousers on the right way. But you have a degree in IT. Virtually everyone I know will therefore trust you and your future is assured.

Unfortunately, you’re still a wank stain. C’est la vie.