Nobody writes their own DataGrids



  •  A quote from my manager in a conversation with other project managers:

    "Nobody writes their own DataGrids.  You just buy them".

    I have never been more excited to leave a company in my life.



  • Because you were looking forward to writing your own DataGrid?



  • You may have to elaborate a bit here. There are usually plenty good DataGrid controls in most languages, and it makes no sense to me to roll your own here, so if that's what he means, I agree with your manager. If it means he thinks you're done once you have the control, then I can sort of understand your frustration.

    Sort of. This is simply the way a manager thinks (big problem solved, someone else solves the small problem, let's get some coffee).

    So... which part am I not getting?



  • Yes I agree - there are plenty of great grids already at there which would probaly cost a fraction of the new grids development cost!



  • @zero619 said:

     A quote from my manager in a conversation with other project managers:

    "Nobody writes their own DataGrids.  You just buy them".

    I have never been more excited to leave a company in my life.

    I'd be OK with taking the DataGrid that comes with your framework of choice and extending it, if the extension isn't too complex.  I'd run for the door if my company forced me to build a DataGrid instead of doing productive work.  If I were forced to work with framework that lacked a grid, I would have already left before this conversation took place.

    I do have one thing against buying -- the license management of some aftermarket components can sometimes cause deployment nightmares.  But, it would be hard for this to outweigh the cost of starting from scratch.  I once re-wrote a barcode recognizer component because the license management was so onerous that it saved me thousands of dollars and three days of headaches the first time I used it.  In case your wondering, you can write a decent 3of9 barcode reader in a few days and if I bought, I had to buy four licenses; one for development, and one for the test, stage, and production environments of the application.  Also, the commercial component used a USB key, so it wasn't supported on virtual environments.  That came out to $8,000.00 for four copies of the software and $15,000.00 to move the app from VMware to standalone servers in order to use a commercial barcode component.



  • I know what you mean.  I wrote my own DataGrid once, and now the President of Poland is dead.  Coincedence?  I think not.



  • I believe more context is needed.

     

    The company I currently work for uses a third party control library for the majority of their custom web development projects.  This is largely due to a mindset, that I later learned of while working on a project, that things like javascript and css are 'for crayola jockey designers' and not for 'real developers'.  So the company spends thousands yearly to do things they could do with the controls that come out-of-box with the .NET framework, and a little JQuery.  What end up happening typically is we'll run into an issue with a postback from one of the 3rd party controls, which will evolve into asking the forums of the 3rd party tools for support, which will then evolve into a trouble ticket that is submitted to the group.  While the issue could be fixed using the basic controls for .net and some javascript, these solutions are viewed as 'messy' and 'cryptic'.  I got in trouble for this once while working on a single page for a non profit.  After months of this behavior, we come to today's blurb from management.  I've since accepted a position at another company with a toolset I find more suitable, and this week will be the last I spend with the manager from the quote is derived. 



  •  Let me guess, you're using Infragistics. My condolances.



  • So basically the problem is that management decides on the tools developers need, without at least listening to them? That is TRWTF in many companies, sadly. I hope you'll do better at your next company.



  • @b_redeker said:

    So basically the problem is that management decides on the tools developers need, without at least listening to them?

    Oh, they usually listen, nodding their heads and saying "I hear you" throughout.  Then when you are finished they say "This iPad thing is going to be the wave of the future, you'll see.  That's why it's imperative that we jump on this bandwagon before anybody else to synergize our paradigms and paradigm our synergies.  I appreciate your input, but effectively immediately all developer workstations will be replaced with iPads.  We want to get a leg-up on the competition by having all of our developers working on virtual keyboards months ahead of anyone else.  Now I'm off to the Bahamas for a 3 week vacation."



  • @elamberton said:

     Let me guess, you're using Infragistics. My condolances.

    Close!  Telerik.

    ED: added a quote we can know wtf you're talking about.  -btk



  • can a mod please edit this to put in the thing i was going to say plus some punctuation

     

    Disregard that, I suck dicks!!!!!

     

    FTFY. -TheShadowMod


Log in to reply