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Search - "no focus allowed"
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I'm at my seat during the regular morning routine of checking emails, planning the things I need to complete/study when my phone rings.
HR: Good Morning, can you come over to the conference room please ?
Me: Sure
I enter the conference room and on the other side of the table, I see a group of 3 HR Managers (not a very nice feeling), especially when it was 10 months into my first job as a Trainee Software Developer.
HR: The company hasn't been performing as expected. For this reason, we've been told to cut down our staff. We're sorry but we have to let you go. You've been doing a great job all along. Thank you.
Me: ---- (seriously ?!)
The security-in-chief 'escorts' me out of the premises and I hand over the badge. I'm not allowed to return to my desk.
This happened about 16 years ago. But it stuck with me throughout my programming career.
A couple of Lessons Learnt which may help some of the developers today :
- You're not as important as you think, no matter what you do and how well you do it.
- Working hard is one thing, working smart is another. You'll understand the difference when your appraisals comes around each year.
- Focus on your work but always keep an eye on your company's health.
- Be patient with your Manager; if you're having a rough time, its likely he/she is suffering more.
- Programming solo is great fun. However it takes other skills that are not so interesting, to earn a living.
- You may think the Clients sounds stupid, talks silly and demands the stars; ever wonder what they think about you.
- When faced with a tough problem, try to 'fix' the Client first, then look for a solution.
- If you hate making code changes, don't curse the Client or your Manager - we coders collectively created a world of infinite possibilities. No point blaming them.
- Sharing your ideas matter.
- Software Development is a really long chain of ever-growing links that you may grok rather late in your career. But its still worth all the effort if you enjoy it.
I like to think of programming as a pursuit that combines mathematical precision and artistic randomness to create some pretty amazing stuff.
Thanks for reading.15 -
Let the student use their own laptops. Even buy them one instead of having computers on site that no one uses for coding but only for some multiple choice tests and to browse Facebook.
Teach them 10 finger typing. (Don't be too strict and allow for personal preferences.)
Teach them text navigation and editing shortcuts. They should be able to scroll per page, jump to the beginning or end of the line or jump word by word. (I am not talking vi bindings or emacs magic.) And no, key repeat is an antifeature.
Teach them VCS before their first group assignment. Let's be honest, VCS means git nowadays. Yet teach them git != GitHub.
Teach git through the command line. They are allowed to use a gui once they aren't afraid to resolve a merge conflict or to rebase their feature branch against master. Just committing and pushing is not enough.
Teach them test-driven development ASAP. You can even give them assignments with a codebase of failing tests and their job is to make them pass in the beginning. Later require them to write tests themselves.
Don't teach the language, teach concepts. (No, if else and for loops aren't concepts you god-damn amateur! That's just syntax!)
When teaching object oriented programming, I'd smack you if do inane examples with vehicles, cars, bikes and a Mercedes Benz. Or animal, cat and dog for that matter. (I came from a self-taught imperative background. Those examples obfuscate more than they help.) Also, inheritance is overrated in oop teachings.
Functional programming concepts should be taught earlier as its concepts of avoiding side effects and pure functions can benefit even oop code bases. (Also great way to introduce testing, as pure functions take certain inputs and produce one output.)
Focus on one language in the beginning, it need not be Java, but don't confuse students with Java, Python and Ruby in their first year. (Bonus point if the language supports both oop and functional programming.)
And for the love of gawd: let them have a strictly typed language. Why would you teach with JavaScript!?
Use industry standards. Notepad, atom and eclipse might be open source and free; yet JetBrains community editions still best them.
For grades, don't your dare demand for them to write code on paper. (Pseudocode is fine.)
Don't let your students play compiler in their heads. It's not their job to know exactly what exception will be thrown by your contrived example. That's the compilers job to complain about. Rather teach them how to find solutions to these errors.
Teach them advanced google searches.
Teach them how to write a issue for a library on GitHub and similar sites.
Teach them how to ask a good stackoverflow question :>6 -
There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.
The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.
I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.
At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.
I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.
Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.
However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.1 -
At a certain client, was asked to help them with an "intermediary" solution to stopgap a license renewal on their HR recruiting system.
This is something I was very familiar with, so no big. Did some requirements gathering, told them we could knock it out in 6 weeks.
We start the project, no problems, everything is fine until about 2.5 weeks in. At this point, someone demands that we engage with the testing team early. It grates a little as this client had the typical Indian outsourcing mega-corp pointey-clickey shit show "testing" (automation? Did you mean '10 additional testers?') you get at companies who put business people in charge of technology, but I couldn't really argue with it.
So we're progressing along and the project manager decides now is a great time to bugger the fuck off to India for 3 months, so she's totally gone. This is the point it goes off the rails. Without a PM to control the scope, the "lead tester," we'll call her Shrilldesi, proceeds to sit in a room and start trying to control the design of the system. Rather than testing anything in the specification, she just looked at the existing full HRIS recruiting system they were using and starts submitting bugs for missing features. The fuckwit serfs they'd assigned from HR to oversee this process just allowed it to happen totally losing focus on the fact this was an interim solution to hold them over for 6 months and avoid a contract renewal.
I get real passive aggressive at this point and refuse to deliver anything outside the original scope. We negotiate and end up with about 150% scope bloat and a now untenable timeline that we delivered about 2 weeks late, but in the end that absolute whore made my life a living hell for the duration of the project. She then got the recognition at the project release for her "excellent work," no mention of the people who actually did the work.
Tl;Dr people suck and if you value your sanity, you'll avoid companies that say things like, "we're not in the technology business" as an excuse to have shitty, ignorant staff.6 -
AI is the future, and it's a future I want to be part of.
