$40 for a career


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @xaade said:

    @blakeyrat is a professional devil's advocate.

    Even if he were getting paid to be a devil's advocate I wouldn't call him a professional one.


  • area_can

    I find it funny how Blakey's upset about people shitting on a thing without trying it.



  • Why? Have I ever shat on a thing without trying it?


  • area_can

    Yes.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @xaade said:
    And yet, you have a scholar with professional experience review the book, and point out that the coding samples don't even fucking compile.

    When did that happen?

    If you accept @ben_lubar as a "professional scholar", I think he once had a textbook like that.



  • @codermanual said:

    Thanks everyone, for your interest in Coder Manual and please don't hesitate to message me if you have any questions at all. I'm here to help people become rock star coders and get jobs!

    Sorry, Rob, but I've got to say this. I despise the use of "rock star" like this. It makes me sound like a drugged-out pisshead with personal discipline issues (but lots of groupies).

    And, bad as it is, calling me a "rock star" anything isn't as bad as calling me any kind of "coder". Writing code is just a small part of what a developer does, whether you call his job "developer", "programmer", or "software engineer". Even web developers need to do a lot more than just writing code.

    So, no, if you're training people to become undisciplined drugged-out pisshead code monkeys, well, ...

    General hint for the readership: any time someone suggests you taking a job and becoming a "rock star coder", just replace those words with "undisciplined drugged-out pisshead code monkey" and see how it sounds...


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Steve_The_Cynic said:

    just replace those words with "undisciplined drugged-out pisshead code monkey" and see how it sounds...

    Does it come with groupies? Because I think that would make a big difference here.



  • @boomzilla said:

    @Steve_The_Cynic said:
    just replace those words with "undisciplined drugged-out pisshead code monkey" and see how it sounds...

    Does it come with groupies? Because I think that would make a big difference here.


    Groupies? For programmers? What are you smoking, man?

    (Alternative version: It had better come with groupies, and hot groupies at that, if everyone's going to call me an undisciplined drugged-out pisshead code monkey, that's for sure.)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @xaade said:

    Maybe if you have settled for a background in cashierering.

    What have the forces got to do with it?



  • @Steve_The_Cynic said:

    calling me any kind of "coder"

    I'd like to believe I'm learning to be a "clean coder".
    I mean, that's why I bought the book.



  • Ok, going to roll with it

    Well, if that was your only job, it would suck quite a bit.



  • @xaade said:

    @Steve_The_Cynic said:
    calling me any kind of "coder"

    I'd like to believe I'm learning to be a "clean coder".
    I mean, that's why I bought the book.


    I hope this is a troll. Really, I do. So you want to be a "clean code monkey", eh?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @xaade said:

    I'd like to believe I'm learning to be a "clean coder".

    Shower once a month whether it's needed or not?



  • Why did you add "monkey" to it?

    Seeking formally written books on consolidations of experiences in how to be disciplined... makes me a monkey?

    I suppose you're against mentor-ship too.

    Hey I know, let's also ignore Bjarne, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

    Nobody can add anything of value to my experiences.



  • @xaade said:

    Why did you add "monkey" to it?

    Seeking formally written books on consolidations of experiences in how to be disciplined... makes me a monkey?

    I suppose you're against mentor-ship too.

    Hey I know, let's also ignore Bjarne, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

    Nobody can add anything of value to my experiences.


    OK, no, it wasn't a troll. You really are that stupid. You totally failed to get the point that when someone calls me a "coder" (any kind of coder), he is handing me a huge insult by saying that all I do is write code. Writing code is important, sure, but it is a small part of what I do. And all the rest is more important than the code itself. A code monkey is someone who just bangs out code like a monkey banging on a keyboard, so more or less equivalent to "coder".

    Seeking more knowledge about how to do your job does not make you a monkey, and in fact it's a way to escape from being a (code) monkey, but you've totally misconstrued my point. In fact, I'm beginning to think you did this on purpose.

    OK, troll it is, then, and a particularly offensive one at that.

    Mentoring(1) is a good thing, of course, but teaching me to be a "rock star coder" (translation, remember: undisciplined drugged-out pisshead code monkey) isn't mentoring.

    And as for the last sentence, well you know yourself better than I do, but I'm inclined to think you're absolutely right.



  • Further point for those who don't want to get the point about "coder" == "code monkey":

    When they call you a coder, they are saying that you are an interchangeable unit of codering, and that any other coder can take your place without anyone noticing any change in productivity and so on. Since you're an interchangeable unit, you are obviously of less value than if you could provide some unique skills, talents, and insights, so we aren't going to be able to pay you as much, sorry.

    Don't accept being called a coder.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Steve_The_Cynic said:

    OK, no, it wasn't a troll. You really are that stupid. You totally failed to get the point that when someone calls me a "coder" (any kind of coder), he is handing me a huge insult by saying that all I do is write code.

