• Eric L (unregistered)

    Its always the platform, never the code

  • anon (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Get 5 quotes, discard the high and low numbers, and average the rest to get a realistic cost estimate, based upon your criteria. Then examine the remaining three much more closely to get a better get feel for the best choice.

    Well, that doesn't make much sense. Why discard 2 options just because of price? Set them aside when finding an average price, but then use that to negotiate the price for the job with the best choice out of the five, even if it's with the one making the highest quote originally.

  • foo (unregistered) in reply to amischiefr
    amischiefr:
    Addison:
    Wow. ASP is slow eh? God dam it you ignorant retards.

    I hate it when people who know nothing spurt BS that they heard from some guy who barely knows any more then they do.

    I hate stupid people.

    ASP = Always Slow Protocol, DUH!!!

    Don't hire this guy, he doesn't even know what ASP means, he got it wrong, it's "Always Slow Processing". Lots of bad developers make this mistake; it shows they havn't got an A+ certification. Always ask developers if they have an A+ certification before you hire them, if not, they don't know anything. I've got A+ certification so you know you can trust me to produce fast, cheap, and high quality code. You should ask someone like me who knows about these things, and I could tell you you should always use PHP.

  • greg (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that when Kyle followed up with Jim 6 months later, Jim hadn't gotten fired yet.

  • (cs) in reply to just another programmer
    just another programmer:
    I use to work at a shop that was always the lowest bidder with the shortest delivery time. My boss would bid way low on the initial contract thinking that he would make up the loss from development in the "maintenance contract".
    When I was in the construction biz (in a previous life), there were sometimes crews like that. They underbid everybody else and you'd see them all over the place for about a year, and then suddenly they weren't there anymore. Ask around, and someone would say, "Oh, yeah, that company declared bankruptcy."
  • Ray (unregistered)

    People jump the gun when it comes to frameworks thinking they are some kind of magical solution for every business need. I honestly don't think the problem was ASP.NET as a platform, but the weird use of DotNetNuke (which I despise) as a "silverbullet" solution. My former team had the same performance problems with Cold Fusion and Mach-II, whenever you use some weird framework to save some "coding-time",you will pay it in performance. Who said that 100 lines of code will run faster than 2 lines of code? Come on, if your project relies more than 50 percent on a framework, then you are using the wrong tool for the job.

  • (cs) in reply to anon
    anon:
    Well, that doesn't make much sense. Why discard 2 options just because of price? Set them aside when finding an average price, but then use that to negotiate the price for the job with the best choice out of the five, even if it's with the one making the highest quote originally.

    It's standard practice, and it does make some sense statistically - discarding the outliers.

  • anon (unregistered) in reply to spxza
    spxza:
    anon:
    Well, that doesn't make much sense. Why discard 2 options just because of price? Set them aside when finding an average price, but then use that to negotiate the price for the job with the best choice out of the five, even if it's with the one making the highest quote originally.

    It's standard practice, and it does make some sense statistically - discarding the outliers.

    Sometimes, just sometimes, the most expensive option is the most expensive choice for a reason. Throwing them away based merely on a dollar amount is just plain foolish.

  • (cs) in reply to anon
    anon:
    Sometimes, just sometimes, the most expensive option is the most expensive choice for a reason. Throwing them away based merely on a dollar amount is just plain foolish.

    Oh, to subsidize the outsourced company's CEO's new yacht?

  • (cs) in reply to anon
    anon:
    spxza:
    anon:
    Well, that doesn't make much sense. Why discard 2 options just because of price? Set them aside when finding an average price, but then use that to negotiate the price for the job with the best choice out of the five, even if it's with the one making the highest quote originally.

    It's standard practice, and it does make some sense statistically - discarding the outliers.

    Sometimes, just sometimes, the most expensive option is the most expensive choice for a reason. Throwing them away based merely on a dollar amount is just plain foolish.

    It's called an outlier and can be disregarded. You get five total quotes. Four of them are reasonably around $50,000. The fifth quote is $150,000. Obviously there is a significant difference between the four quotes and the fifth one. My time isn't worth trying to figure out what it is so it goes into the circular file. If the quotes were evenly spread out between $50,000 and $150,000 then all five would get equal review. But one oddity doesn't get considered.