This week was very stressful, beside my usual depression and personal issues, I've received a lot of difficult tasks at work, to do in a very short amount of time.
Things I never did, tecnologies I've never used, and for a potential client that is critical for the company at this period in time, and if we won't be able to satisfy their requests we could go bankrupt really soon.
A lot of responsibility, almost no time and a person not competent enough to do it (me), especially on a hurry.
I couldn't sleep in these days, I couldn't think peacefully, concentrate to find the best solutions. I had really bad thoughts.
I couldn't find any useful solution online, on stackoverflow, forums, etc. and I spent hours searching them.
For who knows me here on devRant, probably knows also that I tend to work with old legacy code and dead languages as VB6 and VB.NET.
So integrate "new fancy stuff" isn't that easy and there are no documentation and examples to relay on.
I had fear to even try to understand the documentation (for other languages) and try to write code for it… I was panicking.
With no more ideas, I've decided to try to ask ChatGPT for help.
In maybe 3 or 5 seconds it was able to generate the solution, in VB.NET, with comments and all the explanation needed to understand it and integrate it correctly in my software.
With a few other requests it was able to change it to make it fit better my scenarios.
It's truely unbelivable how the tecnology advanced in the last years, how a computer on the other side is able to reply to my questions with answers that I couldn't find anywhere, because they probably never existed for my case, in VB.NET especially.
ChatGPT made my day, and allowed me to end this stressful moment and give me time to relax and focus on more important personal stuff this weekend.5 -
We have this one professor in a mathematics course.
He sits there having no plan of what he's doing. He literally opens his python Jupiterbook with latex enabled, writes a complex equation and tries to solve it in 10 minutes. Makes mistakes every few steps and deletes his formatted equation that isn't even interpreted yet (we see the cdot etc. instead of * which makes it even harder to read). Every few minutes some student corrects him and he deletes it again.
Why can't you just think first and then write and try to teach us?
Use as much time as you want as long as you don't have to keep reverting back the humanly unreadable latex equation.
Hell, you are also allowed to use a basic pen and paper. Trust me, that shit is more readable, even if you have a bad handwriting, than your squeezed in complex untranslated latex equation in Jupiterbook.
Btw. he also streams with no zooming in I might add.
Am I supposed to trying to read your small as shit, focus on what you're teaching while you keep making mistakes or write it down on paper and practice the given tasks?
On top of that, he records the zoom conference but he doesn't share it anywhere on the college forum so that people who have missed it can download it and rewatch it.
Everything he does makes no sense. How did he become a mathematics professor with a PhD?5 -
Focus on projects, not tests.
If you want people to be able to code, judge them by their ability to code.
Plus that way your graduates have a portfolio as opposed to a grade list that says nothing about their usefulness in the market.
If you must do tests, at least mimic real world conditions:
- Digital, no paper
- Internet allowed (have rules on copying SO if you must)
- BYOD, let people work in their customised environment -
With the current economy in its rocky state, it is no surprise that firing levels have reached new highs in the world. According to a recent study conducted in the UK, former managers and workers who lost their lifelong jobs were able to get past their problems simply by keeping a positive attitude in mind. The theory of “mind over matter” is more applicable here than it is in many other situations as workers strive to get back a life they once had. If you have recently lost your job, you may want to focus on getting your spirits up, for instance, you can ask for help with resume writing services such as this one https://resumebros.com/, rather than spiraling into depression. By separating yourself from your former life, you may be able to see better success.
This study was published in “Organization Studies,” a journal that circulates in the UK. Researchers found that people who were able to see their job loss as a new start in life were much more capable of moving on and seeing success again. These patients viewed the change as a way to become self-employed or an excuse to volunteer and better their lives. Taking on a positive step led them to a reduced amount of trauma when compared to those that dwelled on the job loss.
The study consisted of men and women between the ages of 49 and 62 who were once senior workers in their industries with highly successful careers before them. I realize that most of the people reading this will be younger than that, but the theories from the study can resonate in any age group. The men and women in the study all suffered devastation after being laid off, and they coped with that devastation in different ways. Those that were able to separate themselves from their old jobs found it much easier to separate themselves from the pain of the loss.
All of these participants were enrolled in a program for older managers that recently encountered unemployment. The program was government funded and designed to allow out of work individuals to pick up with their lives and start again. The participants that were least successful with the program were the ones that saw their job loss as the end of their working time altogether, as if it was going to be the sole destruction of their lives. They did not handle emergency management well. Their negative attitudes forced them to cope worse than the positive attitudes of other participants.
As a whole, the study aimed to show that coaching, over the course of time, can help unemployed men and women find ways to get past their financial stumbles and get back into the work force again. Those who are willing to embrace the coaching can find themselves back into a state of financial success much faster than those who wallow in their situation. As long as these individuals can see themselves as capable, driven, and intelligent people who happen to be unemployed, they are usually able to make it back to where they need to be in life.
You can apply all of this to your own life and your path toward the future. If you lose a job that you assumed would help you after graduation, move on to something else. You may end up in a better place in the end. I recently lost a huge client of mine that paid me roughly $4,000 a month. I was devastated and a little panic stricken after the loss, but that allowed me to apply for new work with new clients. I now make twice the money from about half the work, all because I wasn’t reaching out to all my opportunities in the past. You may experience the same revelation if you keep a positive attitude. -
Dev goals for 2019:
At least one substantial tech blog post per month (no rain-checks allowed)
Do whatever it takes to have Elixir as the focus of my day job instead of .Net