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Admin
I've worked with some pretty brilliant female programmers in my time who wrote heavily unit tested, highly maintainable, well-designed code. I haven't seen any correlation yet between gender and ability. As long as you hire smart, quality-driven people and make sure that everyone on the team does code reviews, things seem to work pretty well. Finding them, of course, and then also being able to afford them is a different issue...
Admin
I have a feeling your company won't be around for that long.
Admin
At least he's good at creating mock up screen!
Admin
I have a feeling that regardless of what happens next, floating one’s resume is the only rational choice at the current stage. I know I wouldn’t want to stick around at a company which is obviously incapable of appreciating skilled workers. I’d be insulted that they pay Paula the same as they pay me; and given that they don’t care about her lack of skill, does it not follow that they will expect unrealistic things from actual developers? I’d rather prefer earning less over feeling futile.
Admin
I could tell three or four similar stories. A clueless cunt who slept with the boss and started to bad-mouth the colleauges when pushed to do some work - she was supposed to do some HTML "programming" and though that Word's HTML export function would do the trick. The OO-Architect who couldn't model even one single class. The C expert who couldn't write a single line of code, but tried to pass some open source software as is creation. He had just removed the copyright statements. The salesperson who didn't sell a single copy of the product in two years, but banged and later married a "key person" of the company.
It happens all the time.
Admin
If the sales person, worked together with the other people you mentioned, I can understand whe he could not sell anytthing :}
Martin
Admin
It really is a blessing when you can see where someone hasn't done any work. I've had to go back and tell consultants that their line-wrapping code breaks when you add 13 items, because it detects for rowNum in (3,6,9) and only wraps for those rows......no functionality is often better than mock-functionality.
That same company had its flagship web portal product (installed for many other clients too) what had a sum total of a cookie with "admin=y" for their admin security system. It went through lots of authentication steps, but you could bypass it all with a simple client browser set variable.
I can honestly say my old boss would never have found those holes - he's not a code guy, he sees it work, he sees the software demo with non-stressed data (don't try adding " into a text field form variable) and no traffic load on the server, and claps when it works fast and pretty.
Admin
You shouldn't be too surprised if a company whose primary job it is to support an industrial process does not use the kind of tools you would find in a more IT oriented business. I started working in a steel mill about a year ago and probably 50% of the work our department puts out is Fortran programs. The need for modern programs (i.e. VB/Java) is not a primary focus of our department. Keeping the computers controlling the mill is. The first guy who was actually capable of writing anything more modern than that was hired less than four years ago. As a result no one has any real experience managing a large project and I've basically had to teach myself how to do project management. God help me if I ever need to debug programs that are already running. Im lucky if there arent 5 different versions of the same VB program on one computer, with no indication which one is the one currently running. On the projects I do now, Im not given any deliberables, any time frame, or any requirements. Just "We need you to make a program that does _____". I would venture a guess that most medium sized businesses, especially industrial ones, are in a very similar situation. While many businesses have modernized their IT departments (for better or for worse), there's probably still a lot out there who are just scraping by keeping the industry running. It's departments like these that are vulnerable to this kind of abuse. You might think certain things should be patently obvious, but to a 60 year old Fortran programmer he's going to assume that whatever system works for him will work for a modern programmer. He doesn't need formalized source control. If she shows him something that looks like it works he'll believe it. I know something very much like this could happen in my own department because I know I could have done myself. I didn't of course, but I know that I could have thrown a few hard-coded VB forms together and no one would have ever been the wiser. While this specific incident seems particularly bizarre, I have absolutely no doubt that this kind of thing could easily happen.
Admin
I am a bit flummoxed that anyone would admit to staring at their computer all day, whatever personal crises they were facing. Where I come from we call that "flaking out". Take a leave of absence or buckle down. Better yet, split your salary with the person who is actually doing your job--I know that would have made me feel better on the occasions when I've picked up someone else's slack.
Admin
"I don't have no doubt" = Double negative = Bad English = I have doubt.
I don't have no doubt you don't.
dZ.
Admin
Hum, I tought it was because it just wasn't funny.
-dZ.
Admin
Certainly a testament to her oral persuasion skills, if you know what I mean.
Admin
Me too. Difference was that my bosses knew I was doing this. Because I'd turned out good code for four years beforehand they turned a blind eye for six months. Working there was Dilbert incarnate most of the time, but they did have their odd moments of compassion.
Admin
One company I worked for, I was talked into interviewing someone's neighbour's kid for a programming position.