  • Crabs (unregistered) in reply to jeremypnet
    In this instance, Jim could have easily sanity checked the quote by looking up the day rates of ASP.NET programmers. I haven't done that myself, but $6,800 probably doesn't amount to more than about 10 days of work

    ...Where can I go work for that kind of money? That's about 7 weeks of work out of me..

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:

    Yes. That reminds me of the bad name Java desktop programs got, because most developers didn't think of adding the user events (mouse clicks etc.) in a separate thread. I've seen many apps where you press a button, and the rest of the interface hangs while the function does its work... but it's Java that gets the blame.

    You would think that they would wonder why Java on the server was so fast and powerful, while the desktop apps where unresponsive... Put two and two together, and blame the developers and not the VM.

    Well, users blame Vista, instead of ignorant developers of crappy apps that didn't play by the long published rules, and that's why those don't work in Vista. Why Java should be getting a break?

  • Anonymous Person (unregistered) in reply to thetunaman
    thetunaman:
    The site could maybe handle 1 user at a time, but 2-3 brought it to it's knees. The owner was sad that java was such a slow crappy language and that he wished he had done it in php.. php could handle 100 users on the same server at once!

    I peeked at the code, and found the bug pretty fast. It was an ebay like auction site that could show a list of items for sale. When iterating through the 100 items to display on a given page, rather than do a single query and pull items out of it.. it was doing a full query for all items in the database, grabbing the 1 item it needed, then dumping the row. So to load a page with 100 items, we would make 100 full database queries, each returning all items in the database table, which we would iterate through to show a given item. Once the size of the table grew to around 1000 items, it was just too much to handle and slowed the site to a crawl. (Database being on same server as app didn't help with memory to spare I am sure).

    3 minute change gave a 10000% speedup.

    Sigh to outsourced garbage.

    Ell oh ell! I recently ran into the same concept. In my case, there would be 101 queries. First a query to get the 100 key values to query, then it looped over the results, running a query to retrieve the detail data for every key value. App was a mega-slug, particularly when there were thousands of rows.

    Turns out the first query for key values was against the same table that had the actual detail data, all I had to do was add the appropriate columns to that query and remove the iterated one altogether!

    I can't even imagine what the original programmer was thinking.

  • anon (unregistered) in reply to MrsPost
    MrsPost:
    Obviously there is a significant difference between the four quotes and the fifth one. My time isn't worth trying to figure out what it is so it goes into the circular file. If the quotes were evenly spread out between $50,000 and $150,000 then all five would get equal review. But one oddity doesn't get considered.

    So you're selecting a vendor/consultant for a $50,000 project and it isn't worth a phone call to find out what they think they bring to the table, or if they'll bring their price down to $80,000 and still bring whatever stellar qualifications they think they have to the project?

    And there's no chance whatsoever that you got quotes from 1 outstanding performer and 4 hackshops who don't understand the project, is there? Because there is such a shortage of clueless "yes, we can do exactly what you want" companies out there.

    Well, good luck with that. Me, I'd make the phone call.

  • Viet (unregistered)

    The real WTF is to get it "compiled"

  • Worf (unregistered) in reply to anon
    anon:
    MrsPost:
    Obviously there is a significant difference between the four quotes and the fifth one. My time isn't worth trying to figure out what it is so it goes into the circular file. If the quotes were evenly spread out between $50,000 and $150,000 then all five would get equal review. But one oddity doesn't get considered.

    So you're selecting a vendor/consultant for a $50,000 project and it isn't worth a phone call to find out what they think they bring to the table, or if they'll bring their price down to $80,000 and still bring whatever stellar qualifications they think they have to the project?

    And there's no chance whatsoever that you got quotes from 1 outstanding performer and 4 hackshops who don't understand the project, is there? Because there is such a shortage of clueless "yes, we can do exactly what you want" companies out there.

    Well, good luck with that. Me, I'd make the phone call.

    Sounds like how we get some contracts actually - people wonder why our bid is at the high end (or highest) and they'd call to find out WTF is going on. When we explain, the customer often goes back. meditates a while, then comes back (or not).

    Sometimes it's because we bring to the table something they completely overlooked, or we managed to sell them some feature they were hesitating on but did want, and updated quotes shocked them.

