Not a coding job, but by far one of the worst I ever had.
In the mid 1980's, I worked in Reno as a houseman for a large hotel casino. Being a houseman was bad enough. Having to move furniture, sort the dirty linen, cleaning up rooms that the maids called "too dirty" for them to clean. But on one day, I was looking for a way to make some brownie points with my boss, when he asked for a volunteer to clean a room. I made the mistake of raising my hand.
Before I was sent to clean the room, I learned that the guest had blown his brains out with a small caliber gun. I was to clean the room and place any "biologic matter" in a special haz-mat bag they gave me.
I then was briefed by the detective on the case that the bullet had not yet been found. Part of my cleaning job was to "feel" each piece of brain matter as I bagged it up for them to look for the bullet.
It was about two hours later, when I had finished cleaning the room that I learned from my boss that they had found the bullet.
He didn't want to come up and tell I didn't have to keep looking for it, because the idea of seeing the mess make him feel sick.
I was so pissed that I tossed the bag-o-bits on his desk and told him to call the cops to ask for a pick-up.
I've run into this problem several times.
About a year and a half ago while looking for work, I found that on many of my interviews a noticeable change in my interviewer happened when they asked me to verify my age. I learned a long time ago that when sending out my resume to leave off dates and any mention of the year. I always left things kind of vague, stating that I was there for 6 years or 8 years, just never listed the actual year. I've never looked my age so I always had that going for me. On several occasions I was in the interview and told that I had all the right qualifications for the job and just needed to fill out the actual application. Time and again I was told that "it was just a formality" and that after some higher-up saw my resume and my skill set I'd be offered a job.
After handing back the filled application I'd wait to see the visible change in my interviewer when they got to the line where you had to fill in your birth date. Then I'd have to ask if there was a problem, be told there wasn't, and go home never to hear back from them again. After the sixth or seventh time I started writing the numbers badly enough to mistake a 6 for an 8, taking 20 years off my age. The very first time I did this, I didn't see the interviewer change attitude, and I got the offer by phone about 3 days later. I didn't take that first offer due to another interview happening the next day and being given the offer while still in the interview.
It took a couple of days after being on the job before the mix-up of the numbers became known. I still have that job after a year and a half, and my employer has been very thankful in both wage and compliments ever since. Face it, if you've got the skills and can show that you're the right person for the job then age doesn't matter. But you might have to help nudge things along by writing a little sloppy.
"The kid from down the block that coded our website in the first place moved and we're too stupid to know how to rework our site to work with any other browser."
I've been reading what everyone else mentions or offers, but the one missing item from all the advice is to ask for a deposit. While this may not seem like a very good business move, it does show intent and makes sure that you don't put in a ton of time to only have a client back out later, The deposit can cover expenses for client meetings and research into their project. But you need to ask for a deposit, even more so on the big ticket large scale projects of more than a thousand.
I've had several projects in the last year go belly up. On was a calendar project we were hired to do by a local school. We made the mistake of not having a contract, (Our bad), and not getting a deposit, (again out bad). We figured, "what could go wrong?" the district calendar was a project funded for the last 8years by a local bank. We shopped the project around to several different places and brought the budget in at $12,000, a $6,000 reduction from the year before. We got the go ahead from the school to do the work, and when we were ready to go to print, the bank bailed out of the project. They're now having money problems of their own. The school didn't have the money in the budget, so the project died. And we were out all of the time we spent on the project, plus the money we were going to get paid.
While we can't hold the school responsible for the bank failing to fund the project, a deposit would have kept us from loosing money. After that point, I started asking for deposits and I haven't had a client bail on a project since. By simply asking for a show of earnest money in the project I can safeguard myself from spending my time on a project that goes nowhere.
-Goran
Re:Something created the universe
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 1
You forget the best part of sinking into a black hole.
If you're smart you partied it up using your credit cards to charge everything.
"Just try to find me in that black hole to make payments! I Dare you!"
While not the best solution we used a standard window mount unit that you would find in your home.