    This sort of rant has always struck me as over sensitive / insecure. But maybe people really do mean that sort of thing and I'm not picking up on it. IME, people who know what the job is know that there's more, but this is just a convenient short hand. People who don't know...don't, so they aren't being insulting.

    In any case, if you do all that other stuff, you still do coding, so describing what sort of coder you are is describing what sort of coder you are. I have horrible penmanship, and when people tell me I'm a messy writer I don't assume that they think that all I do is write down words that I didn't think up or anything.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @boomzilla said:

    IME, people who know what the job is know that there's more, but this is just a convenient short hand.

    That hasn't been my experience. I've seen a lot of "I'll design everything, you make the code do that, you're just a coder so what do you know about architecture/usability/maintenance/sanity"

    QA has it worse, though. There's been a lot of pushback against that mentality in programming, but in QA, even the testers tend to have the mentality "I'm just a tester, what do I know about code/usability/security/performance? Write down what you want in detail and I'll evaluate it."


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Yamikuronue said:

    That hasn't been my experience. I've seen a lot of "I'll design everything, you make the code do that, you're just a coder so what do you know about architecture/usability/maintenance/sanity"

    Fair enough.

    @Yamikuronue said:

    QA has it worse, though.

    I hear you guys just mash buttons and stuff. 🚎



  • Yami, I gotta start writing up some WTFs from our QA department-- well two people in it specifically. Because goddamned are they awful. (Unfortunately, one of the two is assigned to the feature I'm currently working on, which mean I'm doing effectively all the QA as well as the coding.)

    For example, the guy can't figure out the file format that needs to be uploaded to the back-end in CSV format to describe a specific type of account. The BAs at the company? They got it after just one meeting, and in fact have most of the production data already encoded and on the server. This QA guy has three times tried to upload a file with duplicated rows and gotten "unique key constraint" errors in SQL.

    Ok, once? I'll give you. Twice? I can tolerate that. But opening bugs against my code THREE TIMES because you can't use an Excel sort to find duplicated rows? Goddamned. (And yes, we should do better validation with more friendly messages, but this feature was built on a tight timeline and we decided to kibosh that since the DB constraints do the actual "validation" work.)

    He's actually worse than useless, because I end up wasting my time chasing his stupid moron phantom bugs.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    Oh god, yeah, I've seen some fucking basket cases walk through our doors. I can't find good QA people in part because anyone with intelligence and self-respect switches to software engineering because QA people get shit pay and no respect. It's why the issue is one of my biggest pet peeves: people don't even know what good QA looks like anymore :(

    This morning I had a call with an external firm our marketing department likes to use to outsource a lot of the ad-hoc testing. They want them to take over maintenance of the existing automated tests. Which, fair enough, I could use the help, but these people are fucking morons. Today's holdup: they haven't been able to start because too many of them have access to our AD systems, the list needs to be pruned. WTF?



  • @Yamikuronue said:

    Oh god, yeah, I've seen some fucking basket cases walk through our doors. I can't find good QA people in part because anyone with intelligence and self-respect switches to software engineering because QA people get shit pay and no respect.

    Well you know I've said several times that I loved the QA work I did, and would gladly have spent a career in QA if "career in QA" wasn't basically an oxymoron in our current shitty IT environment. God I hate this industry, have I mentioned that?

    @Yamikuronue said:

    It's why the issue is one of my biggest pet peeves: people don't even know what good QA looks like anymore

    It's worse than that. People can't even tell the difference between buggy software and good software. Look at Discourse. Several professional software developers think Discourse is release-quality and has been for a year.

    Look at the Atlassian development tools our company uses. If the development tools are buggy as shit, we're creating this world where junior (haha Boomzilla-- "junior!") developers are looking at things like HipChat and Git and they seriously think this is was good software looks like.

    Look at what Adobe's done with Photoshop-- remember before they added the CS label? The thing was rock-solid, usable (with an admittedly nasty learning curve). Then in the name of "synergy" they decided to replace half the widgets with Flash movies of all things (just in time for Flash to become obsolete), and now it's a buggy wreck that can't even draw lines without fucking up the anti-aliasing half the time.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    (haha Boomzilla-- "junior!")

    Oh look, @blakeyrat realized words have different meanings!



  • @Steve_The_Cynic said:

    You totally failed to get the point that when someone calls me a "coder"

    That coding is actually a part of your job.

    Let's say you're a one man fisherman shop. That you fish and then sell fish.
    It involves all kinds of things, like taking care of your boat, and knowing how to market your wares.

    If someone says, "wow, you're an excellent caster, you know how to throw your net right where it is going to get good fish", do you turn to them and say "I'm a fucking fisherman. Casting is just one part of my job."

    @boomzilla said:

    This sort of rant has always struck me as over sensitive / insecure.

