Moral Dilema: My Company Doesn't Know A Thing About Standards

[ChipOManiac]

Why not run various pages through the W3C validator and print off the error reports and just leave them laying around where they might be noticed. If you do it for pages where you have to make changes and make sure that there are no errors in the part you changed then if they ask about the reports you can simply say that you were checking that your changes didn't add anything into the page that wasn't HTML - since the validator simply tests if the tags are valid HTML or not.

Believe me I tried that, and it doesn't work because they're using the right tags in completely wrong ways. It's valid HTML, but semantic rubbish. They brushed me off when I said that heading tags were for structuring the content. And besides, the div instead of ul is too stupid even for the validator to notice.

Nevertheless, thank you for your thoughts.

I would recommend that you approach this situation very delicately – that is if you would like to keep your job.

I have shown my despair of their abusing standards (via groans, and facepalms). I am (and they know it) a very honest and open guy. The reason I have kept shut up is because they're "superior" to me, and the last thing I want to be is right and be called a Heretic.

However, the lead designer (and the guy who chose me for the internship) seems to have a little faith in me, so I might have some hope there.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Of course, if they force me to write non-standard code, my job wouldn't matter much.

[xhtmlcoder]

Obviously they have never heard of Screen Readers or even understand the basic semantics of markup or even how a Search Engine would view and weight the page. Let alone Separation of Concerns. If they are misusing TABLE for layout they are allowing themselves to get into a inflexible maintenance nightmare.

[ChipOManiac]

Obviously they have never heard of Screen Readers or even understand the basic semantics of markup or even how a Search Engine would view and weight the page. Let alone Separation of Concerns. If they are misusing TABLE for layout they are allowing themselves to get into a inflexible maintenance nightmare.

I tried to explain screen readers to them. Their reply: "Who cares about them?"

[xhtmlcoder]

The people who "care" are those that use or require them. Ask those clueless guys if they; "Enjoy surfing the web with their monitors switched off?" As obviously they don't need them; "Who cares about web masters that need monitors?". >;-)

Approximately 3% of e-commerce consumers are visually impaired, or otherwise require the use of a screen reader to read text on a screen.

For an e-commerce site with 10,000 visitors per month, then, at least 300 of them are likely using some form of a screen reader - maybe this company enjoys discriminating against their visitors? It's not just people who need AT that benefit from a well structured site.

Sri Lanka Government departments and agencies are required by the Protection of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act. No.28 of 1996 to ensure that online information and services are accessible by people with disabilities. So it's not like there aren't some web accessibly laws in place in the country.

[aaarrrggh]

I would recommend that you approach this situation very delicately – that is if you would like to keep your job.

The fact of the mater is that you are the bottom of totem pole. As an intern you probably aren't even on the totem pole. Therefore, no one is likely to take you seriously. That is unless you come off extremely confident and have facts to back up what you are saying. However, this will not guarantee any results. The thing you really have working against you is your position. That might be impossible to overcome dependent on how confident you have been the whole way through. If you have been coming off shy when confronted than chances are you won't be able to recover because you will have already formed an impression that you don't really believe in what you are saying.

The fact that you asking here whether certain practices are "correct" or not leads be to believe that you have come off uncertain to your superiors. Thus are going to have a very difficult time convincing them otherwise. Therefore, I would recommend to start looking for a new job because you are unlikely to change anything. Politics plays a significant role in this. Politics that you can't overcome unless you have seniority, are liked or have formed an image in others mind that you know what you are talking about which doesn't seem so.

The key to having people embrace new ideas is believing in what you are saying and having extreme confidence in it. Lacking that your thoughts will be nothing more than background noise. Especially when compared to people with a high level seniority over you that have been with a company for much longer amounts of time. I have seen it time and time again. In office setting seniority and confidence matters more than correctness of information. You can have the dumbest idea but if delivered well with extreme confidence with a little seniority to back you up people will embrace it. That is the way it works.

Extremely well written and you should take heed of his advice.

When I was first starting out a fair few years ago now, I *knew* some of the code I was looking at that I'd inherited from "senior" developers was poorly written, but I was so low on confidence (for whatever reason), that I didn't really hold enough authority to put my points forward. Over time I proved that my code was better than theirs and eventually managed to get promoted within that company. However, in the job I now have, I respect my own ability enough to consider myself something of an authority figure, and people seem to respond to that confidence with respect.

Having said that, I'd still always consider another person's opinion on something, especially if it can improve a system I'm working on in any way.

So much of this stuff is about confidence and how you come across, and some of this will come to you over time.

[Lieto]

If they use "simple/stupid" because they dont know how to use "smart/correct" — you are in trouble =/
Delicate approach wont work if they simply dont know what they are doing and are not willing to learn.

