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Admin
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/express/default.aspx
Visual Studio 2005 Express editions for free, as well as the Beta 2's of VS2008 Express.
Admin
Admin
"Fix this or I report it" is not blackmail. "Give me money (or give me something) or I report it" IS blackmail, and just as illegal. Its not blackmail if you do not gain anything (although I think the law generally means money) from it.
Admin
What a fucking sucker.
Admin
I thought everyone was a programmer. I know all my employees are great programmers. When I say black font on a black background, they do it pronto, no questions asked. When I tell them to use flat text files instead of linked SQL Servers to do a data migration, they do it -- no questions asked. That is because, I too, am a programmer, architect, software engineer, business process expert, and manager...ALL rolled into one. Do you know me?
Admin
But... Since when do ethics have anything to do with following the law?
Admin
An even funnier thing are people who have to go to school for this crap and end up with this HUGE chip on their shoulder because they are under the impression it's a real science and they are actually engineers so they spend all their free time making themselves feel better at the people who didn't need school to learn BASIC LOGIC.And then as a last resort they complain about run-on sentences.....
Admin
oh BS you made this crap up
Admin
Admin
Admin
Agh. I forgot there was an "express" edition. Though its crippled so you can't use most of the API's, isn't it?
The story ain't made up. I've seen ugly stuff, and lots of stuff of truly WTF material. Websites using Access as backend. Developers that can't tell the difference between Java and Javascript. Dudes asking us to blatantly reverse-engineer financial software. I'd go on but I'm sleepy right now...
As much as Visual Studio might be good, KDevelop looks quite right for me, and it interacts with CVS, unlike VS that insists on me using the god-awful Visual SourceSafe. IBM's VisualAge was fairly decent, haven't checked out Eclipse; and I currently use NetBeans though almost any Java IDE suffers from memory hogging. Ugh! Can't Sun implement free() inside its VM? I hate ending up with 1024+Mb processes!!!
Admin
They are related in that if you have one, dont deal with the other. ;)
Admin
Well said chap! I something that I keep telling to young guys that think that the web stuff is so new and cool! Is the same old crap + annoying CAPTCHAs... ;-)
Admin
Who has a chip on his shoulder?
Admin
What is so special about being able to put "programmer" on your resume?
"Programmer" is hardly a prestigious job title, it's more of an entry position for people who don't have a life yet and not much work experience. People who are still a "programmer" past their mid- to late twenties show a lack of potential.
Admin
My first job was also somewhat like that - producing VB software for some South African fly-by-night operation - subcontracted to an American fly-by-night operation. Our specs were "make some kind of strategy tool" we used "not entirely licensed" VB.
The company that bought the software was Enron - go figure.
Now I'm doing open source web based data warehousing, And all three of the aforementioned companies are out of business.
Admin
With the current free-fall of the dollar comparisons are a bit hard to make, but 2500e is a fairly decent pay in Finland, and we're not exactly a third-world country.
Admin
Yes. Micro-managing manager who thinks he knows as well, or most likely better than his underlings. A real pain.
Admin
Bingo!!
I was like that 6 years ago. Its not that I don't know that the boss is abusive. Its not that I don't know that I can get another job should I look for it. It's just the fact that being young, relatively new to the scene, I just have this high amount energy to burned, with no perception of limitation.
Anything that goes in between will translates to something like, "I can deal with this", "Maybe I can just give extra hours", "Maybe I should learn something, like communications... etc, then I can actually handle this".
That said, it led me to improve myself up to a point that I realized, that even if I sell my soul, it wont make things better. Not until boss is willing to give extra resources(or whatever the limiting factor is).
Another thing is that, for new budding programmers who love his/her trade, his/her motivation for any decision might be on the interest of the project, not on personal interest, because the project is their interest. You can say they don't have a life, well, they'll learn that in due time.
Conversely, for any other people out there, they perceive that people make decision on their interest, and rightly so. Applying this equation to a boss who doesn't have a spec of idea of what his programmers are doing, it does not bode well. Since he doesn't know what his programmer is doing, he feels he can easily be taken advantage of, as the programmers may suggest something to their advantage.
The way most of that kind of people handle this is well, push the button and read the emotional(or whatever) signals that they can actually understand. That my friend, is the common way normal loving people can be terribly abusive when it comes to that (at least that I know of).
Unfortunately, to deal with this kind of people is to scream bloody murder every time they suggest something astronomical. Which may lead to your firing, which is too bad. Well, maybe not so bad after all.
Admin
I assume that 2500 euro figure is per month? I think the tens of thousands of dollars figures are per year.
Admin
Admin
At the end, it all comes down to cost of living. Garbage collectors here in Switzerland make about that salary/month. Then, they're paid fairly well since hardly anybody wants to do that job.
