• (disco)

    So much for leaving WTF, Inc., and going somewhere sane. It sounds like you landed in WTF2, Inc.

  • (disco) in reply to HardwareGeek

    Holy shit...a small firm with over 100 Java developers?

    Has this firm been bailed out yet by Dodd-Frank?

  • (disco)
    HR put those there to stem the tide of folks who were refusing offers because of how things work here
    If they don't deserve being shot right in the head for this, it's for deserving a far more severe punishment for other far worse felonies that they are sure to have committed.
  • (disco)

    Love @snoofle stories.

  • (disco) in reply to Eldelshell

    All hail @snoofle!

  • (disco) in reply to Eldelshell

    I wonder if @snoofle hates @snoofle stories.

  • (disco)
    glassdoor.com

    I've never heard of this until now. Am I too late? Some of the companies I have a few choice words for still exist.

  • (disco) in reply to Shoreline
    Shoreline:
    I've never heard of this until now. Am I too late?

    Nope. Our company has some... interesting ... entries.

  • (disco) in reply to PWolff

    http://www.soundsnap.com/tags/gun_cock

  • (disco)

    You do start to wonder when a company may find itself not just with some correspondingly awful glassdoor reviews outing them as misrepresenting the working conditions but actually getting sued if the person turned down a role elsewhere partly on the basis of reviews which were deliberate misrepresentations by the company. Then again, having seen how many companies offer career progression yet it's ALWAYS 6-12 months away...

  • (disco) in reply to Shoreline

    As always, take those with a grain of salt because of the same principle behind all Internet reviews: people will only post stuff if they're angry.

    Another problem is that it's waaaay too focused on US-UK companies.

  • (disco) in reply to Eldelshell
    Eldelshell:
    too focused on US-UK companies

    .be just says: coming soon to Belgium.

  • (disco)

    The BAs put their collective foot down and refused to allow any architecture documents to be released to any of the teams. No new data structures would be specified. No interfaces between systems would be defined. Nobody would be allowed to start work building any of the components until the BAs were satisfied that what was going to be done would make them happy.

    Ah. Waterfail development at its finest.

    Then they wrote a wrapper in WXL so that the C++ functions would be callable from Excel. Then they called the macros from the Excel spreadsheet.

    Some reverse engineering required…

  • (disco)

    Did anyone try to sell them the idea of JNI/JNA?

  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    Some reverse engineering required…
    Good luck resolving class member fields.

    I know it's not impossible - but I think it would take about 100x man-longer than rewriting everything from scratch (including fixing all those million bugs that will surely emerge over years due to complete lack of domain knowledge).

  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:

    Then they wrote a wrapper in WXL so that the C++ functions would be callable from Excel. Then they called the macros from the Excel spreadsheet.

    Some reverse engineering required…

    Gaska:
    Good luck resolving class member fields.

    That's probably what management told them to do. After all, they had spent some serious money on those C++ libraries that were written by the nephew of a friend of the CEOa group of highly qualified expert developers and therefore it's obvious they absolutely cannot afford not to use them.

    Disclaimer: just some literary experiment, nothing meant seriously

  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    The BAs put their collective foot down and refused to allow any architecture documents to be released to any of the teams.
    Ah. Waterfail development at its finest.

    Of course, the development team lead should have put his foot down and announce that not a single line of code would be written until the BAs agreed to their terms, on the grounds that the dev team understands the technical situation at least as well as the BAs. And if the higher-ups don't believe their dev team understands their own code, they need to find themselves a new dev team.

    If what you build doesn't solve their (undefined) business problem, it will be your fault and there WILL be consequences!

    Ahh, there's the answer! The boss is a spineless idiot, and stays in his job by firing an underling whenever anything goes wrong. Got it.

  • (disco) in reply to EatenByAGrue
    EatenByAGrue:
    Ahh, there's the answer! The boss is a spineless idiot, and stays in his job by firing an underling whenever anything goes wrong. Got it.

    That's uncanny. You just summed up one of the glassdoor reviews I wanted to write.

  • (disco)

    I'd take everything in glassdoor.com with a grain of salt. As mentioned, most reviews there are only done by people who are upset at their company. There is also just so much fraud. My current company is actually a really great place to work, but they had a terrible glassdoor.com score for a while because there was a slew of negative reviews, either from one or two disgruntled employees who created multiple accounts, or (as they suspect) actually from their competitors who created fake accounts just so they could slag them.

  • (disco)

    "When developers said that they needed to know the underlying C++ interfaces, they were told to just call the spreadsheet functions. From their server-side code."

    Ugh. "You guys know that Microsoft's license specifically forbids doing this? I bet the regulators would love to hear about that proposal."

  • (disco) in reply to PWolff
    PWolff:
    That's probably what management told them to do. After all, they had spent some serious money on those C++ libraries that were written by the nephew of a friend of the CEOa group of highly qualified expert developers and therefore it's obvious they absolutely cannot afford not to use them.
    The library is fine - it's just totally unusable without header files.

    Of course, TRWTF is header files in 2015. And TRRWTF is header files in 2020.

  • (disco) in reply to Gaska
    Gaska:
    Of course, TRWTF is header files in 2015.
    How else are you going to develop in C/C++?
  • (disco) in reply to Cidolfas

    Some days, when I have nothing else to do, I take a look through Glass Door reviews and try to pick out the ones which were planted by somebody in management, which ones come from someone who was just fired for suggesting that his or her manager was wrong about something, and which were written as cruel jokes by people who just want to watch the world burn.

  • (disco) in reply to FrostCat
    FrostCat:
    Ugh. "You guys know that Microsoft's license specifically forbids doing this? I bet the regulators would love to hear about that proposal."

    Wouldn't you like it if your whole system was brought to its knees by a dialog box?

  • (disco) in reply to tarunik
    tarunik:
    Wouldn't you like it if your whole system was brought to its knees by a dialog box?

    The best way to get those idiots to see reason would be to write a demo for them that caused that to happen. Preferably when they were showing it to their bosses.

    "Oh, yeah, it does that sometimes. Unless you want to hire an high school kid to watch the server and click Ok, we can't do it that way. Of course, even if we did that, people who had to wait for him to notice it might get a bit upset, but at least we didn't make the BAs change their ideas."

  • (disco) in reply to FrostCat

    You realize, of course, that the BAs would bully this spineless dev manager with the words "It's broken! Fix it!"

    And then someone will hit on the correct "solution" which involves the creative use of the following tool to punch the "Enter" key every few seconds. http://gallery.photo.net/photo/14354881-lg.jpg

  • (disco) in reply to EatenByAGrue
    EatenByAGrue:
    And then someone will hit on the correct "solution" which involves the creative use of the following tool to punch the "Enter" key every few seconds.

    Homer Simpson did that once.

    Didn't work out all that well for him.

  • (disco) in reply to RaceProUK

    Well, the episode finished with him being the hero for saving Springfield from a meltdown and being paid for something which I don't remember (personal trainer o fatty camp).

  • (disco)

    HR put those there to stem the tide of folks who were refusing offers because of how things work here

    I think I would have quit at this point of the conversation. And perhaps sue the company, too.

  • (disco) in reply to Eldelshell

    True, but in the real world, he'd have been prosecuted for gross negligence, then died from severe radiation sickness.

    But then The Simpsons has never been one for total realism :smile:

  • (disco) in reply to EatenByAGrue
    EatenByAGrue:
    You realize, of course, that the BAs would bully this spineless dev manager with the words "It's broken! Fix it!"

    Of course. And I'd say they need to bug Microsoft to fix it. It's right there in the EULA.

    EatenByAGrue:
    And then someone will hit on the correct "solution" which involves the creative use of the following tool to punch the "Enter" key every few seconds.

    I'm not going to tell them that.

