To PLC and HMI programmers

I'm not the smartest guy in the world. I've got my associates in electronics and I've been to a zillion training courses. I'm really good at troubleshooting programming issues on start up.
Now do me a favor. and stop hiding things. By this I mean programming in a method that is even difficult for other integrators of your caliber to understand. You do things that only you understand, then fail to "fully" comment your work, and it makes it so hard on me to fix things that you didn't get just right.
Now for some background. I am in Taiwan, performing the last month of a startup of a chemical plant, and I have to fix the integrators mistakes, and believe me there are plenty. I don't mind, and I understand that there will things to correct, but some guys want to keep their jobs so bad that they don't even comment thoroughly what they have done. It takes me 3 hours to fix something that might have taken 30 minutes if it was commented properly.
Sorry about the rant, and thanks for listening.

try writing a program from scratch while 3 people inturpt and 2 others complain about the time its taking and then the boss keeps wanting it all done last week and the project manager keeps adding things , informaly so there is no review or meeting to disscuss the additions.

Now when you get something that just works and your ready to start testing it, they ship it!!!!!!!!!!

Well , I tried to comment it as I went, but when things change and change and change doesn't it make sense to save the final commenting for when it is done?

OK I am about done all I need to do is test and confirm all these new additions work correctly and then comment everything..........

What they hear is this " ...........blah blah ...... It's done.....blah blah blah.........

Now you have what someone else wasn't done with.

Would be nice if the programmer was onsite for start up. But he is probably being rushed into the next project/ kneejerk/ fire.

I have found that everyone generally tries to do a good job, but we all are cut short by other factors, time , money , management, sales.

To be fair , if the designers and engineers of the world made the decisions , more things would work and be smoother, but fewer things would get done and there would be less half working junk to spend money on at walmart.

Not sure if that's a good thing, but our economy is based on people spending every dime they make on **** that half works that they dont need to begin with so we can fill a big hole in the ground and complain about the contamination of ground water.

muusic man, dahnuguy

Day light savings and that lose of a hours sleep didn't go over to well with you two. Take the rest of the day off and get some sleep.

Mickey said:

muusic man, dahnuguy

Day light savings and that lose of a hours sleep didn't go over to well with you two. Take the rest of the day off and get some sleep.

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almost curious what this means............

I think you folks should be gratefull that you have work to complain about.

Humor:
If it was hard to write, then it should be hard to read!

ATU said:

I think you folks should be gratefull that you have work to complain about.

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my post is not a complaint.

my point is : Things look different from different perspectives. If we could all do what we know needs to be done , everything would be much better, but life and work is a series of compromises. We ship when management says ship. Sales makes the rules and the big money. Nobady cares if it takes the guy in the field 2 weeks to adjust everything. It shipped on time, was delivered on time and installed on time. Contractual obligations were met and sales got paid. Next.

Give me an extra week after it's done, and I'll document the hell out of it.

Doesn't happen.

Stop making changes so I can finish the changes from last week .........

Doesn't happen.

So this is what we have.

And every misstep by management creates more work for us little guys. Which I am saying is a good thing. For us that is. Poorly run bussiness employs more workers.

Ken Moore said:

Humor:
If it was hard to write, then it should be hard to read!

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If it was easy to read then it wouldn't be called CODE!

More seriously, if customers gave their suppliers more time to get things straight then dahnuguy's situation wouldn't happen and then muusic_man wouldn't have to complain about it.

Dahnuguy: I'm right there with you - I am a firm believer in documenting the heck out of my programs and modifications, but more than once I have come back to MY OWN work only to find that the idiot who wrote it didn't document it well or that the logic behind the logic doesn't seem to make much sense.

It's like you point out - when you are in the heat of it, you rarely get the opportunity to do it completely or, sometime, the way you should.

I hate it, too, but it happens and then you have to go on to the next thing.

Steve