Just make sure your harder on your friends than perfect strangers:D
Having been on both sides of the divide, I can say that I appreciate what a manager goes through with programmers. And vice versa.
I’ve probably fired as many programmers as I’ve hired when I’ve been a manager, 'cause I can spot slacking off very easily. And I never ever give the ones I fire a reference.
As a programmer, I bring my stuff in on time, to the best of my ability. If it can’t be done on time, I keep the manager of the project fully informed. I also appreciate it deeply when I have a manager who knows as much as I do about the technical stuff.
Being a manager, I once read, is worth twice the money and four times the work.
Truer words were never spoken. I’d rather be a programmer.
Falcon
Programmers should certainly not system test. They should indeed unit test to make sure the buttons all work, but there’s no way someone who knows the internals intimately is ever gonna do what a real user does.
I’ve shifted on this over the years. There are some programmers I’ve met who are actually very good at system testing, but they are few and far between, and unluckily, they often aren’t as good at writing code as they are at testing it.
Programmers should program, and they should unit test to make sure they wrote it right and followed the specification laid down. But they should not system test, and certainly not regression test. That needs to be in the hands of people who actually use the stuff and know what paths they actually take and what they need the software to actually do.
As a programmer, I thank whatever deity comes to mind that day that I am usually graced with good testers, because I know for damn sure I would never, ever find more than 50% of the stuff they come up with for me to fix.
-Doug
Doug -
We’re saying the same thing. In my firm, system testing means checking that all the damn buttons work. And that the edits at least return SOMETHING. Not to check the correctness, but that they work.
What I do, as an analyst, is the data validation tests, then after those are complete (which will be in fucking APRIL at this rate), we do a regression test. Then, the acceptance test by the production team.
Our programmers did NO testing. So instead of the QA team testing data, we’re hung up by buttons not working. And then get blamed for going over the time allotted.
I do love my job. I swear. But right now, we’re about to send the system back and tell them to take a fucking week and TEST the damn thing. And not to return it until it works.
Falcon: Maybe your company should hire some actual testers. Developers should develop. I understand that there are things you need to do with the program, but you personally don’t have to do it…you can hire guys whose only job is to try every button, every menu item, every shortcut key…damn, my job sucks…
Ah, actually it’s pretty good. In fact, it’s BETTER when the developers screw up. Do you have any idea what torture it is to run through test suites on exactly the same product on all the dang OSs and not find a new bug for a WEEK?
If an old man can poke his nose in for a minute, I’ll give you an old-timers point of veiw.
When I first started with computers about 25 years or so ago, you booted them and they said “ok” or “ready”. Basic was the only language and DOS really meant disk operating system (you called dos from basic and told the floppy drive to turn on, export or import a file, etc.) Commercial software was non-existant. You wrote it or did without.
Even back then I learned that the only real way to check your coding was to give it to the folks who would be using it. I could write a 1500 line inventory program and check it out for a week and never find a glitch, but sure as hell, within two hours of releasing it, somebody would lock it up tighter than an old maids snatch.
Technology has long since passed me by and I haven’t programmed anything in years other than my VCR, but I’d bet the theory holds true. If you want it idiot proof, you need to set back and watch the idiots play with it.
Just my opinion,
Hermit
OK, I’m going to come out here and sympathize with Tomcat.
First, in addition to being the Queen of Coal, I am a programmer. I re-added a few weeks ago all of the code I had written, and was shocked to see that I personally had written about 1.3 million lines of C/C++/Java, and about 200,000 lines of FORTRAN in my job. All in addition to being a mechanical engineer. I may not be “formally” trained as a programmer, and my code may not be “supremely suble and elegant”, and I may still use “goto” in C code, but there are a few things you can say about code I write:
- It works.
- It is easy to debug, especially for non-professional programmers.
- Did I mention that it works?
OK. The last three years I have been put into a situation similar to Tomcat, where a “big boss” has put programmers under me, but given me no real power. It’s like:
Programmer: Do you do our reviews?
Me: Nope.
Programmer: Do you decide our salaries?
Me: Nope.
Programmer: Do you do our exit interviews?
Me: Nope.
Programmer: Can you fire us?
Me: Nope.