    Exactly.



  • @Yamikuronue said:

    That hasn't been my experience. I've seen a lot of "I'll design everything, you make the code do that, you're just a coder so what do you know about architecture/usability/maintenance/sanity"

    "Oh wise one, then teach me."

    Either they'll get the point, or they'll try to teach you.

    One is good, the other is hilarious.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @blakeyrat said:

    People can't even tell the difference between buggy software and good software

    OMG this.

    Even developers can't tell these days. I've got a thread in the Lounge going into details, but I'm still working through a series of problems getting my test script to integrate with one of our applications that's meant to integrate tightly with third parties. The params are passed through a signature method, and the signature must match or the query is rejected... but the params the server uses are not properly url-decoded, so I can't just run my half through a urlEncode library before signing. The guys who wrote and maintain the application don't even know what url encoding standards are or what characters are considered special. It's all on the third party to figure out how to magic up the encoding so that it matches our arbitrary homegrown coldfusion library.

    It's insane.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Several professional software developers think Discourse is release-quality and has been for a year.

    Either that, or the other scenario where developer team X leaves the Beta label on a finished product for years giving users the expectation that they'll make it better at some point. That trend needs to die.
    Because now we have "early-access". Someone needs to call up Steam and say, "early access" has a definition, like deliverable will be release quality in a specified amount of time +/- 10%. We need to fix this trend, now.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Adobe's done with Photoshop

    Back in the day, Jasc Paint Shop Pro was my 80/20 rule, but it was more like 90/10. For 10% of the price, I got 90% of the productivity.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Yamikuronue said:

    I've got a thread in the Lounge going into details



  • @xaade said:

    Back in the day, Jasc Paint Shop Pro was my 80/20 rule, but it was more like 90/10. For 10% of the price, I got 90% of the productivity.

    And that's relevant to the conversation... how?



  • That photoshop is over-hyped.

    And over-hyped products with guaranteed customer bases, feel free to do stupid shit.



  • @xaade said:

    That photoshop is over-hyped.

    And that's relevant to the conversation... how?

    Look, I was talking about how much its quality has gone downhill in recent years. I wasn't talking about its level of hype. I wasn't talking about its cost. I wasn't talking about what percentage of features you found useful.

    WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU REPLYING TO MY POST IF WHAT YOU'RE TYPING ISN'T REMOTELY RELATED TO MY POST!? is really the answer I'm trying to get at here.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    And that's relevant to the conversation... how?

    It's absolutely related to the conversation.

    Open-source, overhyped, turns out bad stuff thinking it's good.

    Part of the problem with developers thinking bad things are good is the massive hype we give ourselves, that makes us go NIH.



  • @xaade said:

    It's absolutely related to the conversation.

    ... how?

    @xaade said:

    Open-source, overhyped, turns out bad stuff thinking it's good.

    Oh, ok, so if I drill down and ask you why it's relevant approximately 4376 times, you'll finally ass-pull a reason for me. Good communication strategy.

    Except... Adobe products are open sourced? No, wait, now you've gone from irrelevant to delusional.



  • sigh

    Another example for you.

    I come into a shop, and they are trying to explain to me what Raven-DB is.
    I'm saying what kind of database do you use?
    Oh, it's not relational. It's document based, which makes it faster for websites which are just going to dump the contents of one uniform record.

    Yeah, I just got out of a system that does that, it's called flat file.

    No this is better than that, it's stored in JSON, so you can directly access it from Javascript, or hand it off to an MVC controller as a C# object for processing.

    Ok, but you have relational information in your records.

    We store relevant information from that relationship directly in the record.

    How do you update it?

    With triggers.

    ???

    It means updating is slower but access is faster.

    ... 3 months later ...

    They made a change that made RavenDB unstable for our use, and they won't fix the bugs. Instead they are just adding stuff we don't need. And now we're too invested to go back to a relational database.

    ... I look at their own relational database...

    You didn't like that because you were doing it wrong. Look at these massive SPROCS with business logic in it. :wtf: is that?


    Moral of the story...

    Hype is the reason we think bad software is good software.

    How is that related to Jasc PSP?

    Sometimes it's better to pick the company that is behind, because they are focused on actually making their product better, rather than making it look like it is getting better. And so, they don't have the budget room to make stupid mistakes.


  • Fake News

    I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it all right.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfl6Lu3xQW0



  • @xaade said:

    @Steve_The_Cynic said:
    You totally failed to get the point that when someone calls me a "coder"

    That coding is actually a part of your job.

    Let's say you're a one man fisherman shop. That you fish and then sell fish.
    It involves all kinds of things, like taking care of your boat, and knowing how to market your wares.

    If someone says, "wow, you're an excellent caster, you know how to throw your net right where it is going to get good fish", do you turn to them and say "I'm a fucking fisherman. Casting is just one part of my job."


