Comment Seriously? (Yes, seriously.) (Score 4, Insightful) 466
I do this all the time in my line of work. Someone hands us a data dump of 2 million lines in a messy CSV file with dozens of columns that's old collected data. We benefit if we can make use of it--but we have to clean it up first.
It's a one-time job--script something up to process the data into cleaner data and format it as we need it to make use of it ourselves. Then, toss the script away.
There's a big difference between "software engineering" and "coding." Coding skill is useful in all kinds of edge cases that mainstream applications don't handle, and when you're just looking to finish an edge-case task, you don't need to think about correctness or maintainability. You certainly don't want to pay a contractor $$$ to cook something up if it's only three dozen lines and will only be used for two weeks. For those casesÃ"the "who cares if it works six months from now, we just need it to do something specific for us this afternoon" caseÃ"you just need it to work once or twice, during the current project, as a part of the *process* of getting it done, not as an *asset* to monetize over time.
I totally get where he/she is coming from.