But as an experienced developer, I'd make more in drawing unemployment.
Admin
If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Admin
Even funnier than that are people too dumb to even get into college, or get a scholarship to pay for it, who think that because they understand an IF statement they are as good as me. You're not. If what you're coding is "basic logic", then that's because your boss has deemed you unfit for serious programming work. Furthermore, if you can't compose a proper sentence, it's because you can't think a proper thought. We're not complaining about your grammar; we're complaining that you've wasted our time with your incoherent drivel. I spilled some coffee in the parking lot. Go clean it up.
Admin
Time is money.
Captcha: onomatopoeia (blegh)
Admin
I have a boss kind of like this at the moment too, in terms of "can we build an invoicing system in two weeks". I deal with it thusly:
Boss: "Can we build this in two weeks" Me: "No, more like four months" Boss: "But it's really simple, all you do is blah blah" Me: "Ok, two weeks"
This actually works because you're agreeing with your boss. However later you have to use some other techniques to evade blame.
Boss: "Is it done yet" Me: "No, it's taking longer than we anticipated, it'll be done tomorrow" Boss: "Is it done yet" Me: "No, it's taking longer than we anticipated, it'll be done tomorrow"
This has one drawback - from now on, whenever a new project is made up you'll be told to make it using an existing project as a base, eg. an online store out of an rss feed generator or vice versa. This can add time to the project as windows has to calculate how long deleting the unneeded files will take.
Boss: "This thing is broken and a client is complaining." Me: "I disabled it because you said it was deleting things from the database. I'll fix it when I've finished all the other tasks."
This is very useful if the boss likes to break the data and blame your code.
Boss: "I need feature X." Me: "Ok, here is the feature." Boss: "This is not feature Y." Me: "You asked for Z." Boss: "No, that's not what I meant."
This actually works because the boss takes part responsibility for communication issues. You need to prime this first however, with "what does that actually mean?" and "can you give me written specifications?".
Admin
The worst of the WTFs in this story (for there are many) is that the poor guy was FIRED a day after asking for a raise at his yearly review!
Admin
I don't believe the APIs are crippled at all. The limitations are lack of x64 compilers, more limited plug-in support, working with local databases and the deployment tools that are supplied.
But given its aimed at individual developers and not at software teams or companies they work quite well.
Admin
Oh wow, I just left a job exactly like that
Admin
Yeah, it would be a real hindrance to getting, say, a sales position.
Admin
BS. Enron didn't buy software out of SA. They developed everything internally, and what wasn't done by Enron's own software was done in Excel.
Admin
... or U238
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-238#Radioactivity_and_decay
Admin
The definition of blackmail is threatening to do something that would be legal if it weren't being used as a threat. The term doesn't apply if what is being threatened is illegal; that's extortion.
(I'm not a lawyer, but you didn't really think I was anyway)
Admin
And even funnier still are the college educated that think their education really means something after the first few years. In our field, that college degree only prepares you to start programming, it does not make you a good programmer in practice.
When I started 15 years ago, everything I learned then is nearly useless now. The only things my education is still valid for is basic theory and that could have been learned on the job.
Admin
I'd hazard that the only thing 'rumpelstiltskin' took away from school was a deep-seated entitlement mentality. See, he's paid his dues, now he's owed a job. I wouldn't hire him, no matter what kind of schooling, if I detected the attitude displayed in his post.
Admin
I would instantly blackmail. I would still be in the store when I make the phonecall. I would make sure that I got paid 22,000 yearly salary for life for the service of "keeping yer mouth shut" or else Microsoft would get a mysterious phone call about some dude who is ripping money off from little ol' MS!
Admin
Admin
You could also spend 10 years doing the same thing and not keeping up with any new technologies, not that anybody should jump on every single new technology, but at least keeping up with what is common development practice.
Admin
To be fair to Garrett, it didn't sound like he was particularly proud of his work (except for maybe the original PHP thing, which may very well have been a good program.. for what it was. Could be that he'll get a Jr. Programmer job somewhere and get a taste of what a real development environment is like, and learn. Sounds like he at least bright enough and motivated enough to learn multiple programming languages on his own. Imagine what could be done with a little, you know, training or even a degree.
Really, the only person who deserves scorn here is the owner. Garrett was just an innocent victim who was perhaps just a little too deparate for a job.
Admin
Hmmm.
If you need a programming job on your resume to get a better programming job, then you do what you have to. Anybody that doesn't understand this is a dick.
You went to college? Congrats! You didn't go to college? Congrats!
You don't give a flying fuck whether some internet stranger that you'll never meet in person went, or didn't, to college?
Double-congrats!
Do you care? I hope not since it's utterly irrelevant and I included it just to swing my coder-wang in public.
Schwinng!
