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• Was a Big Fish in a Little Pond, Am Now a Little Fish in a Big Pond. How Do I Grow? [closed]

  - by Ziv

  I've finished high school where I was in the top three in my class, I studied a little and there too I was pretty much Big Fish in a bigger pond than high school. Now I got into my first job in a very big company, there are some incredibly talented programmers and researchers here (mostly in departments not related to mine) and for the first time I really feel like I'm incredibly average - I do not want to be average. I read technical books all the time, I try to code on my personal time but I don't feel like that's enough. What can I do to become a leading programmer again in this big company? Is there anything specifically that can be done to make myself known here? This is a very big company so in order to advance you must be very good and shine in your field.

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• Is it best to try to work at a company where your software directly makes the company money?

  - by Ryan Hayes

  I was told once that the best place to work as a developer is a company where the software you write is what makes the company money, whether it be software production or software services like consulting. This is opposed to a company where the software you write is just to support some other part of the business that makes the money, like manufacturing or finance. I know there are always exceptions, but in general, are employees treated better if they are on the front lines of profit generation, as opposed to being just another cost center? cost center (n.) - A cost center is part of an organization that does not produce direct profit and adds to the cost of running a company. Examples of cost centers include research and development departments, marketing departments, help desks and customer service/contact centers.

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• How to avoid to be employed by companies which are candidates to DailyWTF stories?

  - by MainMa

  I'm reading The Daily WTF archives and especially those stories about IT-related companies which have a completely wrong approach of software development, the job of a developer, etc. Some stories are totally horrible: a company don't have a local network for security reasons, another one has a source control server which can only be accessed by the manager, etc. Add to it all those stories about managers who don't know anything about their work and make stupid decisions without listening to anybody. The thing is that I don't see how to know if you will be employed by such company during an interview. Of course, sometimes, an interviewer tells weird things which gives you an idea that something goes very wrong with the company (in my case, the last manager said I should work 100% of my time through Remote Desktop, connected to on an old and slooooow machine, because "it avoids several people to modify the same source code"; maybe I should explain him what SVN is). But in most cases, you will be unable to get enough information during the interview to get the exact image of a company. So how to avoid being employed by this sort of companies? I thought about asking to see some documents like documentation guide or code style guidelines. The problem is that I live in France, and here, most of the companies don't have those documents at all, and in the rare cases where those documents exist, they are outdated, poorly written, never used, or do force you to make things that don't make any sense. I also thought about asking to see how programmers actually work. But seeing that they have dual screens or "late-modern-artsy-fartsy furnishings" doesn't mean that they don't have people making weird decisions, making it impossible to work there. Have you been in such situations? What have you tried? Have it worked?

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• Positive reinforcements @ work [closed]

  - by nurne

  I found out that what fuels me to do well at work are positive reinforcements From bosses, colleagues, and customers My current job at a startup is very demanding My boss doesn't have time to give positive reinforcements, and also i'm always behind schedule so maybe i don't deserve positive reinforcements On the other hand i don't get any negative reinforcements, so i guess that as long as this doesn't happen - what i'm doing is ok How is your relationship with bosses colleagues and customers @ work? Do you need positive reinforcements? Do you get them? How do you make them happen? Is there some kind of standard for developers? For hi-tech? Thanks

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• Where to look for challenging jobs with a relaxed atmosphere?

  - by RBTree

  I'm a dev at one of the big-name tech companies. I like the job for many reasons: I do interesting work on a cool product I solve challenging problems and use a lot of high-level skills (quantitative, creative, writing, presenting) It pays well The problem is that I feel I need a more relaxed atmosphere (shorter hours, less performance pressure, and more flexibility), in order to free up time for other pursuits and reduce stress. The ideal would be a job that's around 30-35 hours a week, where there is flexibility to work more or less in a given week. Can anyone suggest where to look for a job like this, where I wouldn't have to sacrifice too much on the above points? (Obviously I would have to sacrifice pay.) My employer does not generally offer part-time employment. The closest thing I can think of is when I did summer internships at my university's CS department. The work was very intellectually challenging, but if I needed to go home a couple hours early or get flexibility on a due date, nobody batted an eyelash. However, I'd like to find out if there are alternatives to academia since from what I've seen the pay there is a gigantic drop from what I'm currently making. I've done freelance development before, but I do like that as an employee of a large company I have a lot of things taken care of for me (e.g. benefits and guaranteed stable employment).

