man-children who believe in the genius of their own farts.
Projection, I think.
I never said I was a good programmer. I'm acutely aware of my own shortcomings. It's the people who think they're competent that aren't are the problem.
Or a defensive assbag, like you. Sheesh. For someone who works with programmers all the time, you really hate them, don't you. Perhaps you'd be happier with a different job.
I wasn't referring to incompetence among programmers, I was talking about society in general.
If a programmer can hose a production asset accidentally, that's a failure of management, specifically in providing adequate resources to create a "sandbox" environment that the programmer can completely hose, and can be restored in minutes. And if you think a properly resourced (ugh) developer is more dangerous to your app than the average (or, more-than-average, in the case of the CEO) idiot user, I don't think you're actually a programmer.
Unless, like I was, you're given a legacy codebase and told to keep the duct tape and bailing wire in place, instead of being given time to improve it.
By comparing the behaviour with what the specification says
HAHAHAHAHA.. oh, wait, you're serious about having a spec. Let me laugh even harder.
True story: $biggiantclient wanted us to create about 5 major features to add on to our existing site. $biggiantclient represented a ton of business for other departments. Management walked on eggshells around $biggiantclient as a result. I asked for a spec, I was told there was none. I protested, giving all the reasons I could think of why that was a suicidally crazy idea; eventually I was told to shut up and stop asking for one. So, I wrote one myself based on what I thought the client wanted, in as much detail as I could. I sent it to the PM. Eventually I had to start coding. So, some time later, I'm on a phone call with $biggiantclient (about 9 people from there on the call), the PM, and my boss. We're discussing the progress on one of the features, and they say that the way I did something was not what they wanted. I said "That's what was on the spec I provided; was that wrong?" Them: "What spec?"
Yep.
There's no reason to assume that a test suite you got from the original author is more accurate than a test suite you write yourself.
When there IS no test suite, some testing is almost always better than none. Almost.
And then the client will bitch at you because their users got stopped for putting the wrong thing in that field. So, you protest, but in the end you end up removing that validation. Later on, when you go to send reports, and your data integrity is shit, you get blamed again.
Recently I got asked to remove the validation on a one-time-use security token, because people with previously-used tokens were getting blocked. THAT'S THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT, YOU IDIOT. That was one time that it was GOOD that I'm the only dev on that project, because they couldn't make someone else do it.
Which is why you always keep a copy of the original. Not that it will save you, but should it hit the fan, you can at least point to that and say "That's what I said we could do, and they ignored it." You'll probably still get fired, but you have the satisfaction of being right.
Technically, that is true. However, the two are not equivalent. Leaving a job (for whatever reason) can be seen as disloyalty, based on the context. If you start at a job, and figure out two weeks/months in that the job is not as represented and in fact is much worse than you thought, and quit, you're a "job hopper", and the consequences are yours instead of your employer's. (Also, then you have to explain why you left the previous job so quickly if you do manage to get an interview. There really isn't a great answer to that question; you can either make up some bullshit about the job being eliminated unexpectedly, or you can REALLY sink your chances by being honest about it. They hate honesty.) Plus, no unemployment assistance or health insurance for you, should you do that. (Yes, you can make the COBRA payments if you are able; however, that would be another $1000 a month I would have to come up with, in addition to having no job.)
Also, it is highly recommended that you have another job in your back pocket when you resign from one. Your employer has no such concern; they'll just find some fresh-faced college graduate idiot that will do your job and another two, for half your salary.
Programmers fear incompetence because they see it everywhere, even where it is not.
No, they see it everywhere, because it IS everywhere. Nobody cares about competence anymore, they want to know how much something costs. Not its value, but its price.
Complete failure over a trivial error, because computers don't have common sense to ask, "are you sure you meant to do that?", or, "what does this mean?".
They can be programmed to do so for specific input. Then the CEO calls you and tells you to remove it because that one extra click on the app is ruining his sex life, or something.
"business isn't really sure what they want" - And it sounds like they're aware of that and have been forced to understand that Engineering can only do the things you ask them to do, they can't read your mind.
"We tell business what we need from them in order to do our work, instead of the other way around." This is probably the most important thing. It seems to me that the preponderance of businesses out there basically allow sales and marketing to run the show, and since they don't understand what Engineering does beyond drink coffee and consume budget, it can't be important or hard. I recently interviewed with a company with in-house engineering, and I asked them to describe how a project usually is structured there. I was told that the business decided that they wanted a feature added and picked a timeline based on their own strategy (to coincide with a trade show, quarterly earnings, etc) and told Engineering what the requirements were. The deadlines were set at that point, before Engineering even knew that the business wanted the feature. No consultation with Engineering about feasibility or resources required, just "Do this, you have until X." They had also previously asked me how I felt about routinely working more than 40 hours in a week (and, being an Exempt position, this would have meant no additional compensation). Fortunately I did not get offered the job, and would have likely turned it down had it been offered.