That is unless you come off extremely confident and have facts to back up what you are saying

Thing is that he is coming to a senior telling him that the guy is wrong and should learn to do his job better. How can that go good? I am pretty sure that those seniors are aware that they use outdated technics so to say.

I would approach it from the side of "let me please do the whole project the way i am doing it and then if you dont like the result i can do your way and we can see which one loads faster / easier to correct / whatever".

[aaarrrggh]

If they use "simple/stupid" because they dont know how to use "smart/correct" — you are in trouble =/
Delicate approach wont work if they simply dont know what they are doing and are not willing to learn.


Thing is that he is coming to a senior telling him that the guy is wrong and should learn to do his job better. How can that go good? I am pretty sure that those seniors are aware that they use outdated technics so to say.

I would approach it from the side of "let me please do the whole project the way i am doing it and then if you dont like the result i can do your way and we can see which one loads faster / easier to correct / whatever".

I disagree with this, because the inevitable result is: "Ok, we don't like the way you did it. Go back and do it our way now like you promised".

[Lieto]

Load time and compatibility would be a solid argument vs their "dislike".

[aaarrrggh]

Load time and compatibility would be a solid argument vs their "dislike".

Nah not really, because the load time differences in reality would be negligible (most likely, unless they're not compressing images and not minifying javascript and css etc).

For people who refuse to learn new standards, I doubt a few seconds difference on a page load would make any difference anyway.

It is also possible in theory that writing the site to be standards compliant would actually add to the load time, depending on the context.

[Lieto]

i see, well gentle arguing is whats left then i guess.
or even better: trying to find a new job

anyway: dont give up on the standards =)

[ServerStorm]

Hi,

It does seem tough.

Have you taken the angle that increasingly Search Engines are penalizing page rank in organic searches if the mark-up is semantically incorrect - for example overuse of DIVs, improper use of Heading tags ... (the list goes on).

Reinforce this idea with we can't control how restrictive and penalizing Search Engines will become with semantic enforcement - there is a transition to stronger enforcement - but we can become more semantic in the way we do things so we don't have to deal with massive changes in the future.

You add that increasingly governments are legislating more rigorious standards for companies that do business with them, so moving forward you may be restricted in where you can get business unless you become good with accessibility standards and symantic markup.

Regards,
Steve

[oddz]

I'm not saying this about all designers but a fair share of designers out there could really care less about the quality of front-end programming. Seems to me like you are working in a design focused environment rather than an engineering focused one. If that is the case I would take this opportunity to recognize that you would like to work for a company more focused on engineering than pure aesthetics. Of course there isn't any reason both sides of the coin can live in unison but most often than not the ones who seem to push creative edge also push the technical edge which leads to a nice looking but poorly engineered product. Designers that appreciate and understand the importance of balancing the two are hard to come by. More often than not that is the reason most engineering companies have a front-end developer – to keep the designer true to the technology and write proper front-end code. Though you seem like your stuck in a environment where technical quality isn't important and for that I don't what to say besides hit the road.

[Stormrider]

I've been in this situation so many times before it isn't even funny. Mostly I'm working under someone who has no clue about html - just hacks things together until it works. I always find it strange that designers in a company do the front end markup a lot of the time, whereas I think it should be the developers - creative and coding require such a different set of skills it's rare to find someone who can do both well.

I've ended up working under people who are only there because of the length of time they have been with the company or just that they were the only one doing the web side of things when the company needed to expand their webdev team, without them having a clue about modern development practices, industry standards or even OOP in a lot of cases. Every time I've been there I've thought I could bring them round to the accepted industry standard ways of doing things (not that they bother to do any research about what they are, mind), and I end up just bashing my head against a wall and being very depressed about the job I'm in instead. They are mostly from the 'but it works this way' or 'using best practices takes extra time' brigades, and have no clue about the massive maintenance nightmare they are creating by doing so, and no clue that doing this properly in the first place actually saves time in the long run - they were all so short sighted. I have ended up leaving every time this has happened and never did persuade them that there is a 'better' way to do things - some people just can't see it. One company even brought me back as a contractor at the same time as I was doing my new job in order to work on the sites I had built there, their own coders were so clueless about modern frameworks / design patterns they can't understand the framework I used for most of my projects there!

I am so much happier where I am now, where best practices, industry standard web dev techniques and design patterns are used all the time. If you have the choice, quit the job. It sounds like they aren't going to see your point of view however you put it.

[ChipOManiac]

Sri Lanka Government departments and agencies are required by the Protection of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act. No.28 of 1996 to ensure that online information and services are accessible by people with disabilities. So it's not like there aren't some web accessibly laws in place in the country.