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• How to Deal with an out of touch "Project manager"

  - by Joe

  This "manager" is 70+ yrs old and a math genius. We were tasked with creating a web application. He loves SQL and stored procedures. He first created this in MS access. For the web app I had to take his DB migrate to SQL server. His first thought was to have a master stored procedure with a WAITFOR Handling requests from users. I eventually talked him out of that and use asp.net mvc. Then eventually use the asp.net membership. Now the web app is a mostly handles requests from the pages that is passed to stored procedures. It is all stored procedure driven. The business logic as well. Now we are having an one open DB connection per user logged in plus 1. I use linq to sql to check 2 tables and return the values thats it period. So 25 users is a load. He complains why my code is bad cause his test driver stored procedure simulates over 100 users with no issue. What are the best arguments for not having the business logic not all in stored procedures?? How should I deal with this?? I am giving an abbreviated story of course. He is a genius part owner of the company all the other owners trust him because he is a genius. and quoting -"He gets things done. old school".

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• Am I an idealist?

  - by ereOn

  This is not only a question, this is also a call for help. Since I started my career as a programmer, I always tried to learn from my mistakes. I worked hard to learn best-practices and while I don't consider myself a C++ expert, I still believe I'm not a beginner either. I was recently hired into a company for C++ development. There I was told that my way to work was "against the rules" and that I would have to change my mind. Here are the topics I disagree with my hierarchy (their words): "You should not use separate header files for your different classes. One big header file is both easier to read and faster to compile." "Trying to use different headers is counter-productive : use the same super-set of headers everywhere, and enforce the use #pragma hdrstop to hasten compilation" "You may not use Boost or any other library that uses nested directories to organize its files. Our build-machine doesn't work with nested directories. Moreover, you don't need Boost to create great software." One might think I'm somehow exaggerated things, but the sad truth is that I didn't. That's their actual words. I believe that having separate files enhance maintainability and code-correctness and can fasten compilation time by the use of the proper includes. Have you been in a similar situation? What should I do? I feel like it's actually impossible for me to work that way and day after day, my frustration grows.

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• As a Junior Software Engineer should I say that something has been done wrong if I feel so?

  - by Why123

  I recently joined a company and it is my first job. When reading the code base, I felt that the code was not well written. It seemed to me that the code had most of the problems mentioned here and also seemed to have an Anemic Domain Model. There are no unit tests and they don't employ any code quality checking tools like findbugs or pmd. The problem I have is that the code is very difficult to understand. Maybe my conclusions are wrong because I am not that experienced. I need advice on whether to communicate the above facts to a superior or not. If I am to communicate, to whom(Tech Lead, Architect, Product Manager) and how? And if I do communicate will they take it badly since I'm a Junior and has no experience?

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• Diplomatically point out the obvious problem in a product

  - by exiter2000

  As we all know, every software has bugs in it. It is matter of time to discover it. Suppose if you just found your product has potential big issue and it was not developed by you. How would you deal with it? I usually speak up with some data & analysis even if it is not my part of code. I am wondering if it is too offensive because I often faced on some resistance(depending on the issue), which would eventually be gone.

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• Unix tools in business use: are they helpful?

  - by Prometheus

  Do you think knowing Unix tools like sed, awk, LaTeX, Perl give you a great edge in the business world? (e.g. being a manager) From my short reflection, the only profession that needs those sort of (plain text) tools is programming. Because even when I do creative writing, I rarely ever need it. I mean, do CEOs and executives of large corporations ever learn this kind of stuff if they were not CS major to begin with?

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• Is there a cheaper non-express non-student, non-msdn version of Visual Studio 2010 that supports plugins in the US than the $710 Professional Edition?

  - by Justin Dearing

  I've never actually purchased a copy of Visual Studio myself. SharpDevelop and Express edition have always been good enough for my personal use, and my employers always furnished me with the IDEs I needed to serve them. However, I'm thinking of actually paying for a copy for my personal laptop. I need this mainly so I can open solutions that contain web projects. So my question is: Is there an edition cheaper than the $710 Pro edition on Amazon that will do what I need: http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-C5E-00521-Visual-Studio-Professional/dp/B0038KTO8S/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1287456230&sr=8-2 ? What I need is defined as: Open up a solution with C#, Web App, VB.NET, and Web Projects. Install addins like resharper, testdriven.net, etc, SCM plugins, etc. Some level of db project support. At least to be able to open a dbproj. I only need that for SCM hooks. SSMS and SQLCMD are good enough for actually editing databases. Ability to install F#, IronPython, IronRuby etc. Now naturally I'm a fairly intelligent resourceful person so I realize I can get Visual Studio in a questionable manner. Thats not what I'm looking to do. I want a legal copy, I don't want a student copy, or an MSDN copy. I want a real copy, I just want to make sure I get the cheapest edition that serves my needs.