    It won't eliminate the "pay-for-the-yacht" type of wild bids, but calling to find out why a bid is so high can often reveal if a) the bid contains stuff that was overlooked/forgotten/never considered, b) the shop charges more for a specific reason (quality? delivery?) c) the shop is just looking for some sucker willing to pay for the yacht.

  • (cs) in reply to Franz_Kafka
    Franz_Kafka:
    Code Dependent:
    I need to buy a woodworking tool...What is the stigma attached to buying it at Walmart?

    Walmart generally sells something that breaks sooner, even when it's the same model number. I go there for bullets, but nothing else.

    Whoa whoa whoa, wait a second. So you won't use a saw from Walmartbecause of quality concerns, but you'll gladly pick up hundreds of tiny explosives that you plan on setting off at arm's length?

  • Edward Royce (unregistered) in reply to Ray
    Ray:
    People jump the gun when it comes to frameworks thinking they are some kind of magical solution for every business need. I honestly don't think the problem was ASP.NET as a platform, but the weird use of DotNetNuke (which I despise) as a "silverbullet" solution. My former team had the same performance problems with Cold Fusion and Mach-II, whenever you use some weird framework to save some "coding-time",you will pay it in performance. Who said that 100 lines of code will run faster than 2 lines of code? Come on, if your project relies more than 50 percent on a framework, then you are using the wrong tool for the job.

    Hmmmm.

    That last sentence doesn't seem to make sense to me.

    So if my project is depending on -more than 50%- of it's operation on the framework then that's -bad-?

    Doesn't that actually imply that by having -more than 50%- of the work done by the framework result in my having to do less code? Isn't that the entire point of using a framework?

    Like .NET?

    Is there a typo in the quoted text or am I in serious need of more coffee?

  • eric76 (unregistered) in reply to Franz_Kafka
    Franz_Kafka:
    Walmart generally sells something that breaks sooner, even when it's the same model number. I go there for bullets, but nothing else.
    I buy my fishing licenses at Walmart.

    Not one has ever broken.

  • (cs) in reply to PublicLurker
    PublicLurker:
    Code Dependent:
    morry:
    they shop at walmart.
    I need to buy a woodworking tool. Walmart has it for $8.95. Home Depot has it for $9.95. Ace Hardware has it for $12.95. Or I can order it online for $12.95 plus $6.00 shipping.

    What is the stigma attached to buying it at Walmart?

    And Rockler probably has something for $19.95 that actually doesn't break when you are halfway through your task. Walmart sells crap. That other places also sell crap does not change that simple fact.

    That Rockler (whoever they are) has high priced merchandise doesn't mean that it's reliable (re: Jaguar, Mercedes, Microsoft).

  • (cs) in reply to Kensey
    Kensey:
    Code Dependent:
    PublicLurker:
    Code Dependent:
    morry:
    they shop at walmart.
    I need to buy a woodworking tool. Walmart has it for $8.95. Home Depot has it for $9.95. Ace Hardware has it for $12.95. Or I can order it online for $12.95 plus $6.00 shipping.

    What is the stigma attached to buying it at Walmart?

    And Rockler probably has something for $19.95 that actually doesn't break when you are halfway through your task. Walmart sells crap. That other places also sell crap does not change that simple fact.

    Tell you what, why don't I just go buy the item I was going to build, and be done with it?

    Notice what I said: "I need to buy a woodworking tool. Walmart has it." Other places have the same product, same brand, same model, the one I need, for more money.

    I don't need to take a taxi to cross the street, I don't need a drill press to drill a hole, and I don't need a $400 plane to smooth an edge.

    Walmart sells some crap. They also sell some standard-quality stuff. When standard quality is what I need and I can get it there cheaper, that's where I'll be buying it.

    In my experience, Wal-Mart either:

    1. doesn't carry what I want, only a cheaper, lower-quality version, or
    2. carries what I want, but at no price savings or even a significant markup compared to buying it from an online surplus or specialty shop.

    I think the last thing I bought at Wal-Mart was sink drain plugs. Can't remember what it was before then -- a watch battery, I think, and I won't be buying those there again because a real jeweler will often sell you the battery and install it while you wait at no extra charge.