Wow! Even I didn't know that, guess I could use this, thanks.

Hi,

It does seem tough.

Have you taken the angle that increasingly Search Engines are penalizing page rank in organic searches if the mark-up is semantically incorrect - for example overuse of DIVs, improper use of Heading tags ... (the list goes on).

I do think that search engines are now searching in that way, but I doubt they'd see the light. But still thanks for your thoughts.

I am so much happier where I am now, where best practices, industry standard web dev techniques and design patterns are used all the time. If you have the choice, quit the job. It sounds like they aren't going to see your point of view however you put it.

I do have the choice, and if they still don't see to any reason, then I might as well transfer my position. Thank you.

Designers that appreciate and understand the importance of balancing the two are hard to come by. More often than not that is the reason most engineering companies have a front-end developer – to keep the designer true to the technology and write proper front-end code. Though you seem like your stuck in a environment where technical quality isn't important and for that I don't what to say besides hit the road.

Here I don't think front-end development was much of an issue until recently, the higher management wants to do everything to standards but don't know anything about it, and neither do the ones who implement it.

i see, well gentle arguing is whats left then i guess.
or even better: trying to find a new job

anyway: dont give up on the standards =)

Don't worry I won't give up the standards!

[Lieto]

I can imagine someone telling me that i should do outdated designs, i would probably freak out
Also, i am quite happy that more and more people starting to realize that designers shouldnt do front end. Moreover some designers are ux / ui, some are creative, some are illustrators... wow, thats an awesome world.

[TomB]

I was in a similar position in my last job. It was worse than that though, it was bad PHP and bad HTML. Things as bad as having an opening div echo'd in one file and a closing div echoed in a totally different one. The "Lead developer" had no clue about OOP and barely even understood the concept of a function. The codebase was a mess, making even fairly minor changes took hours of work trying to discover how things worked and what knock on effects changes would have in seemingly arbitrary parts of the system (and this was running a site with hundreds of thousands of pageviews a day and a database with over a billion records across a couple of hundred tables!). There was so much redundant code, undocumented that nobody there knew how it worked or if it was even in use! It got to the point where the "Technical Director" decided to start switching off pages/code blocks he assumed weren't in use and waited to see if anyone phoned up complaining. Brilliant.

Despite being the "Junior Developer", I managed to teach people there OOP. This happened because they saw how robust my code was and how everything was separated to make re-use and substitutions easier. Eventually, one of the other developers was eager to learn and together we put forward a case for a total re-build knowing it would save so much time and problems for the company long term. I actually headed up the development of the site structure and back end despite still being the "junior developer"!

It is possible to make changes from the bottom up, but people need to see the practical and technical benefits rather than an argument which is based entirely on "But this is how it should be done!". Show them pages which break in some browsers, show them how difficult it is to control the design when <br />s are used. Make them think, ask them how they'd solve certain problems and why they'd do it that way.

[Stormrider]

I was in a similar position in my last job. It was worse than that though, it was bad PHP and bad HTML. Things as bad as having an opening div echo'd in one file and a closing div echoed in a totally different one. The "Lead developer" had no clue about OOP and barely even understood the concept of a function. The codebase was a mess, making even fairly minor changes took hours of work trying to discover how things worked and what knock on effects changes would have in seemingly arbitrary parts of the system (and this was running a site with hundreds of thousands of pageviews a day and a database with over a billion records across a couple of hundred tables!). There was so much redundant code, undocumented that nobody there knew how it worked or if it was even in use! It got to the point where the "Technical Director" decided to start switching off pages/code blocks he assumed weren't in use and waited to see if anyone phoned up complaining. Brilliant.

Despite being the "Junior Developer", I managed to teach people there OOP. This happened because they saw how robust my code was and how everything was separated to make re-use and substitutions easier. Eventually, one of the other developers was eager to learn and together we put forward a case for a total re-build knowing it would save so much time and problems for the company long term. I actually headed up the development of the site structure and back end despite still being the "junior developer"!

It is possible to make changes from the bottom up, but people need to see the practical and technical benefits rather than an argument which is based entirely on "But this is how it should be done!". Show them pages which break in some browsers, show them how difficult it is to control the design when <br />s are used. Make them think, ask them how they'd solve certain problems and why they'd do it that way.

^Yup, been there... only noone was willing to learn how to do anything different from the way they normally do it. They hadn't even heard of version control and would edit code on the live servers... mad.

[molona]

^Yup, been there... only noone was willing to learn how to do anything different from the way they normally do it. They hadn't even heard of version control and would edit code on the live servers... mad.

