You don't even have to bring in the government for the situation to get unworkable. In the early 90's, a large US corporation (hereafter named mega-corp) outsourced its mainframe systems. The vendor was repsonsible for maintaining the old machines, while mega-corp retained legal ownership of the data (I don't know who technically owned the hardware). But significantly it was the vendor who effectively owned the access interface. Along comes the web, and it was desireable to develop web clients for access to the data. But the mainframe interface needed some significant upgrading to support web clients. Vendor wanted everyone's first-borm and then some to do the work, and instead, mega-corp wrote massive amounts of screen-scrape code to get at their own data.

I once had an English teacher who required that we write a 5-pager without using any form of the verb "to be". We could use it as what was then called a "helper verb", as in "she was having a hard time with the assignment", but not as the main verb in the sentence. We of course grumbled about this (it was not even a writing class), but what I found was that in the end it REALLY improved my writing. I.e. like all things, the verb "to be" has its uses, but one can become too reliant on it. The "no code comments" policy seems like it could make a good exercise for improving one's coding (i.e. if you're putting in a lot of comments, then think about how to rename methods and variables or restructure the code to make it more self-documenting), but as a blanket policy it's of course ludicrous.

Thanks, it looks like just what we were looking for!

Would that be kind of like teaching someone how to bake a cake by teaching them how to make toast? :-D

Yeah, it could be a good one, but it states it's for people who have some programming background. I'll keep it on my reference list, cuz I'm pretty sure it'll come in handy. We have lots of levels of inexperience among our developers. -- thanks.

We have a database developer here who wants to teach herself .Net. She has no app programming background or training, so I think she could use essentially a beginner's programming book that uses C#. Can anyone recommend one? If anyone has experince teaching beginners using C#, can you give me any suggestions, lessons learned, etc? I've worked with java and c/c++ developers learning .Net/C#, but never someone who pretty much needs to learn from square one. Thanks!

This reply is meant for all of you who responded. Thanks a bunch for the frank advice (which is one reason why Code Project is such a treasure). You have helped me decide to go for senior developer. It could be very foolish to take on Tech Lead in a company I know little about (yeah, you do your research, but you never really know what it's like until you're there in the trenches every day). I am attracted to Tech Lead not so much because I want to get away from development, but because I'm tired of working for incompetent dev leads. I am much better at the planning part of it than most people I've worked for. It's not a lot of fun, but having someone provide clear schedules of what is to be delivered when, who is responsible for what, makes the development part of the job much more pleasant. I hear you all about Tech Leads not having any actual authority, but just having a realistic handle on where things stand, even if you can't change it, can be some help. But I figure if the developer job works out, I'll have a much better idea than I do now on the pitfalls of Tech Lead in their particular environment. Thanks again to all of you!!

I'm a senior developer looking for work. One company has openings for multiple .Net developers ("all skill levels") and also a position for a .Net Technical Lead. I have never had the title of Technical Lead, although I've certainly done some of it along the way and feel I may be ready to take it on. What's the ramifications of either choice? If I try for the lead, and they decide that I am underqualifed, would I be out of the running for the developer job? How about the opposite situation?