After establishing that he was capable of RUNNING scripts for IRC clients, but not actually programming them, or anything else for that matter, I broke the bad news to him.
For some reason he thought I was being unreasonable suggesting that he actually learn how to program before ever being considered for a programming position. He just couldn't understand how being able to run an IRC client didn't qualify as credentials for an internet programmer.
The REALLY annoying part is that it took me 3 hours to pound this concept into the head of company guy who brought him in in the first place. "But his mother tells me he's really smart"... Ya, its the business equivalent of "he has a nice personality".... 3 hours to explain to someone that being able to use a program they can't doesn't make the guy a programmer, and every mother thinks their kid is smart...
WHY WHY WHY DON'T THEY LET ME HAVE HUNTING PERMITS FOR PEOPLE?!?!?! And if you thought the wildlife people were bitchy about poaching.. oyy...
Admin
We had one guy who slept in his car for a couple of hours each day. Try to give him some work and he'd just whinge about it. Try to get some work done and he'd tell you that you were doing it wrong, even if you're the expert on it and he's never looked at it in his life.
We also had a 'manager' who thought his job was to waste everyone elses time - constant procedural changes, office rearrangements, getting the busiest person in the office to do some inane job that wasn't at all important, that kind of thing.
Admin
I don't know about male vs. female programmers, but when you here this kind of story, you always know that an alleged Java "programmer" was to blame.
It's hard to believe that Java and Visual Basic are so popular. Maybe programmers would be better if they used languages with smaller libraries.
Admin
When my girlfriend of half a decade broke up with me I nearly died. However, my boss understood what I was going through and in line with my personality gave me as much work as I could handle.
This really helped. No, really. If I hadn't had work to concentrate on then I would have fallen to pieces.
Admin
Been here, done this, in a university setting: Was hired as graduate research assistant because the (Computer Science, no less) professor and the outside company he was partnered with were unhappy with the progress being made by the previous assistant. The project required reverse engineering of the protocols for a couple of serial port based bits of hardware. Total output from the previous guy (who'd been working on the project for 4 months) was a 3 page report of infomation on one of the pieces of hardware (culled from the manufacturer's web site) and indicated that he neither A. Understood how to do I/O to a serial port in windows. nor B. was capable of cutting and pasting it from the MSDN document on the topic. Took me less than a week to get an operational driver.
Admin
Or both.
Admin
Wait, this forum generates HTML every time a quote box is used, rather than storing the BBcode in the database and rendering it as needed? And it doesn't check if a person has permission to use HTML, before rendering it as so? I'd say that itself is a WTF.
Admin
Common people - enough contractor bashing for now - if this was remotely true the technical team leader for this project should be sent to the gas chamber. We do team reviews at least once weekly and I would have picked up this problem on week 2. Contractors are average paid programmers knowing what they do. Not overpaid coders. If youz cannot make it as contracters - stop posting cr** like this
Admin
The thing is, DBAs are in the category of "people you aren't aware of if they are doing their job well", much like airplane mechanics. You don't think about them at all until something goes wrong. The organization as a whole may preceive them as being less important because they get little attention. A wise executive would be conscious of this situation.
Admin
Reminds me of a gag I implemented in an application. I had to add a menu item in the main application for a coworker, but he hadn't finish his module at that time. Since I don't like NOP menus and functions, I added a message box. Title: "HHGTTG Error", message: "Please do not select this menu item again." Due to some problems, it was there for about 6 months.
Two days before releasing the new version with the final call to my coworker's module, the telephone rang.
Customer: "I selected the menu item, and this message box popped up. What does it mean?"
Admin
I have stories like this, about both contractors and regular employees.
Employee 1. Got a project to add some trivial reports (should've taken 1, at most 2 weeks). The status keeps going up - 50% complete, 70% complete, etc. After several months, the lead programmer decides to check what's going on since there are no checkins into repository. He produces two layout screens and starts blaming the techs for not installing Crystal Reports on his machine so that he can't get the job done.
Employees 2 and 3. Got a job. Got another job with another company in the same building. Every morning they come in to work, read and answer email, start the corporate IM with the status "At the meeting" - and go to a different story to work for another employer (not sure if they did any real work there either). End of the day - come into office, check answer email, go home laughing at the thought of getting two salaries for no work at all. This lasted for about 2 months. Company decided it was too expensive to try and recoup the paid salary through court.