And I too didn't attend college for computer science. Does it matter?
shrug only if you're applying for a job with a company that insists on you having a college degree.
No tickee, no shirtee.
Hey as long as I'm amused, who cares?
Admin
If you find yourself saying "Everything I learned in college is useless to me now", then you didn't go to college. You went to trade school, and have discovered that the tools of your trade have changed.
Admin
And you couldn't be more wrong. Colleges teach using the tools of the time, note I said the theory is still useful. All the tools have changed, my training in COBOL and RPG us useless but the theory I learned while being taught those languages still applies. The accounting I took, I never use. The higher math I took, since I write business applications, gets used rarely.
It's not so much that the tools have changed, but the work we do as corporate staff does not truly require all the things you use in college and a lot of what you learned is never used.
The real learning actually comes after college, when you are presented with a unique problem and you fall back on the theory you know and your own ability to think abstractly to solve that problem. This is something you can achieve without even going to a trade school.
As I said before, your college education should only be a factor for the first few years. If you think it should accord you with any other rights or privileges you are part of the problem. A piece of paper means nothing if you can't actually do the work, and someone that can do the work does not need that piece of paper.
If you are still talking about a degree you earned 10 or 15 years ago as one of your accomplishments then you really haven't done anything to advance yourself in those 10 or 15 years. The tools change, even the methodologies change. Object oriented development has not been taught forever, and this even changed some applied theory in CS.
Admin
I always thought extortion had to be threat of physical violence.
So:
"Pay me xxx or I'll call the BSA/MS and report you for using illegal software" == Blackmail "Pay me xxx or I'll beat up your wife and dog" == Extortion "You fired me because you're a cheap fuck, so I'm calling the BSA/MS to report you for using illegal software as payback" == Perfectly Legal
Admin
The key to a College education is to go work for a place that values it. If you got a degree from a top school like UC Berkeley, you need to seek out a job where the degree is valued. You don't go work for fly-by-night scmuck who is looking to get rich off your crappy programming. But if you get a job at a decent company, they will say "This guy has potential. Let's train him and give him a little time, then he will be a valuable employee."
If you don't have a degree, then you have to scramble.
I pretty much agree with the 10 years it takes to become more than competent. The first year or two is just a blur, where every project is new, you have no clue how long anything will make, you make a ton of mistakes and then working long hours to get things to work. Then you spend a couple of years learning some shortcuts and you start seeing patterns in the projects. But now, you worry that you are doing things the "right way" and not just "getting the code to work". Then a few years later, you realize that the way you code is good enough, and that it is worth it to have 95% clean code and 5% hack job, because to get rid of the last 5% will require a huge effort. Then the 9th and 10th years you have seen everything, coded everything, seen fads come and go, and you don't worry about style, you know that when you are given specs that they will change 16 times, and you don't ever estimate 2 weeks unless you think it will be 2 days. When you hear of a bug, you know what the problem is or where to look for it right away. You know what mistakes junior programmers will make before they make them (like: "I didn't test it because there is no way a change in this module will affect that module.")
Admin
You post explains my point perfectly. The things you know and make you valuable after 10 years in the industry are not your college education but rather those things you learned afterwards. Your experience by that time is far more valuable then the degree you earned many years prior.
If you haven't learned any of those things in the years you have been programming then a 10 year old degree isn't going to help you. You can also learn those things without first having that degree, but it is so much easier to get started in this field with one.
Yes in the beginning the degree is worth it, get one by all means, but do not rely on that piece of paper for the rest of your career. The "I have a degree so I must be smarter than you" people only work to piss off those that really are smarter, degree or not.
Admin
Admin
Hey! I'm still a young guy... I think. Or is 34 old now?
:D
Admin
Listen folks,
I got a Bachelor's Degree and a Master's Degree in EECS from MIT ten years ago. I've worked in software development since then. Some observations:
Some of the best people I've worked with didn't have any kind of degree.
The very very best do have degrees.
The bigger the chip on someone's shoulder about their awesome degree, the less impressive the degree is.
A good college education is timeless.
I've met people with degrees I'd never hire.
Even a few from MIT. When I see "MIT" on a resume, I don't automatically hire them. I do, however, ask a very different set of questions. When asked "how long does it take to sort a list?" they better give an answer at least as good as "n log n" within ten seconds.
Admin
You observations are very anecdotal but reading them you bring up questions about number 2. Are these people the very very best because they have degrees, or do they have degrees because they got tired of fighting it and simply got one in order to achieve the respect they rightly deserve, or did their passion lead them to keep going for more education and they ended up with a degree by default.
Keep in mind, I never said having a degree is bad. I only say that just because you have one doesn't make you a good programmer and the lack of one does not make you a bad one.
Admin
Yes. By the way, I will be about 30min late Monday.