I have been working in a support tech company for 6 or 7 years which has brought me into the cubical space of many of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley.
One thing I have noticed is the overwhelming majority of foreign names on the cubicles. Hardly ever a Smith or Jones and most I find totally unpronounceable.
Rough estimate: 70-80 percent foreign names. No doubt H1-B visas.
It's time for Microsoft to have a reality check: An 'operating system' is just a means to run programs/applications that do the real work on a computer.
Obsoleting all that 'real work' periodically may be fine for Microsoft's bottom line, but it wins them no friends with day-to-day users who just want to get a job done.
And the way they obsolete their programming languages is another whole issue. I was perfectly happy with VB6. When VB.NET came out I tried to 'convert' some simple programs to see what all the shouting was about. Nothing would automatically convert and researching the 'why' of it I find many of the fundamentals are not just missing, but totally dis-allowed.
So much for getting the job done.
My oldest files are circa 1988 and were in Wordstar format. For those too young to remember Wordstar, it's native file format had the high bit set on the last letter of each word as an aid in deciding were extra spaces could be placed during print formatting.
In order to use these files I had to write a small Visual BASIC program to parse the files and reset the high bits. The result is a plain text file, but still containing all of the 'dot' controls, (used for page breaks, font size, etc.). These files can be opened in a generic text editor and copy/pasted into a modern word processor for futher formatting/editing.
BTW: Anybody need some ancient hard drives? The really 'big' ones I have are between 320M and 750M!
I've worked mostly in small shops, (10-35 users), and there have never been more than 2 or 3 that could be reasonably expected to maintain their own PCs. Most of those who could would not. They see such 'drudgery' as beneath their status. After all, what do we have an IT guy for?
I can't say that I'm proud of ALL my code. Sometimes a quicky-fix or work around is left in place because there is no time to clean it up. Also, there always seems to be fragments of abandoned code left in a project that gets forgoten. As for what to do . . . Well the problems are there mostly because of time restrictions and nobody is going to provide the time to repair them unless they cause real issues.
And on the topic of drift! Sometimes it seems to me that the client has no idea of there own business rules and goals and will request the damnedest things just because they saw something similar somewhere and though it was cool!
I agree. I can add a new column to a report in an hour or two. The problems arise when the client thinks that adding an entire new feature set with additional database tables should be done in the same time frame. They seem to think of coding as approxiamtely the same as writing prose where a typo or two still leaves a usable document.
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I have been working in a support tech company for 6 or 7 years which has brought me into the cubical space of many of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley. One thing I have noticed is the overwhelming majority of foreign names on the cubicles. Hardly ever a Smith or Jones and most I find totally unpronounceable. Rough estimate: 70-80 percent foreign names. No doubt H1-B visas.
It's time for Microsoft to have a reality check: An 'operating system' is just a means to run programs/applications that do the real work on a computer. Obsoleting all that 'real work' periodically may be fine for Microsoft's bottom line, but it wins them no friends with day-to-day users who just want to get a job done. And the way they obsolete their programming languages is another whole issue. I was perfectly happy with VB6. When VB.NET came out I tried to 'convert' some simple programs to see what all the shouting was about. Nothing would automatically convert and researching the 'why' of it I find many of the fundamentals are not just missing, but totally dis-allowed. So much for getting the job done.
I once had a supervisor deny my request for a 1200 baud modem because, "Nobody can read the text faster than 300 baud". Built it and they will come.
My oldest files are circa 1988 and were in Wordstar format. For those too young to remember Wordstar, it's native file format had the high bit set on the last letter of each word as an aid in deciding were extra spaces could be placed during print formatting. In order to use these files I had to write a small Visual BASIC program to parse the files and reset the high bits. The result is a plain text file, but still containing all of the 'dot' controls, (used for page breaks, font size, etc.). These files can be opened in a generic text editor and copy/pasted into a modern word processor for futher formatting/editing. BTW: Anybody need some ancient hard drives? The really 'big' ones I have are between 320M and 750M!
I've worked mostly in small shops, (10-35 users), and there have never been more than 2 or 3 that could be reasonably expected to maintain their own PCs. Most of those who could would not. They see such 'drudgery' as beneath their status. After all, what do we have an IT guy for?
I can't say that I'm proud of ALL my code. Sometimes a quicky-fix or work around is left in place because there is no time to clean it up. Also, there always seems to be fragments of abandoned code left in a project that gets forgoten. As for what to do . . . Well the problems are there mostly because of time restrictions and nobody is going to provide the time to repair them unless they cause real issues. And on the topic of drift! Sometimes it seems to me that the client has no idea of there own business rules and goals and will request the damnedest things just because they saw something similar somewhere and though it was cool!
I agree. I can add a new column to a report in an hour or two. The problems arise when the client thinks that adding an entire new feature set with additional database tables should be done in the same time frame. They seem to think of coding as approxiamtely the same as writing prose where a typo or two still leaves a usable document.