pbraun wrote:
I have done that in a past job as well. I find that unless you get some experience with some of the "make it look pretty" coding, potential employers tend to gloss over the experience you have.
I agree that some employers will ignore that but it depends on what job market / industry domain you're looking in. I've never done work that included much of the "pretty" stuff and I've been not doing it continuously for over 20 years in 4 different states (ok, 3 states but the two parts of Florida I've been in can't be considered the same state). I do make GUIs and such to provide command and control for the hardware I'm talking to and the software services I'm providing to other programs, but the GUIs have never been for widespread consumption. I think the target audience of your project is the key - commercial (mass market) versus internal engineeer / single customer (very limited market). If the end-user base is small, "pretty" becomes what the customer, whom you can sit down with on-on-one, decides is ideal for their needs. The one-off customer doesn't usually want "pretty." They want efficient and easy-to-use and usually have enough knowledge of the problem being solved that you don't have to include lots of bells and whistles to hold their hand while they use the program. Note that you still need a well-designed GUI taking advantage of the controls that are available but I've never written something that I'd consider included the "pretty" stuff. Judy