    Wal-mart: $0.99 for battery Jeweler: $9.99 for battery... but they take off the back and stick in for free! May be worth it if it's a Tag Heuer, I guess.

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous Person
    Anonymous Person:
    Ell oh ell! I recently ran into the same concept. In my case, there would be 101 queries. First a query to get the 100 key values to query, then it looped over the results, running a query to retrieve the detail data for every key value. App was a mega-slug, particularly when there were thousands of rows.

    Turns out the first query for key values was against the same table that had the actual detail data, all I had to do was add the appropriate columns to that query and remove the iterated one altogether!

    I can't even imagine what the original programmer was thinking.

    He (or she) was probably thinking, "Thank $deity I was able to copy/paste my code from the Internet. Now I can say I have two years experience as a programmer!"

  • (cs) in reply to eric76
    eric76:
    Franz_Kafka:
    Walmart generally sells something that breaks sooner, even when it's the same model number. I go there for bullets, but nothing else.
    I buy my fishing licenses at Walmart.

    Not one has ever broken.

    Just you wait - you'll be out there in your hip waders one day and the game warden will wander by. When you go to show him your license, it'll have turned into a coupon for $1 off on ice cream.

  • Mizchief (unregistered) in reply to Mark
    Mark:
    hatterson:
    Actually just went through something like this at my job.

    One of the companies we work with approached us to develop 'phase 2' of an online testing application that we had provided for them a while back. They insisted that they would need a hard quote and that was all they would pay as they were highly disappointed with how the prices skyrocketed with 'phase 1' I politely explained that the reason the prices exceed the initial quote was because the initial quote was based on a certain set of requirements whereas the final deliverable was nothing like the initial request due to them playing the "we know that you're 90% done with development now but we've changed our minds about the core requirements" game.

    ...

    That's why at meetings I get smart-assed to anyone proposing big changes in the requirements. We'll be halfway done with development when someone wants something changed. They ask if it can be done. I say "Sure, but first I want you to sign this memo stating that this change will delay the project timeline by X weeks." That usually shuts them up fast.

    When they argue my time estimate with the standard "But it's a tiny little change..." I remind them that I'm the developer, they're not.

    Ahhhh, it's good to have leverage.

    Yea i've tried that. Except the client gets upset, then my pointy-haried pussy boss tells them we can do it anyway and somehow I end up working 60 hour weeks.

  • Mizchief (unregistered) in reply to just another programmer
    just another programmer:
    I use to work at a shop that was always the lowest bidder with the shortest delivery time. My boss would bid way low on the initial contract thinking that he would make up the loss from development in the "maintenance contract".

    Our development cycle consisted of working on the project which had the maddest customer that week. Needless to say we never on schedule, our code was crap, and the maintenance contracts never materialized as customers would take their code in a huff when we finally (usually months late) got a crippled version working.

    It was a shame because there were some super smart guys working there and we could have put together some sweet applications.

    I think I work at that same company

  • Mateo_LeFou (unregistered)

    I'm kinda bummed 'cause a friend of mine wants me to -- ahem -- "give his website a quick facelift".

    He says he can only spend $100.

    ...I'm basically trying to figure out a not-rude way to recommend a couple HTML books to him.

  • Mizchief (unregistered) in reply to Ray
    Ray:
    People jump the gun when it comes to frameworks thinking they are some kind of magical solution for every business need. I honestly don't think the problem was ASP.NET as a platform, but the weird use of DotNetNuke (which I despise) as a "silverbullet" solution. My former team had the same performance problems with Cold Fusion and Mach-II, whenever you use some weird framework to save some "coding-time",you will pay it in performance. Who said that 100 lines of code will run faster than 2 lines of code? Come on, if your project relies more than 50 percent on a framework, then you are using the wrong tool for the job.

    Yea Frameworks are always bad. You should code every application in x86 assembly and then again in x64 so that it's as fast as it can possibley be.

    Do you drive a Jet Powered car, or do you drive a car that meets your budget, comfort, style, etc?

    Performance is just one of the many requirements you must consider when designing a solution. Most business applications don't have to be as fast as possible, just fast enough. As long as your not unnesscairly maxing out the CPU and ram usage performance should, and usualy does take a backseat to other aspects like Quality, maintainablity, scaleablity, and of course functionality.

