• Ponedonkey (unregistered)

    Thats sooo sad. I would wash my hands and take showers every day, but still not feel clean...

  • _olly (unregistered) in reply to Raison de Calcul

    Nobody in pizza has a soul. I did 2 years for the cause, I learned that and how to toss dough.

  • (cs) in reply to Trask
    Trask:
    That sounded like a very stressful situation for him to be in. I'm in a similar boat, but I'm still just a technician waiting for a chance to show off some programming skills to get that on my resume.

    Find an open-source project, and contribute to it. Problem solved.

  • (cs) in reply to Memomachine
    Memomachine:
    Franz Kafka:
    Perhaps he was looking for more depth? Personally, I'd prattle on about how nlogn doesn't capture things like sorting 100G of data in 1G of memory and how some things work best when the working set is smaller than the l2 cache, but that's just me.

    My answer would be:

    When the computer thingy is finished.

    Seriously. In an age of frameworks and toolsets how many times are there opportunities to write yet another sort routine? And with wide possible variances in terms of available memory, disk thrashing, the size of datasets and the actual implementation of sorting in the framework or toolset. Really is there any way to really know?

    And just how useful is N log N? Any more useful than my answer? Not really.

    Aargh.

    It's not about writing one.

    It's about understanding the importance of having one.

    When your next report on 300,000 electronic votes takes ten days to process (personal history), then don't come crying to me.

    I believe you just mentioned "frameworks."

    How very enterprisy of you.

  • (cs) in reply to Anon Fred
    Anon Fred:
    real_aardvark:
    And I'm still fascinated by the idea that whoever it was would require a (hugely) different standard of algorithmic theory from an MIT graduate rather than a street-sweeper with a junior college qualification in Access. Did he have a really bad time at MIT? This is just bizarre.

    I expect people to live up to their opportunities.

    It's much more likely that you'll find your MIT graduate is too heavy on theory and insufficient on practice, though.

    OK, the theory versus practice argument makes a little more sense.

    Good to know that you're a classic "equal opportunities" employer, though. It'd be a shame if you wasted your time on an MIT graduate who can't answer an insane question inside ten seconds, rather than take pizza-boy round the corner who has half a notion that PHP isn't just a horse-tranquiliser.

    Many people, of course, would prefer that PHP had stuck to what it's good at. But I'm not one of them.

    Free the PHP seven! And down with naughty MIT-theorist types!

    Hey,, if it's good for Chairman Mao, it's good for the community, right?

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Anon Fred
    Anon Fred:
    You have 1000 rows in your database. How long is it going to take for it to sort them? What if you have 10k rows? 100k?

    1000 rows: no time at all. you most likely can load the whole table into memory and sort in place. This is far less than index lookups.

    10k, 100k: depends on what indexes you have and whether you are loading too much of the table - about 10% rule of thumb. I'd need to know about the indexes and query structure, but I'd probably use explain plan and see if it made sense - it's always possible for the table to require an index rebuild, especially if it's statistical and the last time it was done, the table had 100 rows in it.

    FredSaw:
    Anon Fred:
    You have 1000 rows in your database. How long is it going to take for it to sort them? What if you have 10k rows? 100k?
    Ask SQL Server. Or google it.

    somebody has to know this stuff, and if you don't, how will you know if the answer is any good?

  • (cs) in reply to Raj Desipapi
    Raj Desipapi:
    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?
    Boss? I didn't know you read this forum too.
  • Sherri (unregistered)

    Oh boy. Been there, done that. Sounds exactly like how my first programmer job went.

  • alc (unregistered)

    The WTF is that Garrett didn't blow the whistle on his former a-hole boss' unlicensed copies of...well...everything. If you do business in unscrupulous ways, be sure your employees are either culpable with you or loyal. Once he got another job I hope he anonymously threw his former employer under the bus.

  • Black Cat (unregistered)

    Garret should have said: "Ya know... I don't deserve to work in your company, man, coz I'm worth so much more..."

  • lorcan (unregistered) in reply to rumpelstiltskin
    rumpelstiltskin:
    cheese:
    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.....

    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.

    It is a shame that going to college didn't make you less of an asshat...

  • Hognoxious (unregistered) in reply to cheese

    Is your first name Helmut?

  • dreamwraith (unregistered) in reply to dsharp
    dsharp:
    "He cut his teeth on the green screen, central computer back in the day. He didn't have to deal with stateless, disconnected systems like we use today and unfortunately, his expectations can be somewhat unrealistic"

    Actually many "green-screen" applications were completely stateless. CICS transactions are almost identical to web apps. The only difference is that web apps use the CGI protocol and CICS transaction use some other protocol.

    When you run a CICS transaction screen, it's not sitting there waiting for your input. It runs, sends the screen, and finishes. Then when the user hits the enter key, it restarts, reads the fields off the screen, processes, generates a response, sends the response, and ends, and so on and so forth.

