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I've been working in this company for about 8 months now and i'd like some advice how to tell my collegues that what they write is bad practice. Let me give a little introduction first.

The company im working at allows its customers to setup questionairres/surveys. The current code is about 5 years old (or older) and they've made a new platform which supports mobile devices. This platform is relatively new, but i've noticed something which i call 'bad practice':

They simply do not seperate code and html. Everything is dynamically build up using 1 single c# generaing class, which blurts out html, script tags, inline css "style='position: relative;'" and so on.

My main question is:

How do i convince my colleagues and especially my IT manager to keep these seperated.

It's bugging me a lot, but maybe i should just let it go. We simply do not have the resources for it and im probably not the person to make any calls about this. I just dont get how come the programmers who made this new 'platform' didnt think about this.

We also have lots of coding problems:

  • Different versions of jquery and mootools are being used throughout our applications
  • There's loads of duplicate code
  • CSS files being included after each other have stuff like '!important' in them, and some are being overwritten with each include. For example: 'Master.css', 'another_file.css' both declare the exact same css rules.

Please help me out to convince my IT department theyre doing things too unorganized, write unmaintable code and simply have no standards anywhere without sounding like a whiner. Don't get me wrong, i love my job, but it's really working on my nerves. If things don't work they do a little dirty hack on a hack on a hack and things will get more messy by the day.

Robin
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    `i'd like some advice how to tell my collegues that what they write is bad practice`. This is the wrong way to go about it, offer any feedback as `enhancements`. If you tell them they are wrong, they will go on the defense immediately. – Kevin Bowersox Nov 25 '13 at 12:47
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    This may be better suited on another stack exchange. However, you could have a meeting with the IT Manager and explain your concerns. Maybe demonstrate how to improve things and explain why it's better. The team maybe unaware, so an explanation of the implications would be good. – Darren Nov 25 '13 at 12:47
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    Well, as it would mean going into a lot of troubles and costing a lot of money, you probably won't get your company to start from scratch. But instead of identifying bad practices, I would suggest identifying problems caused by underlying bad practices, and propose the best (or better) practices as a solution to these problems. Depending on your interlocutor, you should adapt you speech : to a marketeer, think about time/money lost, to an IT maybe speak in terms of resources spent or quality, etc ... – Laurent S. Nov 25 '13 at 12:49

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