    If you can find a framework/platform that handles over 50% of the functionality you need with already tested and working code, just install it on a faster server, collect your check and move on to the next project.

    A lot of the stigmata that gets associated with .net, java and the frameworks that ride on top of those is that it makes it too easy for garbage coders to get something working without knowing how to really develop a product or how to write decent code on top of those frameworks.

    I also think that a lot the "PHP is the one and only" guys are the type of coders that are focused and dependant upon creating these 1 coder 1 client systems that keep themselves employed vs. creating resuable and resellable engineered software products.

  • christian (unregistered) in reply to GCU Arbitrary

    Possibly. But remember that in this case, it was the word of one technical person vs. another technical person.

  • Jordan (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Migala:
    How will you know which self-proclaimed experts actually know what they are doing?
    Get 5 quotes, discard the high and low numbers, and average the rest to get a realistic cost estimate, based upon your criteria. Then examine the remaining three much more closely to get a better get feel for the best choice.

    Works great when picking contractors to - redo your roof, siding, driveway, kitchen or website!

    I just got done with a quote not that long ago where someone basically asked me to clone myspace... then ADD features myspace doesn't have.

    I quoted them $250,000 for phase one of a three phase project. Then I agreed to reduce the cost to $80,000 in exchange for 30% equity in the site, (their idea, not mine).

    Then I discovered that at $80,000 I was the highest quote, and that the next highest quote was in the $10,000 range. For myspace.

    They got something like 7 quotes too. All the other developers, and I saw some of their proposals and contracts, basically wrote themselves a carefully worded document that sounds like "we'll make myspace for you for $10,000", but was actually "we'll install and skin phpNUKE for you for $10,000".

    I tried to explain this to the client, but he did exactly what you suggested, and average costs down, concluding that myspace's code was worth all of $10,000.

    What really needs to happen is that clients need to be firmer about what a contract entails, and then more apt to sue companies that go off contract.

  • (cs) in reply to Mateo_LeFou
    Mateo_LeFou:
    I'm kinda bummed 'cause a friend of mine wants me to -- ahem -- "give his website a quick facelift".

    He says he can only spend $100.

    ...I'm basically trying to figure out a not-rude way to recommend a couple HTML books to him.

    My brother, a doctor, pulled the "computer guy in the family" routine on me and asked me if I would help him with his business computer -- for pay, whatever I thought it was worth. The alarms went off, but I thought, "What the heck, it won't hurt to at least have a look." Turned out his office had bought a new patient management system and it needed to be initialized. What he needed was a data entry clerk.

    I helped him for a couple of hours, since I was already there, and then excused myself to leave. I recommended a former-girlfriend-turned-friend who had recently been laid off at work. He hired her at $12 an hour and she wound up getting a few days' work out of the deal.

    When he asked what he owed me, I told him nothing, consider it a family favor.

    But now I know where I can go for a medical exam if I'm ever broke and uninsured. :)

  • katastrofa (unregistered) in reply to Mizchief
    Mizchief:
    Yea i've tried that. Except the client gets upset, then my pointy-haried pussy boss tells them we can do it anyway and somehow I end up working 60 hour weeks.

    Your boss makes you work 60 hours/week for him and YOU call HIM a pussy?

    :O

  • katastrofa (unregistered) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    But now I know where I can go for a medical exam if I'm ever broke and uninsured. :)

    You're in for an unpleasant surprise. He won't reciprocate.

  • (cs) in reply to Mizchief
    Mizchief:
    Yea i've tried that. Except the client gets upset, then my pointy-haried pussy boss tells them we can do it anyway and somehow I end up working 60 hour weeks.

    I'd just let the project be late. 60 hour weeks aren't healthy, and I sort of doubt your PHPB is offering you any incentives.

  • Asiago Chow (unregistered) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    Notice what I said: "I need to buy a woodworking tool. Walmart has it." Other places have the same product, same brand, same model, the one I need, for more money.

    "Brand and model identical" != "identical" and we're not just talking about their censorship of music etc.