We had some serious reconstruction work being done to out server room and during that our regular AC unit was taken offline so as not to clog it up with Construction dust. The unit mounted in a hole in the wall with the back end facing out into the Cube farm. While we as the tech group had to deal with the added heat from the AC unit in our office area, the Server Room stayed nice and cold. As for any water that was collected, that was resolved with two 5-gallon buckets. One that was empty and one that the water drained into. In an average 8-hour shift there was only about a quart of water in the bucket. Dumping the bucket each morning wasn't a problem since it was a short walk to the breakroom sink. The extra bucket simply took its place under the drain while you dumped the other.
This might be a quick fix for you, but then you also then have to deal with the security of having the wall unit.
Since our cube farm was an internal office space accessed by key-card, the only folks that would have ready access would be the ones that worked on the boxen in the first place.
So for us, the security issue was very small.
...you might have to put up with them selling dope on the side.
At a LAN party?!!
At the most it would be weed, but remember we are talking about geeks. I really doubt that the Hell's Angels would bother trying to sell Caffine drinks, and cheetos. I think you're fairly safe using them for security.
I got a regular sized legal envelope that contained a letter telling me that, "I might be a winner of a contest held by a local radio station."
It didn't come from the station but some business in another state. My wife figured it was junk and wanted to toss it.
I figured it wouldn't hurt to fill it out, since I did enter a contest with that station.
After mailing back the form, I got an envelope by way of UPS with a small 4x6 card that said to take this to the local Circut City to claim your prize. A 51" DLP HDTV.
No fan fare, and no contact at all from the radio station. Fast forward two years. A Weber Grill shows up on my doorstep by way of Fed Ex. No shipping information, no info on who sent it. After a week of research, it turns out that I again won a contest from the same radio station.
I simply say that "Due to other client data being in the same database I am unable to allow you access. Since doing so would violate the privacy and security of their data, I sure that you would understand why I can't do that. I'm also sure how you would feel if the roles were reversed and how you would feel if another client asked for direct access and could see or read your data."
Usually this takes care of the problem. If not, tell them how much it will cost to set up a stand alone database that only contains their data and then give them some unreasonable amount. If they agree, then you just made your company a nice chunk of change. You then set up the database, and the scripts to replicate the data to back it up (when the client hoses themselves) and move on. When the call comes in that they hosed their database, you charge them for the time to restore from the back-up times a factor of two or three, and again, you've set yourself as the goldenchild for your company by making them money.
Lets see. Faster at building crap? Yes. Faster at creating a page that loads faster in a browser? Far from it.
I think this is where you might be mistaken. A WYSIWYG for anything other than a prototype is a waste of your time and the company's money. Using Dreamweaver to edit source code is a waste of Drive space, CPU cycles, and Time. I can load Homesite, BBEdit or Coffeecup HTMLeditor for that matter, and be done with my edits before I get off the phone with a client. Why anyone who "really knows" how to write code would use a WYSIWYG is beyond me. Of all the coders I know, none of them use a WYSIWYG. Zero. The only excuse I can think of for using a WYSIWYG is that either you're lazy or someone who really doesn't "know how" to code.
Is that with the advent of the WYSIWYG, every Charlie dipstick that can figure out how to use one thinks He's/She's a web developer. It doesn't surprise me that page size has doubled. The average WYSIWYG writes crappy code, and if you don't know how to write it yourself the page stays bloated.
It has however, benefited my pocket since many of the businesses who have had a site built by these morons come looking for someone to "make their sites work better." It does still amaze me that even in this day and age your average business still doesn't check the credentials or abilities of the people that they hire as programmers.
So as a parent, if I take a picture of my 6-month old baby girl in a bathtub, have the picture on my computer, and go traveling, I could be detained and locked up for child pornography? I'm sorry but I have little faith that our minimum wage earning security sloths will be able to tell the difference between proud parent images and kiddie porn.
I seem to remember a similar situation at a department store photo department. The teenager running the picture printer saw pictures of a 7 or 8-year old bare-chested child with long hair (it turned out later to be a boy), thought it was kiddie porn and called the cops.
I barely feel like they know how to do the job they have. Now were going to have them searching peoples laptops?
It's simple math.
Less people switching to Vista = less flaws!