  • (disco) in reply to RaceProUK
    RaceProUK:
    How else are you going to develop in C/C++?
    [Modules.](http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n4047.pdf)
  • (disco) in reply to Gaska

    Is that part of the standard, or is it still at proposal stage?

  • (disco) in reply to Gaska

    What's the elevator speech for these modules? I started reading the paper but it didn't come to the point quickly enough for me.

  • (disco) in reply to RaceProUK
    RaceProUK:
    Is that part of the standard, or is it still at proposal stage?
    It's neither. This is TRWTF I was talking about - after thirty years (which is ***almost half of the history of computers***) C++ still requires a complete copy of source code of your generics (and about 5-20% of non-generic code) in every single file of your project!
  • (disco) in reply to boomzilla
    boomzilla:
    What's the elevator speech for these modules? I started reading the paper but it didn't come to the point quickly enough for me.
    Java-like imports.
  • (disco) in reply to RaceProUK
    RaceProUK:
    But then The Simpsons has never been one for total realism
    Now you tell me! After I spent all that time rebuilding Springfield for them and all!
  • (disco) in reply to aenikata
    PWolff:
    If they don't deserve being shot right in the head for this, it's for deserving a far more severe punishment for other far worse felonies that they are sure to have committed.

    AFAIK, there's nothing wrong with this. You'd better not lie on your resume, but NP if they lie.

    aenikata:
    You do start to wonder when a company may find itself not just with some correspondingly awful glassdoor reviews outing them as misrepresenting the working conditions but actually getting sued if the person turned down a role elsewhere partly on the basis of reviews which were deliberate misrepresentations by the company.

    With the non-disparagement clauses that are appearing in employment contracts these days, odds are that a bad review of the company would get you sued...even if it was true.

  • (disco) in reply to Gaska
    Gaska:
    Good luck resolving class member fields.

    I was actually thinking about reverse engineering the WXL, at least enough to work out what the interface actually is. The aim would be to get to the point where you can automatically generate an API description in some IDL (there's loads of variations on that theme) and then to use that to build the binding of choice.

    The API would suck (almost invariably, what is a good API in one language is a bad one in another; it's all down to impedance between abstraction models) but it would at least exist.

  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    WXL
    Don't know that TLA. Might it be WiX Toolset?
  • (disco) in reply to Gaska
    Gaska:
    Don't know that TLA. Might it be WiX Toolset?

    No idea. It was in the article though, and those never ever have mistakes!

    Googling for WXL shows something horrific. “My god, it's full of angle brackets!”

  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    “My god, it's full of angle brackets!”
    The XML kind, or the TMP kind?
  • (disco) in reply to RaceProUK
    RaceProUK:
    How else are you going to develop in C/C++?

    The correct answer is, of course, STOP DOING THAT. You're trying to solve the wrong problem.

  • (disco) in reply to Gaska
    Gaska:
    Modules

    You mean that long compile times and/or having to recompile every file that includes the header will be a thing of the past?!

    Gaska:
    It's neither.

    Darn.

  • (disco) in reply to another_sam
    another_sam:
    The correct answer is, of course, STOP DOING THAT.
    In about two years, we will finally be able to.
  • (disco) in reply to Gaska

    Well that's only about twenty years too late, but what happens in two years to enable you to stop using C/C++?

  • (disco) in reply to another_sam

    A decent GUI library and fully working VS plugin for Rust.

  • (disco)

    What's the big deal. The answer was 42. http://images.amcnetworks.com/ifc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/dont-panic-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-ifc.jpg

  • (disco) in reply to Gaska

    IDE support for languages is near-essential. Dare I ask what problem domain you're working in where need for a GUI library intersects with the need for a systems programming language?

  • (disco) in reply to EatenByAGrue
    EatenByAGrue:
    And then someone will hit on the correct "solution" which involves the creative use of the following tool to punch the "Enter" key every few seconds.
    Updates have been applied. Restart now?

    Not that it matters because we're going to restart in 15 minutes anyway

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