"We don't accept issues that don't meet our standards" - I am skeptical of this being as simple as it is stated here. Every environment I have worked in has resisted this heavily, especially when the issues being created are filed by people with "Executive" in their job title. Usually it's "This is broken go fix it" and if the person filing the issue has enough juice, nobody will dare go back to them for more information, they're far too important for that. Some companies are worse than others, but I have yet to be at a company (and I've worked for several Fortune 500 companies) where IT/Engineering were first class citizens, able to require more information to solve a problem.
"business, admin and others show up at our standups and our sprint demo" - See above, usually people who actually can make decisions won't deign to attend meetings with people who do actual work.
Increased taxes and spending are justified by progressives with phrases like "taxes buy civilization", but they choose to spend most of the new money coming in on increasing individual benefits (it buys votes, I suppose).
"Buys" votes? Isn't it possible that people are electing representatives that share their positions? You make it sound like bribery, when it's really just democracy in action. It's just not acting the way you'd like.
Starting to? It's been shrinking for years. The deficit has shrunk every year since the current administration took office, even the years when the Dems controlled Congress.
I think your 'lazy' peers are just ahead of the curve. They already know that going the extra mile in the working world doesn't get you anything. Your boss' job is to get as much work out of you as he/she can while paying you as little as possible. Your job (in addition to what you actually do) is to do as little work as you can for as much money as you can. It's not in your interest to go the 'extra mile'. You've busted your hump for an 'attaboy' and a big bonus for your manager.
If the real world rewarded hard work, things would be different. The real world rewards those who can work the politics and get rich off of the hard work of others.
No, the way non-technical people work (at least at the upper-management level) is that they ask their underlings for a solution to a problem, when they've really got the solution they want to hear in their heads. The underlings, who have ostensibly been hired for their expertise in their fields, give them technically sound answers, but answers that are different from what they want to hear, which annoys and confuses them. (For example, you might want to compete with Amazon, but your resources are two Java devs, a junior UX designer, and an unpaid college intern. The boss wants to hear "Yes, we can do that, no problem", when the truth is that it's completely irrational to even consider it.) Eventually, management gets tired of being told that what they want to do is physically impossible, no matter how much money it would save (and that's the important part, make sure you never spend any money, ever) and stops asking them for their input, choosing instead to say "This is what we're doing, go deal with it."
Upper management arrogance and ego are and always have been more important than technical realities. That's what needs to change. We shouldn't be encouraging CIOs to talk like CIOs, we should be encouraging people to not be fucking retards and actually LISTEN to the people they've hired to perform a duty.
Then there are the guys that equate "best practices" as "the lazy programmers trying to get more time to do something that we've already decided should take X." I consider testing/QA as an example of "best practices". At a previous job, we were in a staff meeting talking about the progress of a piece of software we were writing. The bonehead VP of Marketing asked our QA guy how long he would need to finish a testing project. The QA guy answered "6 weeks". The VP then said "You have 3. QA always takes too long."
Not "why is it going to take so long", or "what problems do you need to solve", just "That's too much time". Idiot.
And that means that it never happens, right? And "poor academic performers" are not one of those protected classes, so it's perfectly legal to turn them away.
So, you fund an alternative school for the kids that the other schools turn away. Who's going to run it? How do you force a private company to open a location that is almost certain to lose money?
Also, what happens when nobody wants to open a school in your town, because they don't think they can make a profit?
I just don't see how going to for-profit companies to do this isn't trading one set of problems for another.
The reason it looks like I'm skipping around is that there are so many problems with using private for-profit companies to provide critical town services. Who would decide whose children have to attend the "alternative" school? You're taking school choice away from these parents because it's more difficult to educate those children. Also, how can you force a private company to set up a school to for those kids? Such a school is sure to lose money, unless you're prepared to spend more to educate them, which seems unfair to the other children in the town, as well as putting the other businesses at a competitive disadvantage. How much do you propose regulating this market? At what point do the advantages of a free market go away, if you're going to dictate to a private company who they have to accept as a student?
Slashdot Mirror
Projection, I think.