Contractor 1. Comes with a great resume, overall nice guy. Gets an independent project that had to merge and present data from two incompatible databases (Oracle and BRS/Search). Gets some screens done, every time the manager comes by, shows the UI, takes his suggestions and implements them. By the end of his time says it's 95% done and leaves. When we finally got time to check his project, we discovered it wasn't even connecting to BRS! However, the screens were nice even though the queries that populated them didn't make any sense.
Admin
Well, excuse me! I've written some solid maintainable code, and I know several other females who have done the same. I'll concede that on average men have a greater affinity to IT than women, but there are exceptions to every rule. Some men raise children and take care of the home, too!
Admin
Yes, that's probably what happenned. Even playing devil's advocate though the problem
is that the actual work product is non-existent.
I've seen something similiar. Our company was working in a joint venture project
with another and one of their employees was working hard include claiming overtime
pay for work at home but after a a few (2-3?) months only had put one file into our
CM system as a test.
Things changed in our business plans and the project became entirely our
companies, the other company's employees who were working on the project
became employees/contractors of our company, except for this person who
was let go immediately. This guy was also a contractor.
It does show some lack of management oversight on the other companies part
but this guy presumably was doing something - just nothing tangible for our project.
Admin
Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that is all too possible.
We had an almost-graduated student at my current employer over the summer. Sure, he was a student. His job was to basically investigate whether or not assertions were a useful debugging tool for our particular environment, and to implement them if so.
At the end of 3 months, we got a powerpoint presentation that was complete BS and mostly wrong, which I knew (as a barely-graduate) from general knowledge.
Oh, and on the female programmers thing? They come in two extremes: ones that write excellent, easily maintainable code (eg those who work for a living) and ditzes who seem to sleep their way around. I've yet to meet one in the middle ground. Incidentally, I've noticed it's harder to get a job in IT as a female if you aren't in a de facto or marriage or other permanent relationship...
Admin
I actually have not one but TWO female coworkers who produce decent, maintainable code. One has a masters' in CS, the other worked in coding instrumentation interfaces in her prior job.
Both indian, neither easy on the eyes at all. Not to mention, one is a mom. Ah well, such is life
Admin
Admin
For those that don't believe:
I was working as a contractor just pre Y2K, for a huge company and a huge Y2K project (names reserved to protect the guilty). They'd outsourced the IT management and recruitment to a third-party specialist because they were hiring so many contractors. This outsource company managed to hire a ex fitness instructor who knew absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, we reckoned he'd skimmed 'VB for Dummies' to get through the interview.
Day 2 of his employment, we discover that this guy doesn't know anything, and let our IT management know about it. They, of course, were employed by the same outsource company, and they realised that the embarrasment of revealing that they hired someone who couldn't code at all was worse than the risks to the project of keeping him there. So they hid him away, and told us to cover the slack. He was getting around $60/hour to twiddle his thumbs.
Paula at least managed to get some code written ;)
Admin
At the Technical University where I got my education, the test statistics from the newly admitted students were pretty interesting. The results for men were the kind of curve you'd expect, thick in the middle, and thin on both ends. For women, on the other hand, it was reversed; thick in the ends and thin in the middle (i.e., ditzes and geniuses, but no middle ground).
I have no explanation for this, just a curious fact.
PS. The basis for these curves are tests done by all students on a population of about 5000 yearly, with approximately 30% female students.
Admin
As someone said, a typical management WTF, sadly one that is way too common. I've seen plenty of them that makes this look lika a successful project and will doubtless see more.
Trust me, if we made a site with management WTFs, it would be ten times the size of this...
Admin
You know, after reading 80+ replies, I still don't understand how can some people get away with such an attitude. When I am at my worst, I write something like 50 lines of code per day, and the next day I make sure it works, too. And I still get reprimanded.
I wonder if it has anything to do with that "east vs. west" thing.
Admin
I know by first hand experience what tragedies in one's personal life does to the ability to perform at work. That's one reason not to let developers work alone for an extended amount of time without following up on progress. The conversation "Are you on scedule? Yes, I'm doing progress here." does not qualify as followup. Demonstration of working code combined with code review does.
Admin
I think the reason for this is that tech industries are just less attractive to women. The result of this is you get either highly intelligent women who have a natural disposition towards Software Developement - the genuises - or a bunch of wasters who are looking for a career that makes them some nice money and makes them seem clever - the ditzes.
Of course, it is the lack of general eye-candy and a desire to maintain a healthy testosterone / oestrogen mix in the office that encourages clueless management to hire these girls without actually checking their CVs (resumes?) as closely as their short skirts. I actually went to college with girls who knew nothing about software development but would get very friendly whenever it was time to hand in an assignment, ah, they were interesting times indeed...
