I'm the Real WTF, I think



  • I just thought about my professional life over the weekend, and came to conclusion that I'm TRWTF.

    Thing is, I'm in the IT for 15 years, and through all that time I didn't make a decent toolbox of components for my own use and for driving the cost of projects down.

    The toolbox, of course, may consist of third-party tools, too, but they have to be my own in the sense that I know every bit of them. Which is easier if it was me who wrote them in the first place. Guess that's why many consultants and freelancers keep reinventing their own wheels all the time even if they know reinventing wheels is an anti-pattern; the code must align with their mind well and provide as little resistance as possible.

    And that's why I would thoroughly suck at producing a timely and maintainable solution for a dream customer, if I ever come across one: the one that doesn't want me to write some code using some framework he's heard is good, but the one that states me a problem he or she has and asks for a solution using my best judgment.

    I think I'm too spoiled by working at corporations. Heck, I don't even have much code to show if I change shops, because I transfer my copyrights over to employers, which, I feel, is a lame excuse for not having at least something of my own.

    Feel free to bash me, I deserve that.


  • Dupa

    @wft said:

    Feel free to bash me, I deserve that.

    Here you go:

    But honestly, I hope you're not saying you want to write these tools in Bash…



  • Although I have some good code and cool projects to show off, I don't think any potential employer has ever went into my github and spent more than 5 minutes. So you might as well create a bunch of interesting sounding repos with a README and be done with it.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @wft said:

    Heck, I don't even have much code to show if I change shops, because I transfer my copyrights over to employers, which, I feel, is a lame excuse for not having at least something of my own.

    You're not the only one. If someone would ask me to bring code to an interview, I'd probably have to ask them to give me a coding exercise.



  • You say I'm crazy 'Cause you don't think I know what you've done But when I look at your repo I know I'm not the only one


  • @wft said:

    Thing is, I'm in the IT for 15 years, and through all that time I didn't make a decent toolbox of components for my own use and for driving the cost of projects down.

    And that would be a problem, because...?

    I have never come across a customer or a project where I could easily apply a generic solution, as everyone has their own specific requirements. When you have a generic toolbox, you'll have to adapt it to fit the customer's requirements anyway. This might even take more time than writing something from scratch, as you'll want to maintain the generic design of your toolbox while you're customising it.

    If you're building on top of a platform (such as Sharepoint), align closely with what Sharepoint offers you. Especially now Sharepoint is moving more and more to the cloud, you are much more restricted than you were when you could host everything on premises and you would have Full trust.

    Also, staying close to what a platform offers makes it easier to transfer your knowledge onto someone else, the last thing you want is a customer calling you 5 years on asking you to "fix a bug in the code you made for us" because nobody else understands your code. After all, finding developers that are more than just a code monkey is really hard.

    In my view, you're a much better developer if you keep your technology knowledge up to date, if you know what design patterns are and how to implement them, and if you know about best practices for a given project.



  • And I don't prefer to offer code to show off even if I did participate in creation of community based projects (they are closed source ones anyway).

    Nothing more persuasive to the interviewer about my skill than what I write in front of them. (You really can't tell whether the guy in front of you can remember how he did something he have done 10+ years ago)

    Okay. Maybe I'm the real :wtf:


  • Fake News

    I'm tempted to move this to the "Look at Me" category - this is not so much a WTF of itself.



  • I don't think so. I'm in a similar position. I'm trying to change jobs, but the one I want and I know I can do is with a big Linux company that values "Open source contributions or a public Github repo".

    Well, almost every bit of code I've written is under a NDA. Outside work, I thinker with electronics and setup and teardown servers. No code to show off...



  • @wft said:

    I'm in the IT

    He's hacking into the IT now...he's in. He's disabling our firewall...!



  • @wft said:

    Thing is, I'm in the IT for 15 years, and through all that time I didn't make a decent toolbox of components for my own use and for driving the cost of projects down.

    I've never had to, because .net provides one for me.

    I guess I do have my handmade REST classes I use for projects instead of the bloated and annoyingly obtuse WebAPI. It's just crammed in my DropBox.

    @wft said:

    The toolbox, of course, may consist of third-party tools, too, but they have to be my own in the sense that I know every bit of them. Which is easier if it was me who wrote them in the first place.

    I think this is bullshit. Unless you're working in a really crappy language without its own libraries. (Which you probably are, being this forum.) Microsoft's framework is far, far better than anything I'd ever be able to build on my own in a reasonable amount of time.

    The only skill you really need is the ability to choose a language that doesn't suck ass.

    @wft said:

    I think I'm too spoiled by working at corporations. Heck, I don't even have much code to show if I change shops, because I transfer my copyrights over to employers, which, I feel, is a lame excuse for not having at least something of my own.

    I've never shown code to someone when changing "shops". I do ok.

    @wft said:

    Feel free to bash me, I deserve that.

    I'm not sure what you think you're doing wrong.



  • @presidentsdaughter said:

    I don't think so. I'm in a similar position. I'm trying to change jobs, but the one I want and I know I can do is with a big Linux company that values "Open source contributions or a public Github repo".

    It's not only about that.

    What if you want to do freelance gigs? No one gives a damn about your decade of corporate experience if you don't have lots of 5-star ratings on Upwork (not that you can prove in 5 minutes you weren't a warm body at your company). The same goes if you start a one-man company doing business locally: you want to gain a good reputation and enter the market. And you don't want to spend time rewriting the same damn shopping cart (that's only an example) or invoice-generation code over and over again, or the competition will beat the living shit out of you.


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