    It isn't "they are cheaper so the quality is lower" exactly. It's that they half-ass the Ikea model of Price Comes First. Ikea doesn't make a chair and figure out how much they can sell it for. They figure out what they can sell chairs for and makes chairs for those prices. The problem is how Walmart goes about it. To produce a $200 computer they go to Dell etc with, "You need to deliver 250,000 Inspiron 530S computers to our warehouse at a unit cost of $150 each FOB destination", for a $35 router they go to Belkin saying "deliver 250,000 F5D7230-4 routers for $20/ea FOB destination", a $40 saw sends them to Black and Decker with "deliver 1,000,000 CS1012 saws for $30/ea..." The manufacturer is left to refuse the order or cheapen the product so they can be sold at the required price point. The results speak for themselves: cut features, elimination of bundled accessories, cheapened components, accessories that are not compatible with the same make/model product sold through conventional channels, etc.

    That isn't always bad. Manufacturers sometimes overbundle and sometimes you don't need the features they cut. Sometimes the cost of manufacture is low enough that they can meet the price point without any loss at all. It just depends. However, a safe bet is that products purchased at Walmart will be inferior if that is possible. Bullets? Not very possible. Licenses? Truly not possible. Electronics? EASILY possible. Tools? Easily possible. Food? Maybe possible.

    There is a second argument centered on Walmart employees constantly using social services (emergency rooms, ambulances, police, etc) and being a drag on a community. I'm not convinced that any amount of additional insurance or other benefits would help the people Walmart hires to avoid ERs and use of police services and I don't see that they could be more gainfully employed elsewhere. It seems like the choice is between letting them do something at Walmart, forcing them out of the workforce, or killing them. I don't see any of those as particularly ethical but having them work at Walmart seems the least evil.

  • (cs) in reply to Asiago Chow
    Asiago Chow:
    "Brand and model identical" != "identical" and we're not just talking about their censorship of music etc.

    snip

    I understand the points you make, and I realize that the system is far less than ideal. However, I am not able to fix it by boycotting Walmart.

    In Dallas there used to be a "magazine" (cheap rag with two pages, folded and double-sided for a total of 8 pages) which was specifically for jobless and homeless people. The magazines were supplied to them for 25 cents each, and they then went out on the sidewalks and offered them to passersby for a dollar. I don't know, but I suspect it was common practice to front them the magazines until they got some money to pay.

    I never give money to bums (and there are a bunch of them) although I will buy one a lunch if I think the situation warrants, but when I was approached by someone with the "homeless" magazine I always bought one, and sometimes threw in an extra buck. I thought, "At least they're making an effort instead of doing nothing."

    Similar to your view of Walmart employees.

  • Asiago Chow (unregistered) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    Similar to your view of Walmart employees.

    If you factor out the tongue in cheek..umm...factor, certainly. ;)

    I have a friend who boycotts but not Walmart. He thinks manufacturers should stand firm and refuse to sell to Walmart if they can't deliver full quality at Walmart's price. If they don't he boycotts the manufacturer. When he found out that Belkin products sold through Walmart tend to be lousy compared to Belkin products sold elsewhere his response was "I'll never buy another Belkin product anywhere." I don't agree with him. I think Walmart's behavior is causing the problem and if Belkin doesn't sell someone else will.

    My response is to be ruthless in returning substandard products. I'll buy from Walmart but if the product doesn't match expectations I return it. I've returned hundreds (probably thousands) of dollars worth of junk to Walmarts over the years with the line, "It's either defective or total crap -- either way I want my money back." In fact I returned an antenna to them just yesterday. It worked worse than the twist tie from around the included coax cable shoved into the receiver's antenna connector! I figure that works far better than a boycott because it rewards them for selling good stuff (they keep my money) and more actively punishes them for selling bad stuff (the cost of processing a return usually more than erases the profit from selling the item).

    I think a lot of people would hook that antenna up, decide they were in a bad location for reception, and keep it to use after they move without ever testing it against another antenna or even the wire tie like I did. That's what they are counting on.

  • spellingnazi (unregistered) in reply to anonymous coward

    I'm liking this philosophy. I'll take it one further: if you can successfully go through life loudly accusing people who point out your flaws of being mere whiners...well, you can die without ever having been wrong! Brillant!

