Coding : school vs real life
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And managements job to keep changing the colors!
So true, I've looked over many programs in my career and some were like looking through layers of paint. My company has acquired customers from another company that was going out of business and we had to convert their data. The IT person I talked to at that company characterized their code as layers of paint. Looking at their database structures, my reading between the lines of why they were going out of business was because they had modified their code so much that flexibility resembled concrete instead of putty.
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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lol.. Oh and btw, did we mention that you only have a day to have it developed, tested, published and the documentation written?
JTWhit wrote:
Oh and btw, did we mention that you only have a day to have it developed, tested, published and the documentation written?
And, if the deadline is too tight, skip the testing and documentation; as did the person who made the original application whose code you will be modifying.
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So true, I've looked over many programs in my career and some were like looking through layers of paint. My company has acquired customers from another company that was going out of business and we had to convert their data. The IT person I talked to at that company characterized their code as layers of paint. Looking at their database structures, my reading between the lines of why they were going out of business was because they had modified their code so much that flexibility resembled concrete instead of putty.
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
The last company I worked for had a LOP (Lipstick On a Pig) release of their software.
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My observation: Academic projects look like the top image, while real-world projects often end up like the bottom one. Academic developers, professors and grad students, code like the bottom image, while professional developers code like the top image. I've done consulting work for a couple colleges. I was tempted to call out the local haz-mat team to clean up their code, it stank so badly.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary Wheeler wrote:
I've done consulting work for a couple colleges. I was tempted to call out the local haz-mat team to clean up their code, it stank so badly.
*nods* The importance of having your code work is directly proportional to how likely it is that you will be the one present when the paint gets scratched, the software cattle stampede because they see the wrong color, flattening enough crops that someone will have to starve this winter, and guess who that's gonna be? If you won't be there to suffer the consequences, or don't have sufficient risk to yourself to care about the consequences, then (with apologies to Mr. Johnson and his Boswell) it defocuses the mind wonderfully away from coding as if your job depended on it.
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You forgot the part where the assignment radically changes one week before its due!
ICP-Fan (The Keyboard Wielding Maniac)
Maybe you were lucky in college, but most of my experience was that -- the teacher couldn't make the assignments dumb enough, and kept changing them. It was worse in the intro classes, which I wasn't allowed to test out of because the CS department didn't believe in letting people do that. As for Gary's comment about coding, that's because CS grad students don't know how to program. They're all about lofty ideas and masters/doctorate degrees, not about learning skills.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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And managements job to keep changing the colors!
Management: "Start coding, we'll go find out what the client wants."
Those aren't bugs, they're randomly generated features. Start programming while we go find out what the client wants.
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Management: "Start coding, we'll go find out what the client wants."
Those aren't bugs, they're randomly generated features. Start programming while we go find out what the client wants.
Truer words were never uttered. I had a project manager ask me to bid a job one time so I did and he came back in a couple of days and told me we got the job but that the hours to do it were 1/2 of what I bid. I told him that it was going to take the hours I bid and he said "...that's OK we'll finish it at customers site and charge the s**t out of them...". They did and made enough on the job that they flew my ex-wife to Brownsville, TX during xmas to be with me for a week.
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Truer words were never uttered. I had a project manager ask me to bid a job one time so I did and he came back in a couple of days and told me we got the job but that the hours to do it were 1/2 of what I bid. I told him that it was going to take the hours I bid and he said "...that's OK we'll finish it at customers site and charge the s**t out of them...". They did and made enough on the job that they flew my ex-wife to Brownsville, TX during xmas to be with me for a week.
Mike Hankey wrote:
they flew my ex-wife to Brownsville, TX during
xmas to be with me for a weekI see, you were very naughty and you got your just punishment ... :laugh:
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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Mike Hankey wrote:
they flew my ex-wife to Brownsville, TX during
xmas to be with me for a weekI see, you were very naughty and you got your just punishment ... :laugh:
It was broke, so I fixed it.
Yeah I tried to get them not to send her but said that was my punishment. :)