    Thank you for confirming that you are totally fail at reading comprehension. The fisherman "analogy" is a complete mismatch. When someone talks about "coders" in the modern world (and that's the only time it's ever been current as far as I can tell), they mean it to refer to the whole of the job, diminishing the other things we do into insignificance. I do a great deal in my job that isn't "coding", and referring to the whole job as "coding" (that which a coder does, right?) has a good chance of making people who don't know what the job really entails think that it is just coding.

    As I said before, the next step is that people think, "ah, all they do is coding, so how different can they be at it?" Perhaps worse, there are these one-day courses for managers where they teach them a bit of "coding". Now they think they know what developers ("coders", remember?) do, and they consequently know that it isn't all that special. Even they, non-IT managers, could do it, right?

    NOW do you get it?

    I AM NOT A CODER.



  • @Steve_The_Cynic said:

    I AM NOT A CODER.

    So....

    You're a designer?

    @Steve_The_Cynic said:

    they mean it to refer to the whole of the job

    Oh, I'm certain I know exactly what my project manager does.



  • @xaade said:

    @Steve_The_Cynic said:
    I AM NOT A CODER.

    So....

    You're a designer?


    In part, yes, I am. I'm also left with the feeling you're trying to insult someone with that, but I'm not sure if it's me or designers in general, or perhaps both.

    Any time you have a new word invented to refer to something that already has a word for it, you have to ask yourself why that new word has been invented. So here we have "coder" invented (yes, yes, I know, shut up) to displace "programmer", "developer", and friends. Why? Ten years ago, I didn't hear this word as a name for my job. Even five years ago it was rare. Now we see it a lot, and, worse, we(1) use it ourselves. Why did it arise? Is it just a fashion? Is it someone trying to capture what "programmer" might mean, taking the most visible aspect of the job? Is it someone trying to belittle what programmers do, to reduce its apparent significance to just mashing the keyboard, so that programmers (now reduced to keyboard-mashers) can be displaced, exchanged, outsourced, and / or off-shored at will?

    (1) This is the anti-royal "we". Rather than it being "we meaning I", it is "we meaning not I".

    @xaade said:

    @Steve_The_Cynic said:
    they mean it to refer to the whole of the job

    Oh, I'm certain I know exactly what my project manager does.


    You are better at non sequiturs than you are at reading comprehension, that's for sure.

    I know some of the specifics of what a project manager does, but in essence, what he does is project management, in the same way that what a programmer does is programming. Sounds tautological, I know, but bear with me. "Project manager" is a broad term, encompassing a wide variety of individual activities (far beyond just mashing buttons in MS Project or MAPPS(2) or whatever), all of which contribute to ensuring that a project runs smoothly. (Yes, I know. Lots of people doing this job are actually very bad at it.) The confusion arises from the fact that for small projects, there isn't enough project management work to occupy a dedicated full-time project manager.

    (2) MAPPS: dating myself a little here. You may have a hard time finding this one, as the last time I heard of it was nearly 30 years ago.



  • I still think it's funny that you extend your hatred of an arbitrary unoffensive word to the title of a book which was named The Clean Coder because it was meant to accompany a book called Clean Code.



  • @Steve_The_Cynic said:

    This is the anti-royal "we". Rather than it being "we meaning I", it is "we meaning not I".

    I believe the word you're looking for is da'ai.


  • FoxDev

    @ben_lubar said:

    I believe the word you're looking for is da'ai.

    No, it isn't, it just isn't 😛




  • FoxDev

    Maybe.

    But people actually use English 😛



  • ko mamgle do is an important phrase to know, regardless of whether you speak lojban or not.



  • Ben, be nice and make the link to the translation more of your post I missed the fact that the period was linked at first and actually tried to google it.



  • And yet it's a Googlenope.



  • @Steve_The_Cynic said:

    I'm also left with the feeling you're trying to insult someone with that

    That's your own fault.







  • @Steve_The_Cynic said:

    You are better at non sequiturs than you are at reading comprehension

    No, it's just that you're unwilling to even attempt to understand my point, and so you assume I didn't read yours.

    Your making assumptions of the word coder that aren't correct, and if I were to extend it to another position, say management, then I make myself unable to understand what a manager actually does.

    @Yamikuronue said:

    I'm just a tester

    Just because people abuse words and form their own meaning of the word coder, doesn't mean you throw away the word.

    Otherwise, we're in danger of creating a pattern of word -> derogatory abuse of word -> new word, until we get things that are so politically correct they don't even have a useful description. (I.E. software engineer).


    Coder reflects the aspects of your job related directly to writing code.

    "He is a great designer, but a poor coder." is useful information. But if you make bad associations like "A coder can only code." and infer information that isn't there "He is JUST a coder", then you've made the word useless.


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