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Went from scaring to live horror: all developers had to move from their 2 - 4 person rooms to open plan offices, mixed with sales guys, marketing and support, "to improve the company's community".
The transcription for they just wanted to save money.
No changes to deadlines, expecting the same productivity.
Workaround: home office days and good headphones. 
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My biggest fear is clients unrealistic estimates of what software development will cost them.
"I just want a smart phone app that will change the world. That will only cost a of couple hundred dollars wont it?"
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But I was not given a widescreen monitor to develop and test.
modified 1-Nov-16 23:14pm.
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Run the app on a remote system. mstsc.exe will accept practically any weird resolution you throw at it.
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Imagine a program like an anthill. For the last 25 years countless ants have been whipped through tight schedules. There is no docmentation and no architect. Every ant has to insticvely know what to do without any additional information and finish assignments on time. Speaking of the assignments: They are usually a handful of lines out of context that might as well read 'Do something, ant!'. Why waste time with giving the ants any details about what you want them to do?
I have worked in such a place and left because I'm not a good ant. From my observation, this anthill mentality is common in connection with Visual Basic. The anthills very often are old projects that started out with Access or VB6 and kept their good old practices for decades. When I hear something like that in an interview, the whole thing is over for me.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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I've worked in one such place in the past, and it's not a nice experience. Workplaces like that are so common that it's a scary thought. You don't realize what's going on until you're being whipped around, "doing something" there. If only there was a way for us to know if the place is an anthill before we could accept their offer.
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CDP1802 wrote: When I hear something like that in an interview, the whole thing is over for me.
Whereas my most lucrative contracts in the 90s were these. Power user builds a pile of spaghetti in access, does the job, sort of. The boss decides to extend it to a full on production system with multiuser access and get a professional in, me.
I instantly trot out ms own words that access is s single use tool and scream rewrite.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Every new version of Windows is worse than the previous one. The horrors that await us in Windows 11 are so bad that they defy imagination.
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It's not so much of a fear as a concern, in that it slows us all down considerably. No amount of software engineering or coding standards can fully eliminate this problem.
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Remotely programming my toaster and coffee machine so that my toast
is ready at the same time as my coffee because the two devices don't
like each other.
73
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There always, always... someone who is compelled to say something negative about other peoples work.
Not so much a fear, more of a PITA annoyance like nuisance phone calls. Time wasters.
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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S Houghtelin wrote: There always, always... someone who is compelled to say something negative about other peoples work.
Oh god, yes - I've had review comments about my use of apostrophes in comments...
And that was working on safety critical code, where there are many, many more things to be worried about...
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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Because the are people that are so careless about what they write that everything they do is mediocrity...
Philippe Mori
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... a host of .NET-based apps and web sites--12 years in the making--using some freeware language and CMS, like PHP/Joomla, or Ruby on Rails/Refinary, or Python/Django.
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.
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An amateur has cobbled together an "application" in MS Access that fits his needs and now wants it to be a standalone product that he can resell.
Oh, and since it is 90% "Done" it should be just a few hundred dollars to finish it.
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And as the saying goes... the first 90% takes 90% of the development time, the last 10% takes the other 90% of the development time.
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Try an entire company "running" on Access apps. (See my nightmare, somewhere below.)
You have my uttermost sympathy, believe me.
Access should be banned as a weapon of mass sanity destruction.
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happens to me on almost every job. we are doing an install and training at a customer's facility and I get notified by the customer or my boss that they got promised/promised that certain features would be included, but somehow never got told to me or written down anywhere. Now I've got to burn the midnight oil to get the feature built in.
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In my current contract I have been trying to get the clients to send me their issues and DCRs. They seem to prefer to give these to me "word of mouth" rather than writing them down in an email or doc or even in the online system I set up.
The President of the company has a stack of these issues written up on his desk, but won't share them with me except individually. And when he does, it is one at a time, verbally of course, and he then takes that one slip of paper away again, back in the stack... 
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I hate spiders. So creepy.
But seriously, real answer is managers reading a new management book!
Happens every couple of years.
I would love to just program all day, and have an assistant do all my manager 'paperwork'.
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Moving to an open office plan!!
Yes, lets lower morale and lower productivity for some short term cost savings!!
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non programmer upper bee with no idea what it might take to hit said date. And then they start telling everyone that the newest and latest edition of said software or the new kitchen sink software will be ready on said date.
The worst is if you happen for some reason to hit a date in the past. They don't understand why you cannot do it in the future.
To err is human to really mess up you need a computer
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You can choose Either the features or the due date, but not both!
I usually have to explain this to these people with the Empire state building.
Could they have doubled the size of the building and finished it in half the time?
What if they wanted it built in 1 day?
Okay... we realize because that is physical, it is not possible. Well, I promise you, software suffers from the same basic rules. The only difference is that people are willing to ship such horrible quality that as a building it would be condemned before opening, and nobody who looked at the building would go in. In the case of software this is merely HIDDEN (not visible)... The same issues can exist, and people have lost hard-drives, data, etc. etc. etc. from rushed software.
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I find the 'pair programming' item most frightening, not because I'm scared of pair programming, but because of the prerequisites for that item to occur and its most likely outcome:- Engineering management (dominated by former mechanical engineers) is paying far too much attention to just how the golden goose lays those eggs.
- Management has decided we need to be 'Agile'.
- Management has hired a highly-paid consultant who recommends pair programming as a first step.
- The most productive members of the team are paired with new, 'already-agile' hires.
- The new hires haven't the slightest clue as to how their blithely refactoring those interfaces affects existing products.
- As an end result, all forward progress screeches to a halt, and the customer complaint data base balloons.
- The consultant blames existing team members for their poor adoption of the agile practices.
- All existing team members are terminated 'for cause', which means no termination benefits.
You can see the obvious outcome for the company. Since I would have been fired in the last step, I would not care.
Software Zen: delete this;
modified 1-Nov-16 9:40am.
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