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• How important is to sacrifice your free time for accomplishing goals? [closed]

  - by Darf Zon

  I was reading a book about XP programming and about agile teams. While I was reading, I saw this scenario. I've never worked with a development team (just in school). So I would like what do you opine on this situation: Your boss has asked you to deliver software in a time that can only be possible to meet the project team asking if you want to work overtime without pay. All team members have young children. Discuss whether it should accept this request from your boss or should persuade the team to give their time to the organization rather than their families. What could be significant factors in the decision? As a programmer, you are offered an upgrade as project manager, but his feeling is that you can have a more effective contribution in a technical role in one administrative. Write when you should accept that promotion. Somethimes, I sacrifice my free time for accomplishing hits at work, so it's very important to me to know your opinion base of your experience.

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• What are the dos and dont's when leaving a job? [closed]

  - by john ryan

  I'm going to resign from my current employer (manufacturing sector), where I've been working for 2.6 years as an IT Application Developer. It's the first company I've worked in after I graduated from college. I don't have any problem with the company, I just realized that I want to learn new technologies and get out of my comfort zone and move to the IT industry. I already got a job offer from another company. My IT manager has told me that I am one of the best players in our group, that our group is enough to support our company and that it would be unacceptable if anyone of us resigned. They will counter the offer, but I'm set on leaving. My problem is that I don't know what are the essential dos and don'ts when resigning from a current employer. For example I'm expecting a lot of inquiries on why I'm leaving from people in the company, what do I need to say?

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• If you develop on multiple operating systems, is it better to have multiple computers + displays?

  - by dan

  I develop for iOS and Linux. My preferred OS is Ubuntu. Now my software shop (me and a partner) is developing for Windows too. Now the question is, is it more efficient to have multiple workstations, one for each target OS? Efficiency and productivity is a higher priority than saving money. I have a 3.4Ghz i7 desktop workstation running Ubuntu and virtualized Windows with two displays, and I'm putting together an even more powerful i7 Hackintosh with 16GB RAM (to replace my weak 2.2Ghz i5 Macbook Pro). My specific dilemma is whether I should sell the first computer and triple boot on the second one, or buy two more displays and run both desktop systems simultaneously. Would appreciate answers from developers who write software for multiple OSes. Running guest OSes in VirtualBox on one system not ideal, because in my experience performance is seriously degraded under virtualization. So the choice is between dual/triple booting on one system vs having two systems, one for OSX+iOS/Windows (dual boot) and the other for Ubuntu (which I prefer to use as my main OS). For much of our work, I write a server-side application in Linux and a client for iOS (or for Windows or OS X) simultaneously.

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• Is it common to only pay developers for the time they said a project would take?

  - by BAM

  I work at a small startup (<10 people), and I was recently assigned (along with one other developer) to a relatively small project. The project involved moving an existing iOS app to Android. The client told us they had built the app for iOS in 300 man-hours. Not knowing at the time that this figure was completely false, we naively and optimistically assumed that if they could build the app from scratch in that amount of time, we could easily "port" it in a similar amount of time. Therefore, we drafted up a fixed-price contract based on 350 man-hours, with a 5 week deadline. (We are well aware now of how big of a mistake this was... Never let the client tell you how long it's going to take!) Anyway, by week 4 we had already surpassed our 350 hours, and we estimated that there were at least 2 more weeks left on the project. We were told to continue working, but that the company could not afford to pay out on overdue projects anymore. I thought this just meant "be more careful about estimates in the future". However a few weeks later, the company president informed us that we would not be getting paid for any time past 350 man-hours. We argued over the issue for almost an hour. He claimed, however, that this is standard practice for many organizations, and that I was unreasonable for making a big deal out of it. So is this really a common thing, or am I justified in being upset about it? Thanks in advance for any advice!

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• From Co-op to fulltime help with salary negotation [closed]