Admin
Or both.
Admin
In my experience, there has been very little correlation between the level of interest and the level of aptitude of the female CS-students I have come in to contact with (both as co-students and when I was a TA). But hey, this is a small smaple...
PS. The CS-programmes students make up approximately 10% of the total student population there.
Admin
Hey there!
Hold of the criticism of Java contractors ;) Some of us are actually quite good.
Admin
When I was unemployed I met a guy on a course who was well into his 50's.
He wasn't the least bit concerned and he told me why.
He spent his entire career blagging his way into high paid jobs, he said 'it usually takes them a few months before they realise I can't do the job but by that time I've been well paid.'
I got a job and some years later we called in several people for an interview and guess who was sitting there....
Admin
In many jobs, you are not expected to achieve anything at all for several months, because you are only expected to learn. When I quit my first job after 6 months, the manager was really astonished that I had several (finished and delivered) programs to hand over to my successor. I think he believed I had done nothing at all for half a year. Which was only 50% true.
Admin
Said the self-proclaimed "Java contractor".
dZ.
P.S. Just kidding :)
Admin
To be honest... I've worked with about 10 female programmers over my career, and every single one of them has been less than worthless. It may just be my bad luck, but all of the great tragedies at the places I've worked have been instigated by women.
I'm sure there are some good ones out there... but I have lost my faith. I've worked with a number of defective male programmers as well, but the percentage isn't 100% :P
Admin
On the contrary, that's why it is always funny: because it's true.
Admin
I have a similar story. A friend of mine interviewed at a rather large consulting firm. They flew him out to their home office, and assigned one of their employees to show him around. The employee seems very nervous, so while they are having lunch (company paid, of course), he asks her why she was so nervous. She thought she'd been busted. The company works on 'projects' - they just hire a bunch of people, and those people are expected to sign up for projects, and when the projects end, they sign up for new ones. This girl had worked for the company for two years, and had never signed on to a project. If you're not on a project, it's assumed you're doing some kind of training, so that's what she'd tell people. She thought they'd finally found her out. And for some crazy reason, he turned the job down...
Admin
This cannot be true. It fails the steve rule. http://www.thedailywtf.com/forums/33107/ShowPost.aspx
Alex, I understand the need to change names to protect the guilty, but stick with all male names - too many of us are reading the wrong into into it.
Admin
During my career, I've met several female programmers; every one of them did at least a good job, some were excellent.
Admin
Forgetting whether it's true or not, let's have some fun with it.
1. The Java standard, initial-caps in class name, wasn't followed.
2. Interesting that she perceives herself not as a concrete object, with attributes all her own, but as a mere String. (so goes her coding skills) This brings me to my next point.
3. When I call a method like getPaula(), I don't receive a Paula object. I receive an attribute of Paula, whos value is clearly misleading, nay, blasphemy.
4. It's obvious that she hasn't gotten past the HelloWorld application in her Java book. By the looks of it, she hasn't even mastered passing parameters.
5. Since there is no mutator method, it appears that she has a pretty firm belief that she is truly "Brillant" <sic>.
6. The "Bean" suffix of "paulaBean" must be referring to the size and magnitude of the cerebrum.
Admin
I'm primarily a Java developer but do a fair amount of work with Perl and C (++). I agree with you fundamentally but the primary reason you find so many p*ss-poor Java developers is that it isn't as easy to hang yourself with Java. I have worked with some very good Java architects, but every single one of them has some roots in 1st and 2nd generation languages. They skip most of that in CS/CE programs these days. We should be very thankful that APIs are becoming more robust and easier to use, with these types of people out there. Although this mboard makes me think that this hasn't had such an impact yet. :|
Admin
One specific problem of Java is the over-abundance of frameworks and similar stuff. Java comes with a real big class library, but that's not enough. A typical Java project will also include Ant, EJB, JUnit, Log4J, Struts, Xerces and so on. Any "programmer" who knows the necessary buzzwords will likely get hired; and copy-and-paste (with trivial adjustments) from examples will be enough for many weeks.
While this can be enough to count as a valueable part of the project, it says nothing about the ability to write programs.
Admin
<FONT size=4>JavaWocky...</FONT>
<FONT size=4>Twas brillant, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe
</FONT><FONT size=4>...
</FONT><FONT size=4>One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorPaula blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
</FONT><FONT size=4>And, has thou slain the JavaWock?
Come to my arms, my beanish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy</FONT>
<FONT size=4>My Apologies to Lewis Caroll</FONT>