I never said I was a good programmer. I'm acutely aware of my own shortcomings. It's the people who think they're competent that aren't are the problem.
I'd love to have any form of QA. Or even another developer to review my code.
Or a defensive assbag, like you. Sheesh. For someone who works with programmers all the time, you really hate them, don't you. Perhaps you'd be happier with a different job.
I wasn't referring to incompetence among programmers, I was talking about society in general.
If a programmer can hose a production asset accidentally, that's a failure of management, specifically in providing adequate resources to create a "sandbox" environment that the programmer can completely hose, and can be restored in minutes. And if you think a properly resourced (ugh) developer is more dangerous to your app than the average (or, more-than-average, in the case of the CEO) idiot user, I don't think you're actually a programmer.
Presumes that they aren't the same person. In addition to being the sysadmin, the DBA, the release engineer, QA..
Unless, like I was, you're given a legacy codebase and told to keep the duct tape and bailing wire in place, instead of being given time to improve it.
HAHAHAHAHA.. oh, wait, you're serious about having a spec. Let me laugh even harder.
True story: $biggiantclient wanted us to create about 5 major features to add on to our existing site. $biggiantclient represented a ton of business for other departments. Management walked on eggshells around $biggiantclient as a result. I asked for a spec, I was told there was none. I protested, giving all the reasons I could think of why that was a suicidally crazy idea; eventually I was told to shut up and stop asking for one. So, I wrote one myself based on what I thought the client wanted, in as much detail as I could. I sent it to the PM. Eventually I had to start coding. So, some time later, I'm on a phone call with $biggiantclient (about 9 people from there on the call), the PM, and my boss. We're discussing the progress on one of the features, and they say that the way I did something was not what they wanted. I said "That's what was on the spec I provided; was that wrong?" Them: "What spec?"
Yep.
When there IS no test suite, some testing is almost always better than none. Almost.
Well, they committed the cardinal sin of management: They ran out of scapegoats.
And then the client will bitch at you because their users got stopped for putting the wrong thing in that field. So, you protest, but in the end you end up removing that validation. Later on, when you go to send reports, and your data integrity is shit, you get blamed again.
Recently I got asked to remove the validation on a one-time-use security token, because people with previously-used tokens were getting blocked. THAT'S THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT, YOU IDIOT. That was one time that it was GOOD that I'm the only dev on that project, because they couldn't make someone else do it.
Which is why you always keep a copy of the original. Not that it will save you, but should it hit the fan, you can at least point to that and say "That's what I said we could do, and they ignored it." You'll probably still get fired, but you have the satisfaction of being right.
Technically, that is true. However, the two are not equivalent. Leaving a job (for whatever reason) can be seen as disloyalty, based on the context. If you start at a job, and figure out two weeks/months in that the job is not as represented and in fact is much worse than you thought, and quit, you're a "job hopper", and the consequences are yours instead of your employer's. (Also, then you have to explain why you left the previous job so quickly if you do manage to get an interview. There really isn't a great answer to that question; you can either make up some bullshit about the job being eliminated unexpectedly, or you can REALLY sink your chances by being honest about it. They hate honesty.) Plus, no unemployment assistance or health insurance for you, should you do that. (Yes, you can make the COBRA payments if you are able; however, that would be another $1000 a month I would have to come up with, in addition to having no job.)
Also, it is highly recommended that you have another job in your back pocket when you resign from one. Your employer has no such concern; they'll just find some fresh-faced college graduate idiot that will do your job and another two, for half your salary.
No, they see it everywhere, because it IS everywhere. Nobody cares about competence anymore, they want to know how much something costs. Not its value, but its price.
They can be programmed to do so for specific input. Then the CEO calls you and tells you to remove it because that one extra click on the app is ruining his sex life, or something.
Several critical things you cite:
"business isn't really sure what they want" - And it sounds like they're aware of that and have been forced to understand that Engineering can only do the things you ask them to do, they can't read your mind.
"We tell business what we need from them in order to do our work, instead of the other way around." This is probably the most important thing. It seems to me that the preponderance of businesses out there basically allow sales and marketing to run the show, and since they don't understand what Engineering does beyond drink coffee and consume budget, it can't be important or hard. I recently interviewed with a company with in-house engineering, and I asked them to describe how a project usually is structured there. I was told that the business decided that they wanted a feature added and picked a timeline based on their own strategy (to coincide with a trade show, quarterly earnings, etc) and told Engineering what the requirements were. The deadlines were set at that point, before Engineering even knew that the business wanted the feature. No consultation with Engineering about feasibility or resources required, just "Do this, you have until X." They had also previously asked me how I felt about routinely working more than 40 hours in a week (and, being an Exempt position, this would have meant no additional compensation). Fortunately I did not get offered the job, and would have likely turned it down had it been offered.
