• (nodebb)

    Well of course the HPC ran out of time. They kept finding catalogue items that weren't on the frist sample - that invalidates the original specification and quote.

  • (nodebb)

    Composing the report in Paint would be the obvious next step. Pixel-perfect every time!

  • (nodebb)

    In my experience HPC companies often put the rawest people into doing the jobs so they can train them and make money at the same time. One time my employer made a proposal to a potential customer to do a project for them, all of us that were there would be the ones doing the work. The guy from EDS stood up and said he could have a 100 people show up tomorrow to start working. They hired EDS on the spot. Who knows where they got those 100 people from, and how much they cost.

  • (nodebb)

    I expect this was HPC's way of displaying only certain items -- something that could have happened if they understood how WHERE works

  • Richard Brantley (unregistered)

    I have had the experience of being hired into a shop, start looking at the code written by a HPC, and legitimately wanted to ask "You actually paid money for this?"

  • Argle (unregistered)

    There are always incompetent programmers around. I have contributed any number of stories to this site about them. You have to wonder why they don't leave the industry, but somehow incompetent management ends up keeping them around. I'd like to know why this is so. I have speculated that somehow incompetent programmers are somehow on the same mental plane as management so think more like each other. Who can say?

    I have read recently that CS college graduates are suddenly having a tough time finding employment. Apparently, a lot of upper management in companies have decided that AI can replace them. Aside from the disastrous short-term consequences of this for these companies, we have to ask where are we going to get senior developers tomorrow if we have no junior developers today? In recent years we've heard all the stories of greater demand for COBOL programmers whose numbers are dwindling as the last of them retire. I'm turning 64 this year. My first general purpose computer I got my hands on had toggle switches. I have years of experience in Assembler (several of them), Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, C#, Python, Javascript, and Typescript. I'm in good health and don't plan on retiring soon. But when I do, where do the replacements come from? And who is going to weed out the HPCs?

  • (nodebb) in reply to mynameishidden

    In my experience HPC companies often put the rawest people into doing the jobs so they can train them

    You also mentioned EDS, and it's not quite as simple as that. Or maybe it is, but different. Back in the day, EDS would hire new graduates from pretty much any major, and certainly with no preference for or against actual software engineering / computer science degrees. The new hires went to a training centre, I believe in Dallas, for six months, with a contract term saying that if the new hire left after a total of less than two years, the poor sod would have to pay back some notional cost of the training (possibly pro-rata'ed by how much of the two years is left).

    I pursued the opportunity for a bit, but found something else that wouldn't have required me to spend six months in Dallas... (Could have been worse... It could have involved spending six months on Dallas.)

  • (nodebb)

    "At no point, in the testing process, did anyone try this report with a new item?"

    Remember "Jurassic Park" (the book), when the maintenance team enters the expected number of dinosaurs into the tracking software, and "Hey, it worked" because the tracker found that many. Only then did the smart math guy tell them to enter "expected number plus 100" and guess what happened

  • (nodebb)

    I am curious what a "Light Thief" is.

    Is there a "Heavy Thief?"

    Or a "Darkness Thief?"

  • (nodebb)

    A good HPC should hard code the list of all possible choices. That way, they are needed later when the list inevitably needs to change. That creates job demand. It's good business practice.

    I LOLed at the mention tests should have spotted that issue. A good HPC doesn't waste client time and money writing tests. Besides all their code is already good, by definition.

  • Jaloopa (unregistered) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    A company like that is how I got my start in programming. 3 months full time training in London before 2 years as a contractor with most of my day rate being taken by the company. In my case they decided to offer me an early out on the contract after just over a year, at which point I was able to get a graduate level job for a 30 odd percent increase in pay and was able to move out of London into an actually nice town.

    No way the bank I was contracted to got their money's worth for the work I did with them, but at least I wasn't on the team of 4 green newbies who were sent off for a couple of months to work on an underspecified greenfield project with very little supervision. I was unproductive, they probably cost the bank more in getting the new application working than they'd spent on the wages

  • Alan Scrivener (unregistered)

    Ah, yes, the time-honored code pattern of “make sure it keeps working until the check clears.”

  • LZ79LRU (unregistered) in reply to Alan Scrivener

    Rule #1 of engineering. The device or software you produce should work perfectly and without issue up until the second the warranty expires. Rule #2, for anyone curious is that it should fail catastrophically and irreparably the moment the support contract does.

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