  • g0ats3 (unregistered)

    sexsexsexsexsex

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to Franz_Kafka
    Franz_Kafka:
    Mizchief:
    Yea i've tried that. Except the client gets upset, then my pointy-haried pussy boss tells them we can do it anyway and somehow I end up working 60 hour weeks.

    I'd just let the project be late. 60 hour weeks aren't healthy, and I sort of doubt your PHPB is offering you any incentives.

    When we interview people here, I explain to them that it is likely that now and then they will work 60 hour weeks, and everybody understands that and accepts it. As long as they make up the time by working 100 hours the following week.

  • Jay (unregistered)

    RE WalMart and the like: I've developed a simple strategy when buying modest-priced products, especially consummables where I will buy the same product many times: I start out by buying the cheapest, excluding anything that's obviously junk. If that is good enough for my needs, then I keep buying it and save a bunch of money. If it's not good enogh, then next time I buy a more expensive one. If necessary I go through a few iterations.

    Okay, I'm not going to use this strategy when buying a house or a car. Even a cheap house is tens of thousands of dollars, I'm not going to buy one, throw it away, and buy another. But when we're talking about, say, a brand of breakfast cereail, if the $1 brand tastes awful, I've only wasted $1 on the experiment and then I try the $3 brand. If the $1 brand tastes good, I can then save $2 a week for the rest of my life. The successes more than pay for the failures.

    My ex-wife's philosophy was: Always buy the best, and you can tell which one is the best becaue it's the most expensive. Seems to me that philosophy just encourages sellers to overprice. And may have been a factor in my ex's bankrupcy.

  • lokey (unregistered) in reply to katastrofa
    katastrofa:
    Code Dependent:
    But now I know where I can go for a medical exam if I'm ever broke and uninsured. :)

    You're in for an unpleasant surprise. He won't reciprocate.

    Yes he will - right in your ass - just before he hands you the bill...

  • lokey (unregistered) in reply to Asiago Chow
    Asiago Chow:
    Code Dependent:
    Notice what I said: "I need to buy a woodworking tool. Walmart has it." Other places have the same product, same brand, same model, the one I need, for more money.

    "Brand and model identical" != "identical" and we're not just talking about their censorship of music etc.

    It isn't "they are cheaper so the quality is lower" exactly. It's that they half-ass the Ikea model of Price Comes First. Ikea doesn't make a chair and figure out how much they can sell it for. They figure out what they can sell chairs for and makes chairs for those prices. The problem is how Walmart goes about it. To produce a $200 computer they go to Dell etc with, "You need to deliver 250,000 Inspiron 530S computers to our warehouse at a unit cost of $150 each FOB destination", for a $35 router they go to Belkin saying "deliver 250,000 F5D7230-4 routers for $20/ea FOB destination", a $40 saw sends them to Black and Decker with "deliver 1,000,000 CS1012 saws for $30/ea..." The manufacturer is left to refuse the order or cheapen the product so they can be sold at the required price point. The results speak for themselves: cut features, elimination of bundled accessories, cheapened components, accessories that are not compatible with the same make/model product sold through conventional channels, etc.

    That isn't always bad. Manufacturers sometimes overbundle and sometimes you don't need the features they cut. Sometimes the cost of manufacture is low enough that they can meet the price point without any loss at all. It just depends. However, a safe bet is that products purchased at Walmart will be inferior if that is possible. Bullets? Not very possible. Licenses? Truly not possible. Electronics? EASILY possible. Tools? Easily possible. Food? Maybe possible.

    There is a second argument centered on Walmart employees constantly using social services (emergency rooms, ambulances, police, etc) and being a drag on a community. I'm not convinced that any amount of additional insurance or other benefits would help the people Walmart hires to avoid ERs and use of police services and I don't see that they could be more gainfully employed elsewhere. It seems like the choice is between letting them do something at Walmart, forcing them out of the workforce, or killing them. I don't see any of those as particularly ethical but having them work at Walmart seems the least evil.

    Yeh, at least while they are at Walmart "working", they are not out on the street stealing your car or burglarizing you house!

  • John (unregistered) in reply to halber_mensch

    "ASP.NET = Always Slow Protocol. Never Executes Totally"

    I thought it stood for Absolutely Superb Programming. No Exaggerated Technique?