The real problem is no when things are not done properly... Maybe they don't know better... the real problem is when people don't want to learn any other way, even if it supposed to be better

[Sega]

I would have to completely agree with @Oddz comments. I would look for another job, some things are just out of our control and the moral ground on these circumstances would only lead you to be isolated and with office politics this only further increases the chances of you being disliked and in a workplace this is awful.

In office setting seniority and confidence matters more than correctness of information. You can have the dumbest idea but if delivered well with extreme confidence with a little seniority to back you up people will embrace it. That is the way it works.

....so so true. I would make your life a little easier and look for another job. I would not complain nor make a scene, just find better alternative work and leave in the best manner possible.

[Sega]

I am (and they know it) a very honest and open guy. The reason I have kept shut up is because they're "superior" to me, and the last thing I want to be is right and be called a Heretic.

Not the best of characters to have in an office environment. Instead I would recommend you to be reserved and closed, until others have at least shown you their colours. Once you know who you're dealing with then you can loosen up.

Your situation is almost identical to mine, in the end it was too much to bare and I left. Maybe this was not the best thing I did, maybe it was. In either case I made my decision back then.

We were using tabled layouts too, no validation, inline CSS, DreamWeaver and in many cases created external meaningless DW generated CSS, basic php includes and the best cases a very bad proprietorial CMS. Some of their websites even used the vintage <font> tag.

I did make some positive changes but in the end I ended up teaching everybody how to work, with a bottom dollar salary after almost a year and half of endurance I decided the best thing to leave.

With most office settings, information and knowledge is almost like some secret treasure; protected and kept under secrecy. This makes a terrible environment for evolving your learning but it's the nature of this environment that limits evolution.

Information must be shared and openly released as people find things out in order to serve their company and not their selfish needs. The very essence to why information is kept secret is so the organization does not evolve resulting in the appearance that your better than everybody else, this protecting your temporary job position.

The Greeks have a saying for this:

"'In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king"

Being better than than the group of worse people is certainly no prize. In the end those people protecting their jobs will drag their company down resulting in the eventually closure. If this happens those very people will struggle to find work in today's world of the web.

[PaulFlessis]

Simply, always produce 2 options - human mind works in a strange way - give them 2 options at least, they will have to choose from 1 at the end, no escaping there. Don't keep it open ended for them to produce critique.

And then handle it diplomatically - regard your work as coming from their intuition. That'll do the trick. Bend their rules against them dude. AND NO NEED TO QUIT the industry..!!

[Stomme poes]

I guess what you suggested is the best way, but despite my attempts to code well and bring it to their attention, they've been pretty indifferent about my code, they don't question it.

Just as most of us here do with accessibility, you'll have to sneak it in. You just write good code and just don't tell anyone (the first time you did, you got yelled at. That's a sign that if you are going to stay there, you stop showing people your code). It may take you extra time. Let them think you're a little slow.

I am still figuring out jQuery so I used that as my excuse for slowness while I looked at how to make some JS interactions keyboard and AT-friendly. Now they just see what they want, and secretly it also works for other people too.

Evangelism is fine when you're a big-shot. Apparently publishing a book can make you one. But otherwise, if you're a minimum-wage code-monkey like the rest of us, you just do the best work you can and don't show it around.

[Sagewing]

You will never win this battle, and it's not a moral issue, really. I think that's a little dramatic.

Many large companies are slow to adopt standards, and you are being paid to do it the way that they want you to.

If they want your opinion, give it to them.
If they don't want your opinion, you serve nobody by giving it to them.
If you don't like this kind of work, find an employer who works the way you like

While you are worrying about changing one organization to use standards, the whole world passes by. Pick your battles.

[ChipOManiac]

Sorry for not responding for a while, work's been catching up. :P

I was in a similar position in my last job. It was worse than that though, it was bad PHP and bad HTML. Things as bad as having an opening div echo'd in one file and a closing div echoed in a totally different one.

I fixed something like that about a month ago on our company website, it seemed so illogical. I think if I'm going to do any changing then I guess everything you said is going to be useful.

....so so true. I would make your life a little easier and look for another job. I would not complain nor make a scene, just find better alternative work and leave in the best manner possible.

I did try out and see if I could get out, but the lead tells me to wait until my probation period is over, then he'll recommend me to the engineering section (this is a good company, might as well try for another division).

Not the best of characters to have in an office environment. Instead I would recommend you to be reserved and closed, until others have at least shown you their colours. Once you know who you're dealing with then you can loosen up.

Your situation is almost identical to mine, in the end it was too much to bare and I left. Maybe this was not the best thing I did, maybe it was. In either case I made my decision back then.

I see, I think I'm going to stay here for a while, and see if I can take it since it's worth it.

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts.