What was the absolute worst programming job and why?
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Anything that includes one or more of the following statements: - I just need a button that... - We had this system developed for us and would like you to... - It shouldn't be too hard to do... - Our last programmer was on drugs... (true story) - Do you know Lotus Notes? - We have an old system that we want converted to :insert language here: (as if it will happen by magic?!!??!!) - No, we don't have the source code - do you need it? (again, true story) Feel free to add to the list!!
-------------------------------------------------------- Knowledge is knowing that the tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in fruit salad!!
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Anything that includes one or more of the following statements: - I just need a button that... - We had this system developed for us and would like you to... - It shouldn't be too hard to do... - Our last programmer was on drugs... (true story) - Do you know Lotus Notes? - We have an old system that we want converted to :insert language here: (as if it will happen by magic?!!??!!) - No, we don't have the source code - do you need it? (again, true story) Feel free to add to the list!!
-------------------------------------------------------- Knowledge is knowing that the tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in fruit salad!!
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The job I had for 4 or so weeks at a game company where the lead guy was reinventing the 3D engine and the company ran out of money and didn't tell their employees, leading them on with "I'll get your checks in a couple days" and then one day, the people financing the game (who stopped financing it, obviously) came in in the middle of the night and took all the computer equipment (which was their property so they had every right to do so.) Marc
Amazing hey! Somehow I didn't imagine you in a game company! :laugh:
A train station is where the train stops. A bus station is where the bus stops. On my desk, I have a work station.... _________________________________________________________ My programs never have bugs, they just develop random features.
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Personally I don't think a small company is necessarily a bad thing! ;-) Plus I better get used to it, since I'm in Australia I more or less only work in small company! :laugh:
A train station is where the train stops. A bus station is where the bus stops. On my desk, I have a work station.... _________________________________________________________ My programs never have bugs, they just develop random features.
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Personally I don't think a small company is necessarily a bad thing! ;-) Plus I better get used to it, since I'm in Australia I more or less only work in small company! :laugh:
A train station is where the train stops. A bus station is where the bus stops. On my desk, I have a work station.... _________________________________________________________ My programs never have bugs, they just develop random features.
Super Lloyd wrote:
Personally I don't think a small company is necessarily a bad thing!
For the right person that position would have been great. I was in my early 20's, stuck in an office in the middle of suburbia with only a coule of boring married guys for company
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my first job was maintaining an alarm product based on the PIC16C53 is was coded in ASM no documentation was provided. the software model was such that task where run according to a set of master bit flags and branched out from that, the label of this branching function was called "somewhere" so al through the code i waas seeing goto somewhere. all other variables and such followed the same sick twisted convention as this. oh the joy. :((
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Super Lloyd wrote:
Personally I don't think a small company is necessarily a bad thing!
For the right person that position would have been great. I was in my early 20's, stuck in an office in the middle of suburbia with only a coule of boring married guys for company
Ho I see!
A train station is where the train stops. A bus station is where the bus stops. On my desk, I have a work station.... _________________________________________________________ My programs never have bugs, they just develop random features.
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I've been around for a while... a long while. The worst jobs are always the same, namely, those where you have to babysit your boss in addition to doing your job. But if the situation is such that you have to do your work despite your boss, then that is the absolute worse. Incompetence + psychological problems => pessimal boss => most undesirable workplace
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I've been around for a while... a long while. The worst jobs are always the same, namely, those where you have to babysit your boss in addition to doing your job. But if the situation is such that you have to do your work despite your boss, then that is the absolute worse. Incompetence + psychological problems => pessimal boss => most undesirable workplace
Completely agree! You can make just about any technical job interesting if you are given autonomy (and the associated accountability), but if your boss gets in the way... urk. I'm going to write a book one day titled, "The Arrogant Architect and the Ignorant Manager". I work for myself these days - perhaps that's ignorant and arrogant, but a hell of a lot more enjoyable!
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Not mine but my old organization hired a firm to do some breakdowns on budget, download from mainframe, distribute to appropriate departments, have changes made and re-uploaded to mainframe. All this in FoxPro. After two weeks we had a menu laid out. Another two weeks and it churned for hours trying to commit the flat data to the database
Windows is a pane.