  • katastrofa (unregistered) in reply to Asiago Chow
    Asiago Chow:
    There is a second argument centered on Walmart employees constantly using social services (emergency rooms, ambulances, police, etc) and being a drag on a community. I'm not convinced that any amount of additional insurance or other benefits would help the people Walmart hires to avoid ERs

    If they could afford normal healthcare (GPs, vaccines, etc), they would not have to go to ERs. But subsidizing their healthcare for the benefit of the public (spend 100 on prevention instead of 1000 on ER treatment) would be, gasp, socialism.

  • KKKoder (unregistered) in reply to z0ltan
    z0ltan:
    Does this kind of stupidity just infuriate you? These numbskulls need to be exterminated or just plain terminated in the least. How can they survive with such abject moronic idiocy???

    They're just like the Jews.

    Relax my brother, soon all the stupid people and unclean races will be cleansed from our mother Earth and we can all go back to coding white programs for a white world.

  • smartbutt (unregistered) in reply to KKKoder
    KKKoder:
    z0ltan:
    Does this kind of stupidity just infuriate you? These numbskulls need to be exterminated or just plain terminated in the least. How can they survive with such abject moronic idiocy???

    They're just like the Jews.

    Relax my brother, soon all the stupid people and unclean races will be cleansed from our mother Earth and we can all go back to coding white programs for a white world.

    I call Godwin's Law!

  • AJ (unregistered)

    My org. does custom software for other companies.

    What we have found is that often we are at the lower end of the curve (seldom we are at the top end) in price qoutations we provide.

    Example : a payroll / HR tool for a security firm - we quoted something in the vicinity of about 15k, whereas others quoted anything from about 7k to 70k.

    I think they got an off-the-shelf software in the end - which as I understand they are currently struggling with (one year later).

    Another is a very recent quote we made for another HR software (about 18k SGD). Not sure if we will get the contract or not. It seems one year before they actually paid someone/someones to make the HR software. Up till now a buggy POS has been delivered and it has pissed them off enough to get quotes from others to redo it totally (I think it was one of those "super cheap" qoutes which sort of expanded)

    But anyway, you get what you pay for (usually)

  • Barf 4Eva (unregistered)

    I hope Jim NEVER learns his lesson. He's a natural sit-com pick for any tech professional who needs a good laugh and a way to unwind from a hectic day at work. I'd like to think we'll hear of his misfortunes in future years to come and relish in his empty posturing and self-reassuredness on the path to "success". Call me sadistic...

  • Chad (unregistered) in reply to Mizchief
    Mizchief:
    Mark:
    hatterson:
    Actually just went through something like this at my job.

    One of the companies we work with approached us to develop 'phase 2' of an online testing application that we had provided for them a while back. They insisted that they would need a hard quote and that was all they would pay as they were highly disappointed with how the prices skyrocketed with 'phase 1' I politely explained that the reason the prices exceed the initial quote was because the initial quote was based on a certain set of requirements whereas the final deliverable was nothing like the initial request due to them playing the "we know that you're 90% done with development now but we've changed our minds about the core requirements" game.

    ...

    That's why at meetings I get smart-assed to anyone proposing big changes in the requirements. We'll be halfway done with development when someone wants something changed. They ask if it can be done. I say "Sure, but first I want you to sign this memo stating that this change will delay the project timeline by X weeks." That usually shuts them up fast.

    When they argue my time estimate with the standard "But it's a tiny little change..." I remind them that I'm the developer, they're not.

    Ahhhh, it's good to have leverage.

    Yea i've tried that. Except the client gets upset, then my pointy-haried pussy boss tells them we can do it anyway and somehow I end up working 60 hour weeks.

    1. My customers are internal
    2. I'm management.
    3. I've earned the trust of my superiors.
    4. Profit? Well, annual bonus is coming soon enough...
  • Paul Coddington (unregistered) in reply to z0ltan
    z0ltan:
    Does this kind of stupidity just infuriate you? These numbskulls need to be exterminated or just plain terminated in the least. How can they survive with such abject moronic idiocy???

    Because we let them. We keep tolerating the intolerable, we let the fear of disapproval (or termination) silence us, and we continue to remain "polite" while others treat us and everyone else like dirt.

    Now, how do we, as developers, find creative and practical means to overcome these problems?

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