    CICS and CGI apps so similar in fact that you could "webify" a CICS app with a simple gateway app that translates back and forth between CICS screen maps, and web pages.

    I work in the health insurance industry.

    The CICS I am forced to use at work is VERY stateless. In fact, they don't have any means in place to unlock an expired process.

    For example, if I am actively modifying a record for an individuals information, and my terminal happens to lock up entirely, if i then try to reconnect, or for that matter, if anyone in the COMPANY tries to modify that record, it sits locked.

    The companies solution? There are nightly restarts of the mainframe when the business is shut down.

    So basically, If an individual is unlucky enough to have this happen to their entry while a rep is trying to modify their adress for them or some such, they will be SOL until the following day.

    Talk about a WTF....

    CAPTCHA: doom... how appropriate.

  • jim (unregistered) in reply to xtremezone

    SharpDevelop is pretty good and has a similar feature set to Visual Studio, but is free and open source.

  • jim (unregistered)

    I sympathize with your experience up to a point because I had a similar experience. On the other hand, I have learned that this is just the nature of business, and there are plenty of unscrupulous, but successful business people out there. If you are not able or willing to deal with some of them, you may be in the wrong field.

    My first job after college was actually doing lawn maintenance for $9 an hour, because the economy in my college town was so lame that only a few marginally successful small start up companies exist in the software industry there.

    My first two software jobs after graduating from a competitive 4 year university with good grades and a BS in Computer Science were very menial and demeaning.

    After working lawn maintenance for a couple months, I got my first big break at a 50 person web site company (that was started in the founder's dorm room when he was in college a few years previous.) They offered me $10 / hour (in 2002). I was financially needy, otherwise I wouldn't have accepted such a low offer.

    After working there for two months, I found a slightly higher paying job. I was offered $12 / hour at a small custom software shop. I was one of the founder's first full time employees. His small business had survived for several years by exploiting the cheap computer science student labor that is plentyful in this college town. I worked there for 2 years and endured a lot of BS from the founder. One of his best skills was manipulating college students, many of whom were better software developers than him, to work for him for very small wages. He was also experienced at running a small business and good at managing projects and working with clients.

    Back to my story - I believe he hired me for two reasons. 1) He knew he didn't have to pay me much because I had little work experience. 2) He knew I was eager and willing to learn (and help him learn) new technologies that were baffling and difficult for him. These technologies turned out be Visual Basic .NET, brand new third party .NET UI component libraries, and new installer packaging tools (for building MSI packages). I am talking about someone with his own start up software company, someone that graduated with a computer science degree from the same school that I did.

    Still, that is what employers do - they provide you with a job and in return they expect to profit from your labor. As it turns out, the business model he used charged 5 times as much per hour to the client for my labor as I what I got paid. That wasn't as irritating or as dispiriting as the fact that he was very difficult and stressful to work in the same office with.

    It was frustrating, humiliating and degrading. After he got a raise on his hourly rate from the client I did most of my work for, I renegotiated and he gave me a small raise. I quit the job a few months later. I gave notice and moved to a big city that had an thriving software job market.

    My two years of very hands very valuable experience at that small company has paid off nicely since then. Besides staying there for so long, my only other regret was not doing an internship when I was still in college. It turns out that a college degree in computer science is almost useless without some accompanying work experience developing software.

    Not everyone has an aptitude for software development, math, science, engineering, logic or problem solving. That doesn't stop thousands of people from getting and keeping jobs in the software development industry; people who really suck at software development and / or completely hate it. Many people go into the software field for the same reason that people go into law or become doctors - money.

    It is also true that a computer science degree can be obtained by someone who sucks at software development. That same type of person might never become a good software developer, no matter how many years of experience they get developing software, managing projects, working with clients, writing documentation, etc.

    The other big lesson I learned the hard way at those two jobs is that many software developers are underpaid simply because they don't ask for enough salary up front and/or don't know how to negotiate during the interview process.

  • (cs)

    A tip-off to the Business Software Alliance would never feel better. Let the sharks eat each other.

  • (cs)

    This story is flawed. As early as 1992 Access [2.0] had a redistributable runtime environment so that you could create applications that did NOT require a copy of Access. This predates even VB6.

  • SomeName (unregistered)

    And then government receives an anonymous tip about unlicensed software in a certain company.

  • (nodebb)

    very nice

    Addendum 2022-11-27 19:03: This demonstrates once more how crucial awareness is and how carefully researching a subject is required before making a choice. For instance, the review resource check that assists me so that I may obtain a thorough description of online assistance and avoid making mistakes; the information provided immediately clarifies the drawbacks and benefits of the service.

Leave a comment on “It’s How Everyone Builds It”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article