After all, had more people made the switch, they would have found more flaws and vulnerabilities.
You really have to hand it to MicroSoft. Less really is more!
For nearly every company that I've worked for, it's been the same old story.
Get it done as quickly as you can, cut as many corners as you can so that we can keep more of the budget by keeping development costs down.
Testing?
What's that?
If you can't test it as you're building it you don't last. If you complain about time-lines, you'll be out the door. If you gripe about the feature creep, you end up on the Sh*t-list and they start looking for ways to let you go or force you to quit. Quality left the building years ago in favor of down and dirty coding that simply makes it work. The last project I worked on for a company, I was only given 12 hours to go from drawing board to production. After getting it done and functioning in 14 hours, I got my butt handed to me by a pointy-haired doofus that said I wasted valuable time and needed to "better manage my time".
I'm supposed to listen to a guy that still uses IE as an FTP tool?!
After I quit, it warmed my heart to see that they ended up hiring three people to fill my position.
I tried to be proud of my code while in the corporate world, but it wasn't until I left for a smaller private company (less than 100 employees) that I finally got to a position where I can take pride in the code I write. I can do all the things I know I need to do. I can now document things, comment my code and test until I'm sure that its solid before putting things into production.
Slashdot Mirror
Not a coding job, but by far one of the worst I ever had.
In the mid 1980's, I worked in Reno as a houseman for a large hotel casino. Being a houseman was bad enough. Having to move furniture, sort the dirty linen, cleaning up rooms that the maids called "too dirty" for them to clean. But on one day, I was looking for a way to make some brownie points with my boss, when he asked for a volunteer to clean a room. I made the mistake of raising my hand.
Before I was sent to clean the room, I learned that the guest had blown his brains out with a small caliber gun. I was to clean the room and place any "biologic matter" in a special haz-mat bag they gave me.
I then was briefed by the detective on the case that the bullet had not yet been found. Part of my cleaning job was to "feel" each piece of brain matter as I bagged it up for them to look for the bullet. It was about two hours later, when I had finished cleaning the room that I learned from my boss that they had found the bullet. He didn't want to come up and tell I didn't have to keep looking for it, because the idea of seeing the mess make him feel sick.
I was so pissed that I tossed the bag-o-bits on his desk and told him to call the cops to ask for a pick-up.
I've run into this problem several times.
About a year and a half ago while looking for work, I found that on many of my interviews a noticeable change in my interviewer happened when they asked me to verify my age. I learned a long time ago that when sending out my resume to leave off dates and any mention of the year. I always left things kind of vague, stating that I was there for 6 years or 8 years, just never listed the actual year. I've never looked my age so I always had that going for me. On several occasions I was in the interview and told that I had all the right qualifications for the job and just needed to fill out the actual application. Time and again I was told that "it was just a formality" and that after some higher-up saw my resume and my skill set I'd be offered a job.
After handing back the filled application I'd wait to see the visible change in my interviewer when they got to the line where you had to fill in your birth date. Then I'd have to ask if there was a problem, be told there wasn't, and go home never to hear back from them again. After the sixth or seventh time I started writing the numbers badly enough to mistake a 6 for an 8, taking 20 years off my age. The very first time I did this, I didn't see the interviewer change attitude, and I got the offer by phone about 3 days later. I didn't take that first offer due to another interview happening the next day and being given the offer while still in the interview.
It took a couple of days after being on the job before the mix-up of the numbers became known. I still have that job after a year and a half, and my employer has been very thankful in both wage and compliments ever since. Face it, if you've got the skills and can show that you're the right person for the job then age doesn't matter. But you might have to help nudge things along by writing a little sloppy.
-Goran
More like:
"The kid from down the block that coded our website in the first place moved and we're too stupid to know how to rework our site to work with any other browser."
Of doing freelance work.
I've been reading what everyone else mentions or offers, but the one missing item from all the advice is to ask for a deposit. While this may not seem like a very good business move, it does show intent and makes sure that you don't put in a ton of time to only have a client back out later, The deposit can cover expenses for client meetings and research into their project. But you need to ask for a deposit, even more so on the big ticket large scale projects of more than a thousand.
