Can a software project hurt your career?
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If you interview for a position outside of your company, then how does anyone know if any of your projects were failures? I've never had a failed project and I've never had a bad manager!
1. Your resume lists a company known for failures. 2. Your resume lists a project that is a known failure. 3. You post information from either of the above on social network sites. 4. You answer questions honestly about prior work Consider yourself blessed for not having bad managers and/or employers
Director of Transmogrification Services Shinobi of Query Language Master of Yoda Conditional
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As I've said before, the most valuable knowledge isn't knowing what to do, but knowing what not to do. Besides, given how many projects fail due to management, I don't blame the developer. Unless they are too blame (which, unless they are psychopaths, it usually obvious in an interview.)
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I was involved in a project that was considered a failure and resulted in several executives losing their job over it. That failure had no discernible effect on anyone else's career that I know of. That is, it's failure didn't. It had a big effect on several of my former colleagues with most leaving that company for bigger and better things or, in some cases, just different things. FWIW, that project was the world's first fully automated monolithic disk drive assembly system, at least to the best our knowledge it was. What I mean by that is, we fed it disks, cases, heads, positioners, and screws and it assembled everything and a drive came out the other end. It was a very expensive lesson that a lot of people learned quite a bit from. Enough that it hasn't been tried again since, as far as I know. It was for a company that no longer exists and I was working for a different company that also no longer exists. That was in the era before 5.25 drives got to 1GB and prior to any 3.5 inch HDs. Back then drives cost serious money. Today disk drives are assembled in a modular way. One system typically performs only one or two steps of the assembly process and usually that system is just a single machine with little integration between the different machines. In other words, drives are built on "islands of automation" and moved between them, much like many other products are today. Of course, that varies by manufacturer and even between the different plants of some manufacturers.
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1. Your resume lists a company known for failures. 2. Your resume lists a project that is a known failure. 3. You post information from either of the above on social network sites. 4. You answer questions honestly about prior work Consider yourself blessed for not having bad managers and/or employers
Director of Transmogrification Services Shinobi of Query Language Master of Yoda Conditional
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Be careful, failed sarcasm can hurt your career.
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That would be a very lazy recruiter, recruiting on assumptions. I'd call him out and influence his/her career :) Having seen multiple fails, I can safely say that they are valuable learning-moments. If you haven't seen anything go wrong ever, you have not worked ever. That's a safe bet :) It is also quite valuable to see these trainwrecks coming before they happen, so you can give the client a choice. That farmer is likely to ignore the robin, but at least he has been warned about the rain. "I told you so, I told you so, I told you so" :suss:
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^] "If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Maybe I didn't; or maybe I recognize that the next generation of people think they are infallible... Either way... The very first programming project I was thrown at was at a company that was building a website for another; basically a rewrite of eBay for a company wanting to make a million dollars in the collectible coin and numismatics (paper currency) realm. Project was quoted at 60 hrs. Did get it finished off in slightly over 600
Director of Transmogrification Services Shinobi of Query Language Master of Yoda Conditional