So, months and months ago (I probably mentioned this), we were told that the company was looking for a new health insurance provider.  Later, they gave us form to fill out for a provider that starts with A and ends with A.  They said it was to help the A-A come up with an estimate.  These forms required a detailed medical history for anyone who might be covered, as well as basic but personal information like social security numbers.

I was pissed.  I was fine with providing the medical history, but felt it should be done anonymously.  Anything else was basically providing all the information needed to get far too far into my history than I was comfortable with from a company with whom I had absolutely no agreement.  But I’d only been at this job for a few months, I’d just completed a world class fuckup, and decided that causing waves was not a good idea.

So, middle of May, we get an email saying that there’s an informational meeting from one of the companies bidding on our business.  As it turns out, that is misleading.  It was a meeting announcing that we’d gone with A-A and that the forms we’d filled out were basically, our applications.  Further, we were told in the meeting that we were required to make a decision before leaving the meeting (there was a bit of flexibility if you raised a stink).

Finally, we were told that the change-over was happening in 2 weeks!

Needless to say, people were pissed and HR saw the error of their ways and switch she change-over to July 1.

I’m not thrilled, but its still a reasonable plan and we were able to get my Ms. Moleboy’s operation done before the change (which saved us TONS of cash).

June 30 comes and we are told that the broker we went through has yet to get A-A to give us ID cards or group numbers.  We are told that we are still covered retroactively, but any costs will have to be paid out of pocket and a reimbursement claim submitted to A-A.

1. A-A has a history of denying claims as much as possible (Ms. Moleboy has done some work with them)

2. If they couldn’t get us our memberships in 6 weeks, what would have happened if they’d tried to do it in 2 weeks?

At this point, we have to consider ourselves completely uninsured.

This entire thing, from the initial deception, to the sudden changeover, to the poor results has been one gigantic clusterfuck.

And someone on our payroll made money while screwing up everyone in the company.

glee.

I’ve just started a new job and I’m working as half-dba-half-developer (it is supposed to be mostly development, but I can’t see how thats going to happen).  The product I’m supporting (3rd party product) is very obviously written by people who don’t know much about databases.

1. Instead of passing in data from the front end to a database procedure to handle things like inserts and updates, the front end just generates the SQL and issues it to the DB.  In my opinion, that is a bad design choice.  It turns the application into a black box, more or less.  That makes debugging and writing enhancements harder.  And thats not just for the user end.  The makers of the product have decided that, when there’s a DB level issue, they (or we) will just write a trigger.  Triggers are annoying, poorly implemented, and not meant as a method for patching bad code.  It can also be tricky to predict their behavior as they get more and more complex and start to interact with other triggers.

2. There are no primary key or foreign keys.  No, thats not quite right.  There are conceptual PKs and FKs, but no PK/FK constraints.  The goal of every database platform, be it Oracle, SQLServer, or MySQL, is data integrity and thats why these constraints exist.  The developers appear to understand the concept, and there are columns that are designated as PKs or FKs, but they seem to have missed the fact that without actually implementing the constraints, you aren’t getting that referential integrity.  You might as well have a bunch of flat files because you’ve really decided that the relational model is going to be ignored.

3. I was talking to one of the developers and asked WHY the front end was handling inserts and such.  His answer: “When we had the database doing it all, things got very slow when we had a large number of users.  The database resources got weighed down and slowed to a crawl.”  Moving the code to the front end is NOT the solution to that.  The solution to that is to get someone who knows how to write SQL and whatever procedural layer that database implementation has (PL/SQL, T-SQL, whatever) available.  Of course, given how poorly this whole thing has been designed, there may have been little choice.  Its either continue doing it the wrong way and hope to get it working sufficiently, or scrap it and start over.

But THAT is why you can’t assume that Java/C#/Etc. people can work with databases.

Myopathy.

Alpaca!!

Because every once in a while, you get to work, and get the joyous suprise of there being no toilet paper in any of the three bathrooms.

whee.

I don’t remember if I noted this earlier, but I’m fucking bored.

I work as a government contractor and our contract has NOT been renewed. In a mixed blessing, we did get it extended to the end of April. I say mixed because it does mean I continue to get a paycheck, but there is absolutely nothing nothing nothing to do. All but the most contractually required development has been canceled. The remaining work will probably take up 15-20 hours of time. None of it mine.

(edit: this is not completely accurate.  I am responsible for making sure that any of the weird patching we are doing goes through OK at the database end…which involves me being here and doing nothing…)

ARGH!!!!