  - by Peter

  Hey I'm a coop student that worked at a particular medium size printing company for 8 months. I had a good time it was lax, sometimes insufficiently challenging but none the less I learned a whole lot. I stuck with them for another 5 months (including this month) at the same rate I was paid then, doing testing work, tool development, taking care of emergencies when the lead developers were away, and other smaller projects and now bigger projects and problem handling (bad printer output etc.). I know their website inside out (ecommerce), and I know their printing software inside out and have made many changes to them both without a hitch. I have also done a lot of refactoring of the existing code base which as far as Im concerned, I believe am the only one to do those sorts of restructuring even though there is constant talk about it. I guess the unit testing paid off and lets me see the value in modularity if even a tad more. Never the less I have faith in my skill and the restructuring I did turned out better than I had imagined . Now the problem is that I finish school next month and so I asked for a full time spot the month after. They have been expanding and have hired a new guy a few months after my coop spot, and just now they hired a new guy to deal with the CRM application. The lead developer who wrote all of the software had left 5 months ago so it was up to all of us to learn what he had done over 4 years (including db, networking). So now I'm afraid that if I assert myself for a salary similar to the other guys, which I believe I am certainly on par with, that I would be seen as ingrateful. It's hard to flip a switch and say, hey double my pay, although when I'm working with their bread and butter (printers) and writing new features, refactoring the whole application for extensibility. I love it regardless of pay. I also feel maybe I'm replaceeble, although nobody knows the website better than myself and the lead web dev (not by a long shot), and nobody knows the printer software/drivers better than myself. I just thought they would have brought up a raise earlier on, and now it feels like they don't value my work. I'm also tired of worrying about it. I think my question is, well what do I do next?

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• How to suggest changes as a recently-hired employee ?

  - by ereOn

  Hi, I was recently hired in a big company (thousands of people, to give an idea of the size). They said they hired me because of my rigor and because I was, despite my youngness (i'm 25), experienced as a C/C++ programer. Now that I'm in, I can see that the whole system is old and often uses obsolete technologies. There is no naming convention (files, functions, variables, ...), they don't use Version Control, don't use exceptions or polymorphism and it seems like almost everybody lost his passion (some of them are only 30 years old). I'd like to suggest somes changes but i don't want to be "the new guy that wants to change everything just because he doesn't want to fit in". I tried to "fit in", but actually, It takes me one week to do what I would do in one afternoon, just because of the poor tools we're forced to use. A lot my collegues never look at the new "things" and techniques that people use nowadays. It's like they just given up. The situation is really frustrating. Have you ever been in a similar situation and, if so, what advices would you give me ? Is there a subtle way of changing things without becoming the black sheep here ? Or should I just give up my passion and energy as well ? Thank you. Updates Just in case (if anyone cares): following your precious advices I was able to suggest changes and am now in charge of the team that must create and deploy Subversion :D Thanks to all of you !

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• Handle complexity in large software projects

  - by Oliver Vogel

  I am a lead developer in a larger software projects. From time to time its getting hard to handle the complexity within this project. E. g. Have the whole big picture in mind all the time Keeping track of the teammates work results Doing Code Reviews Supply management with information etc. Are there best practices/ time management techniques to handle these tasks? Are there any tools to support you having an overview?

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• I'm doing 90% maintenance and 10% development, is this normal?

  - by TiredProgrammer

  I have just recently started my career as a web developer for a medium sized company. As soon as I started I got the task of expanding an existing application (badly coded, developed by multiple programmers over the years, handles the same tasks in different ways, zero structure) So after I had successfully extended this application with the requested functionality, they gave me the task to fully maintain the application. This was of course not a problem, or so I thought. But then I got to hear I wasn't allowed to improve the existing code and to only focus on bug fixes when a bug gets reported. From then on I have had 3 more projects just like the above, that I now also have to maintain. And I got 4 projects where I was allowed to create the application from scratch, and I have to maintain those as well. At this moment I'm slightly beginning to get crazy from the daily mails of users (read managers) for each application I have to maintain. They expect me to handle these mails directly while also working on 2 other new projects (and there are already 5 more projects lined up after those). The sad thing is I have yet to receive a bug report on anything that I have coded myself, for that I have only received the occasional lets do things 180 degrees different change requests. Anyway, is this normal? In my opinion I'm doing the work equivalent of a whole team of developers. Was I an idiot when I initially expected things to be different? I guess this post has turned into a big rant, but please tell me that this is not the same for every developer. P.S. My salary is almost equal if not lower then that of a cashier at a supermarket.

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• Is there industry demand for developers who have no GUI experience?

  - by James Jeffery

  Is there still demand for developers who crate software without GUI's in the industry? Are jobs still in demand? I only ask because I write a lot of software for myself in C. I mainly use FreeBSD without a GUI. My software is for data mining, automation and marketing purposes most of the time as this is the field I work in. I find that a GUI is not needed and I feel comfortable working within a console. I've never worked for a company as a programmer, but in the industry do you have dedicated programmers who work exclusively on the GUI's and other who write the logic?

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• Are they asking too much of me?