I've had several projects in the last year go belly up. On was a calendar project we were hired to do by a local school. We made the mistake of not having a contract, (Our bad), and not getting a deposit, (again out bad). We figured, "what could go wrong?" the district calendar was a project funded for the last 8years by a local bank. We shopped the project around to several different places and brought the budget in at $12,000, a $6,000 reduction from the year before. We got the go ahead from the school to do the work, and when we were ready to go to print, the bank bailed out of the project. They're now having money problems of their own. The school didn't have the money in the budget, so the project died. And we were out all of the time we spent on the project, plus the money we were going to get paid.
While we can't hold the school responsible for the bank failing to fund the project, a deposit would have kept us from loosing money. After that point, I started asking for deposits and I haven't had a client bail on a project since. By simply asking for a show of earnest money in the project I can safeguard myself from spending my time on a project that goes nowhere.
-Goran
You forget the best part of sinking into a black hole.
If you're smart you partied it up using your credit cards to charge everything.
"Just try to find me in that black hole to make payments! I Dare you!"
Now where did I put that Tin Foil Fedora?
-Goran
While not the best solution we used a standard window mount unit that you would find in your home.
We had some serious reconstruction work being done to out server room and during that our regular AC unit was taken offline so as not to clog it up with Construction dust. The unit mounted in a hole in the wall with the back end facing out into the Cube farm. While we as the tech group had to deal with the added heat from the AC unit in our office area, the Server Room stayed nice and cold. As for any water that was collected, that was resolved with two 5-gallon buckets. One that was empty and one that the water drained into. In an average 8-hour shift there was only about a quart of water in the bucket. Dumping the bucket each morning wasn't a problem since it was a short walk to the breakroom sink. The extra bucket simply took its place under the drain while you dumped the other.
This might be a quick fix for you, but then you also then have to deal with the security of having the wall unit. Since our cube farm was an internal office space accessed by key-card, the only folks that would have ready access would be the ones that worked on the boxen in the first place. So for us, the security issue was very small.
-Goran
So are you just looking for a way to hide your pron collection from your girlfriend/wife?
Dude! There are easier ways.
-Goran
...you might have to put up with them selling dope on the side.
At a LAN party?!!
At the most it would be weed, but remember we are talking about geeks. I really doubt that the Hell's Angels would bother trying to sell Caffine drinks, and cheetos. I think you're fairly safe using them for security.
Goran
I got a regular sized legal envelope that contained a letter telling me that, "I might be a winner of a contest held by a local radio station."
It didn't come from the station but some business in another state. My wife figured it was junk and wanted to toss it.
I figured it wouldn't hurt to fill it out, since I did enter a contest with that station.
After mailing back the form, I got an envelope by way of UPS with a small 4x6 card that said to take this to the local Circut City to claim your prize. A 51" DLP HDTV.
No fan fare, and no contact at all from the radio station. Fast forward two years. A Weber Grill shows up on my doorstep by way of Fed Ex. No shipping information, no info on who sent it. After a week of research, it turns out that I again won a contest from the same radio station.
The blind leading/watching the blind?
The ill-informed overseeing the absolutely stupid?
Or
The haven't-got-a-clue trying to look like they know what they're doing while watching the hard pressed to deliver working in an unrealistic timeline.
Just trying to get it figured out what kind of cluster Fsk to call this gem of an idea.
-Goran
I've run into this myself.
I simply say that "Due to other client data being in the same database I am unable to allow you access. Since doing so would violate the privacy and security of their data, I sure that you would understand why I can't do that. I'm also sure how you would feel if the roles were reversed and how you would feel if another client asked for direct access and could see or read your data."
Usually this takes care of the problem. If not, tell them how much it will cost to set up a stand alone database that only contains their data and then give them some unreasonable amount. If they agree, then you just made your company a nice chunk of change. You then set up the database, and the scripts to replicate the data to back it up (when the client hoses themselves) and move on. When the call comes in that they hosed their database, you charge them for the time to restore from the back-up times a factor of two or three, and again, you've set yourself as the goldenchild for your company by making them money.