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My *current* assignment. They wanted me to do some modifications to some ASP.NET pages that uses Project 2007 Server's Web Services. They didn't have the source code. Fortunately, I was able to retrieve it thanks to Reflector.
Stupidity is an International Association - Enrique Jardiel Poncela Die deutsche Sprache sollte sanft und ehrfurchtsvoll zu den toten Sprachen abgelegt werden, denn nur die Toten haben die Zeit, diese Sprache zu lernen. - Mark Twain
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- It uses an Access database and we don't know the admin password. (true story)
Jon Smith & Wesson: The original point and click interface
hehe... have come across that one several times also! Luckily there are some good admin password recovery tools available!! Now if it's an MDE and they haven't got a copy of the original...
-------------------------------------------------------- Knowledge is knowing that the tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in fruit salad!!
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- It uses an Access database and we don't know the admin password. (true story)
Jon Smith & Wesson: The original point and click interface
They are easy to crack - there are sites where you pay and they crack it for you ;) 20 min from the question to your boss to having the open DB
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Super Lloyd wrote:
Personally I don't think a small company is necessarily a bad thing!
For the right person that position would have been great. I was in my early 20's, stuck in an office in the middle of suburbia with only a coule of boring married guys for company
Josh Gray wrote:
boring married guys for company
And now, you are one!! (or near enough)
-------------------------------------------------------- Knowledge is knowing that the tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in fruit salad!!
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My current job (which is also my first job as a programmer). CFO that stalls almost every attempt at developing the team and giving body to it. A manager that is fairly new to the task and is on the edge of a burn-out (if not beyond). Requests for self-study are not accepted, because the manager thinks that's not a good signal to the rest of the IT-department (SysOps and sorts) and the trainings that need to take place are going to be planned (not taken) at it's earliest in september. I'm the single .NET-programmer (very junior in experience) and no or litte hired personel for the last year, so no-one to use as a mirror... And a personal thing: they have high expectancies, where I mostly don't know if I can meet them, since I don't know where I stand in the entire .NET-environment knowledge-wise....
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Worst job ever was working for Visual Systems. Everybody sitting in a huge office landscape but nobody communicating. I was asked to make a database but was given no data to work with because "you don't need it". I was assinged to many projects but I never even got invited to any meetings. Talk about lack of management skills... jhaga
How to earn $100/month.
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Agreeing to pair programming at a software house many years ago becuase I though it would be cool to try out a fairly new concept and almost coming to blows because my 'partner' was a complete ****. I think he thought the same about me. Needless to say I'll never do that again!
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I was working with a team of freelancers besides my regular job, taking on mid-sized (sometimes a bit bigger :) ) projects. One of my friends accepted a project with a history like this: Its development started in India, and after a while the project manager wasn't satisfied with the results, found a new team in Estonia, and continued it there. A month and a half before the deadline (by deadline I mean presenting the solution on a seminar in front of the clients, and hopefully installing it the next week... In other words completely finished product) the project manager decides that he's not satisfied with the Estonian team's results, either! (May I repeat... A MONTH AND A HALF before deadline) So, he finds a new team... uhm.. my team. My friend accepts the project! From now on.. it's one for all, all for (n)one :) So the situation now was: We have semi(not)-working code which we had to review while he's writing the specification! By review, I mean make the existing code work. By the time that's done the rest of the specs are to be completed, and we can proceed with development of the rest of the features. Oh, and I failed to mention that there's no documentation on the code, and not a single line of comments! Surely enough, the PM never wrote the specs, never sent any documentation. Actually, if I needed to proove that something is working like it should, I had to dig through the MSN logs and point out to him when he said that something should be done the way it is! That's not all... The team member count was 5 at the start. Half way there, two of them left and the guy who accepted the project started to suffer from every possible syndrome that has anything to do with stress. Ending up in hospital... we count him out, too. So... instead of 5, it's just 2 guys doing the impossible job. Sleep was limited to three hours on three days. A month later, we manage to pull it off as much as humanly possible. We even got enthusiastic about the project, confident that it’ll be completed on time. At that time the project manager’s superior found out the whole history of the project and cancelled it! The project manager misteriously dissapeared from MSN (company account). We did got paid for that month, but the satisfaction isn't there. The project was interesting and would've been a success. Sadly, we didn't get it from the start. Things would've been a lot different :(
To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.