That said, when is the last time a spoofed e-mail actually made it to your inbox?
About 10 minutes ago, and multiple times every day.
Find a guy with a little programming knowledge who can sit in the office next door and write docs for Jim.
Perfect answer. I've worked with several folks like Jim over the years, and consider myself to be in the same vein. Yes, we can and will write documentation if we have management that requires it. But we'd much rather be having fun solving problems, and wise management will make sure that is what we are doing most of the time. Right now I work for a very small research company - the entire tech staff is two engineers (not "software engineers" - computer vision & robotics) plus two programmers. Our code is messy and poorly commented with no documentation - we get away with this because it is research grade code, and because our team is so small. We (the engineers) understand it just fine. The poor programmers who must port it to other languages simply have to put the blinders on and copy the functionality. We could document the code to death, but that wouldn't be any substitute for the fundamental knowledge in physics, statistics and algorithms required to *really* understand the code. When and if we grow into a production environment where many people will have to support (and understand) the code, I trust our management will be wise enough to hire other folks to do the bulk of the documentation, with help as necessary from the engineers. Because there will always be more profitable things for us to be doing, which we actually enjoy.
I remember once years ago freaking my colleagues out with a largish app written in R... with nary a loop anywhere.
I'm sure you had plenty of loops in your code. They were just hidden via the use built in functions. Not that that's a bad thing.... just saying. You have to understand the mechanics of the calculations to use them properly, and over-reliance on built in functions can make it too easy to talk out of your ass.
The means-and-ends moralists, or non-doers, always end up on their ends without any means. -- Saul Alinsky