-Goran
Lets see. Faster at building crap? Yes. Faster at creating a page that loads faster in a browser? Far from it.
I think this is where you might be mistaken. A WYSIWYG for anything other than a prototype is a waste of your time and the company's money. Using Dreamweaver to edit source code is a waste of Drive space, CPU cycles, and Time. I can load Homesite, BBEdit or Coffeecup HTMLeditor for that matter, and be done with my edits before I get off the phone with a client. Why anyone who "really knows" how to write code would use a WYSIWYG is beyond me. Of all the coders I know, none of them use a WYSIWYG. Zero. The only excuse I can think of for using a WYSIWYG is that either you're lazy or someone who really doesn't "know how" to code.
My two bits on the subject.
-Goran
Is that with the advent of the WYSIWYG, every Charlie dipstick that can figure out how to use one thinks He's/She's a web developer. It doesn't surprise me that page size has doubled. The average WYSIWYG writes crappy code, and if you don't know how to write it yourself the page stays bloated.
It has however, benefited my pocket since many of the businesses who have had a site built by these morons come looking for someone to "make their sites work better." It does still amaze me that even in this day and age your average business still doesn't check the credentials or abilities of the people that they hire as programmers.
-Goran
So as a parent, if I take a picture of my 6-month old baby girl in a bathtub, have the picture on my computer, and go traveling, I could be detained and locked up for child pornography? I'm sorry but I have little faith that our minimum wage earning security sloths will be able to tell the difference between proud parent images and kiddie porn.
I seem to remember a similar situation at a department store photo department. The teenager running the picture printer saw pictures of a 7 or 8-year old bare-chested child with long hair (it turned out later to be a boy), thought it was kiddie porn and called the cops.
I barely feel like they know how to do the job they have. Now were going to have them searching peoples laptops?
This is just plain stupid.
-Goran
Sorry, my bad.
Must use spellcheck AND check the address book on order forms and not write them out from memory
Damn!
And here I was thinking that COBOL on Rails would be released first.
Looks like I backed the wrong horse again!
Man, I am going to be SOOO fired for this...
With Pakistan offline it explains why my spam filter is running nearly empty!
Keep up the good work guys!
-Goran
... To notice that the "preferred" solution to any problem placed before George Bush is to launch an attack against it?
-Goran
Anyone else think that the "Mission to Mars" will now become "Let's go drill the crap out of Titan"?
Any bets Exxon or some other oil company will start funding a space mission to bring back the "oil"?
I really am being watched!
And to think that they laughed at me when I put on my tinfoil hat!
Vindicated at last!
Join us.
Travel the virtual world
Meet Exciting avatars
And hack their boxen!
Gives a whole new meaning to "Dude! I totally pwned you!"
Whoops!
Sorry, my bad. Thought I was on my server...
It's simple math. Less people switching to Vista = less flaws! After all, had more people made the switch, they would have found more flaws and vulnerabilities. You really have to hand it to MicroSoft. Less really is more!
Better get Maaco! http://www.maaco.com/
For nearly every company that I've worked for, it's been the same old story. Get it done as quickly as you can, cut as many corners as you can so that we can keep more of the budget by keeping development costs down.
Testing? What's that?
If you can't test it as you're building it you don't last. If you complain about time-lines, you'll be out the door. If you gripe about the feature creep, you end up on the Sh*t-list and they start looking for ways to let you go or force you to quit. Quality left the building years ago in favor of down and dirty coding that simply makes it work. The last project I worked on for a company, I was only given 12 hours to go from drawing board to production. After getting it done and functioning in 14 hours, I got my butt handed to me by a pointy-haired doofus that said I wasted valuable time and needed to "better manage my time".
I'm supposed to listen to a guy that still uses IE as an FTP tool?!
After I quit, it warmed my heart to see that they ended up hiring three people to fill my position.
I tried to be proud of my code while in the corporate world, but it wasn't until I left for a smaller private company (less than 100 employees) that I finally got to a position where I can take pride in the code I write. I can do all the things I know I need to do. I can now document things, comment my code and test until I'm sure that its solid before putting things into production.
-Goran