- Statement on line 4: ‘select’. Great for debugging. Code has about 400 lines. Some error statements are still as misleading or useless as WBT. Error was actually in line 187 where I forgot a ‘,’
- Looking in all the wrong places when debugging. Nothing has changed
- Need a beer to make your brain slow down? Way back then: 300 baud modem. Now: Customer help lines in wherever. After 1 (English) ,1,3,2,2,1. “Yes, the green power light is on”
- Then Customer help lines: wait, wait, wait: help. Now: “we are experiencing a high volume of callers” Please call back never or be prepared to answer 25 questions to prove your are who you are and are not just calling because you love help lines
Product and Productivity
A recurring advice for job seekers is to show how they helped in improve a company’s profitability. That may work in sales, but is a bit more difficult in IT. IT – like construction – usually works against moving targets. Specs change. The effect of spec changes is sometime indirectly proportional to what project manager’s estimate is. The ‘little’ change that requires a re-design. On the other hand, I have often encountered changes that were rather trivial, would have improved a system, but were not implemented, since they were outside the original scope of a project.
Things Programmers Say
- Analyst says this should take about an afternoon to code
- Analyst says the users signed the specs. He forgot to ask them if they also read the specs
- Manager told me that this is how users get their work done. Apparently the users did not know that
- I have like 59 versions of this program, maybe I should delete some
- Oops, my USB drive is learning how to swim in coffee
Job Titles in IT
Here are a few I found in job ads:
Programmer: genius or room temp IQ and we’d like to replace you with a bot. Even though programmers were supposed to be replaced by programs writing programs we are not extinct just yet
Software Architect: programmer who uses flowcharts
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