"We don't accept issues that don't meet our standards" - I am skeptical of this being as simple as it is stated here. Every environment I have worked in has resisted this heavily, especially when the issues being created are filed by people with "Executive" in their job title. Usually it's "This is broken go fix it" and if the person filing the issue has enough juice, nobody will dare go back to them for more information, they're far too important for that. Some companies are worse than others, but I have yet to be at a company (and I've worked for several Fortune 500 companies) where IT/Engineering were first class citizens, able to require more information to solve a problem.
"business, admin and others show up at our standups and our sprint demo" - See above, usually people who actually can make decisions won't deign to attend meetings with people who do actual work.
"Buys" votes? Isn't it possible that people are electing representatives that share their positions? You make it sound like bribery, when it's really just democracy in action. It's just not acting the way you'd like.
Starting to? It's been shrinking for years. The deficit has shrunk every year since the current administration took office, even the years when the Dems controlled Congress.
So, you're in favor of it so long as you can make a profit.
Nevermind that it's the profit motive that drives the obscene cost of healthcare in the USA. Why should we fix the actual problem, anyway?
I think your 'lazy' peers are just ahead of the curve. They already know that going the extra mile in the working world doesn't get you anything. Your boss' job is to get as much work out of you as he/she can while paying you as little as possible. Your job (in addition to what you actually do) is to do as little work as you can for as much money as you can. It's not in your interest to go the 'extra mile'. You've busted your hump for an 'attaboy' and a big bonus for your manager.
If the real world rewarded hard work, things would be different. The real world rewards those who can work the politics and get rich off of the hard work of others.
Five, if you live on a coast.
Please share. For some reason it's perfectly ok to trash a bad employee, but finding information about a bad employer is difficult.
No, the way non-technical people work (at least at the upper-management level) is that they ask their underlings for a solution to a problem, when they've really got the solution they want to hear in their heads. The underlings, who have ostensibly been hired for their expertise in their fields, give them technically sound answers, but answers that are different from what they want to hear, which annoys and confuses them. (For example, you might want to compete with Amazon, but your resources are two Java devs, a junior UX designer, and an unpaid college intern. The boss wants to hear "Yes, we can do that, no problem", when the truth is that it's completely irrational to even consider it.) Eventually, management gets tired of being told that what they want to do is physically impossible, no matter how much money it would save (and that's the important part, make sure you never spend any money, ever) and stops asking them for their input, choosing instead to say "This is what we're doing, go deal with it."
Upper management arrogance and ego are and always have been more important than technical realities. That's what needs to change. We shouldn't be encouraging CIOs to talk like CIOs, we should be encouraging people to not be fucking retards and actually LISTEN to the people they've hired to perform a duty.
Then there are the guys that equate "best practices" as "the lazy programmers trying to get more time to do something that we've already decided should take X." I consider testing/QA as an example of "best practices". At a previous job, we were in a staff meeting talking about the progress of a piece of software we were writing. The bonehead VP of Marketing asked our QA guy how long he would need to finish a testing project. The QA guy answered "6 weeks". The VP then said "You have 3. QA always takes too long."
Not "why is it going to take so long", or "what problems do you need to solve", just "That's too much time". Idiot.
Form a new union? In an at-will-employment state? Good luck with that. See you in the unemployment line.
So these challenges don't exist? Do you have solutions?
And that means that it never happens, right? And "poor academic performers" are not one of those protected classes, so it's perfectly legal to turn them away.
So, you fund an alternative school for the kids that the other schools turn away. Who's going to run it? How do you force a private company to open a location that is almost certain to lose money?
Also, what happens when nobody wants to open a school in your town, because they don't think they can make a profit?
I just don't see how going to for-profit companies to do this isn't trading one set of problems for another.
No idea how that happened.
The reason it looks like I'm skipping around is that there are so many problems with using private for-profit companies to provide critical town services. Who would decide whose children have to attend the "alternative" school? You're taking school choice away from these parents because it's more difficult to educate those children. Also, how can you force a private company to set up a school to for those kids? Such a school is sure to lose money, unless you're prepared to spend more to educate them, which seems unfair to the other children in the town, as well as putting the other businesses at a competitive disadvantage. How much do you propose regulating this market? At what point do the advantages of a free market go away, if you're going to dictate to a private company who they have to accept as a student?