  - by Tesserex

  Or am I just whining? Background: I work for a "startup," which I put in air quotes because the company has been around for 4 years. We have about 40 employees in three offices, 9 here plus some part time. We have a good amount of investment and bring in about 75% of what we spend (so not profitable just yet.) Standard work week is supposed to be about 60 hours, but they justify that as we have to be online when our international (Taiwan and Vietnam) offices are awake. When I started the job 6 months ago, I spent about a month prototyping an iphone app and did really well on my own. They also found out about my facebook applications and how many users they got. Putting 2 and 2 together (and winding up at -7) they realized 1. I'm independent and innovative (because I was able to use stackoverflow to answer my iOS questions instead of bugging my superiors) and 2. I must have an eye for marketing (since my fb apps grew totally organically without me doing any advertising), and assigned me to a project optimizing adwords campaigns. Today I got reviewed, and then chewed out, by our CEO for not totally rocking this project. Now I thought I was doing ok, but the CEO said the project is stagnant and they're expecting more from me. But since it's a startup, they play loose with job roles and I've had plenty of other things to do in the past three months. Every time I ask what's most important, I get conflicting responses depending who I ask, and the end result is that almost everything has equal priority - high. I could go on about how I don't think adwords is worthwhile for us since our profit margin is so slim, and how we should be trying to improve our website first, but that's not the point. I also have explained to the office director (who originally assigned me the project, not the CEO) that I don't actually know anything about marketing, I'm just a decent programmer, but they think my general smarts will prove capable of tackling this challenge. The CEO also clarified that he wants a more technical and algorithmic approach to the problem. So is there something I can do to address this? Combined with my existing and confusing workload, should I be raising an issue? Or should I do the grown up thing and give it my all, asking for help when I need it and hoping for the best? Sorry if this is very rant-ish.

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• Update live USB distro?

  - by qubex

  I have Lubuntu 14.04 (and Ubuntu 14.04) on a pair of USB disks created by writing the img files to USB using dd on Mac OS X. Unfortunately these systems both have some known bugs (that have since been corrected) and lack certain important drivers for my system (which I have located online). How can I make the USB disks writable and how do I update the distribution upon them as one may do for a locally-installed system? And if I later proceed to install from these USB sticks onto a hard-drive, will they ‘carry’ the package and driver updates with them or will I have to start from scratch again? (I seem to remember from my ancient Windows XP days that such procedures were referred to as ’slipstreaming’ or somesuch on that side of the fence.) (No, I did not create a persistence partition when I created the sticks, because from Mac clearly that isn’t an option. And anyway, as I imperfectly understand it, the persistence partition is for user files and not for the modification of the system.)

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• Anyone code at a treadmill desk? [closed]

  - by Sequenzia

  have been thinking about getting a treadmill desk for awhile now but I just don't know if it is possible to code at one. I can see doing a normal computer job while walking very slow but I just don't know if you can write code do it. Like a lot of people I could stand to lose weight and I am just not in shape anymore. I sit at my computer for at least 12 hours a day and then I am on my laptop for a few more hours. I need to do something to help my health. I also have been seeing a lot of reports about the long term health issues related to desk jobs. Like this. Before I drop a few hundred dollars on a new desk I am wondering if anyone has tried a treadmill desk and if so which one?

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• What are some good online tech talks?

  - by Avi

  We have a weekly tech talk at work, where we try to either have one of the developers present some subject, or watch a video or other presentation. The subjects can be anything related to software development (or anything else, if it is particularly interesting), but we have tended recently to focus on software development methodology, such as unit testing, and technologies, such as NoSQL. What are some good online presentations to watch, especially those related to software development?

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• Should I avoid or embrace asking questions of other developers on the job?

  - by T.K.

  As a CS undergraduate, the people around me are either learning or are paid to teach me, but as a software developer, the people around me have tasks of their own. They aren't paid to teach me, and conversely, I am paid to contribute. When I first started working as a software developer co-op, I was introduced to a huge code base written in a language I had never used before. I had plenty of questions, but didn't want to bother my co-workers with all of them - it wasted their time and hurt my pride. Instead, I spent a lot of time bouncing between IDE and browser, trying to make sense of what had already been written and differentiate between expected behavior and symptoms of bugs. I'd ask my co-workers when I felt that the root of my lack of understanding was an in-house concept that I wouldn't find on the internet, but aside from that, I tried to confine my questions to lunch hours. Naturally, there were occasions where I wasted time trying to understand something in code on the internet that had, at its heart, an in-house concept, but overall, I felt I was productive enough during my first semester, contributing about as much as one could expect and gaining a pretty decent understanding of large parts of the product. I was wondering what senior developers felt about that mindset. Should new developers ask more questions to get to speed faster, or should they do their own research for themselves? I see benefits to both mindsets, and anticipate a large variety of responses, but I figure new developers might appreciate your answers without thinking to ask this question.

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