Programmer: I’m sorry, why are we talking again? :rolleyes:
So I am given a list of requirements, but no real power at all. Not even to fire - only to go and informally say to the “big boss” - “Hey, Karl, yeeeeeah. You know Bob? Well…we are limiting his happiness and personal and spiritual growth by keeping him on this project. We ought to…well…help him grow as a human being by letting him explore exciting new opportunities…yeah…at other firms…”
I put the blame on the IT market. I have seen some absolute walking atrocities of programming come in and be hired, because the market is so tight that they will hire high-school students, or a person with 1 solitary community college class in programming, and put them into positions reserved for degreed, experienced, programmers. I am not joking here. So Jeff, the programmer with an MS in computer science and 5 years experience, sits next to “Skate-DuD3”, who learned programming by hacking Battlenet, and makes just as much money as him.
(This causes programmer morale problems, to say the least. As I’ve posted about before in Engineering threads.)
These people are immature, have never been forced to hold to a schedule, have no idea what the term “Start at 8:00, out at 5:00” means, have no clue that browsing E-Bay all day is not working, etc. Oh what’s the point? I can already see apologists coming out to say things like “no, when I’m downloading porn, I’m really working on the problem in the back of my head…” Give me a fucking break. I am a programmer, and very successful, and I don’t need to web around to “free my mind” to tackle coding problems.
The worst thing is when you give them written specifications that they sign off on, and they do not do them! What is the major malfunction here? You said you would not use the Conditional If statement, and yet you use it 2000 times. Why did you do that? You said you would make all input fields for numbers right-justified, and you made them a mix of left, right, center, etc. What the fuck? It takes just as long to do it right as to do it wrong in this case. And then -they have the fucking nerve to refuse, to fix their error on their own time!
What is one’s possible defense for this scenario?
Spec: All numeric input fields shall be right-justified. (signed and initialed by programmer)
Programmer: Yeah, well, so 500 input fields are left-justified. If you can pay me to come in on Saturday, I might fix them. Otherwise, I’m working on this kewl new 3-D game that I think will rule…oh, and my Team Fortress Klan needs me…my name is “Roket Doode!” (giggles)
Me: You messed it up. Why don’t you fix it?
Programmer: Uh, where I came from (Middle School), we get paid to do work. [Aside]Stupid old bitch…mumble…[/Aside]
I can post again and again about people who write e-mails all day, download porn, cruise E-Bay, E-Trade, or just fucking goof off. But what’s the point? You all know exactly the sort of person Tomcat is talking about. I suspect that some people may be nit-picking his OP because maybe the described behavior hits a little too close to home.
And FTR - I do web a lot. And the two best programmers and friends I had did, and still do, during work. But they also met every single deliverable, and put in their full hourly time during the week. I don’t give a rat’s ass if they download porn for 30 hours a week, so long as they work for 40. Or whatever they are hired to do. It’s not the Webbing or mailing or chatting that are the issue - it’s the working that is the issue.
Now stop reading this and fucking start working! 
This sounds a little strange to me… how can you write software without using IF statements? What programming language is this? Is there a conditionless IF statement?
Just curious.
**
Ulp!!! I’m working, I’m working!
(pounds away at keyboard franticly…)
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Tomcat *
**
That might not be the best cure. My company just fired 2 contractors because they were collecting wads of dough and doing NOTHING. The rest of us have to drag our carcasses in here to work every day and wonder why projects are moving so slowly while these morons* are tele-commuting from the freakin’ beach! Just make sure if you hire contracters, you make them work from the office, at least part of the time, otherwise an amazing amount of nothingness can get done.
*Of course, maybe they’re not morons because they’re the ones getting paid to write half the code we do for twice as much as we get.
DeskMonkey, you speak the truth. We already did the thing of “permanent” to “contractor” to “back to permanent” once. Our contract programmers came in knowing these three Fundamental Truths of Life:
-
They were being paid more than anyone else on the project.
-
They get paid for every single god-damned hour of overtime - unlike everyone else on the project.
-
In 3 months, whether the project works or not, they are out of there, and
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EEOC and other laws prohibit me from telling people who call for a reference later on that the contractor who slept for 3 months and sucked the project dry was a “Festering boil on the face of humanity, and would be doing a better service to the World by being used as an organ donor.”
The funniest thing that ever happened was a psychotic contractor from India who came in and was supposed to be the “Mozart” of MFC programming. Too bad he had never used Windows or MFC - he had only read about it in 3 or 4 books!!! That’s right - he sat down in front of Windows NT, and asked us if it was Unix. Then he looked at the floppy drive in mystery, and asked “what’s this for?” We all laughed because we thought he was joking.
He was not. It took a week to return him due to the contract we signed, during which time we were forced to pay nearly $100 an hour for him. $4000, for a man who sat in his chair for a week and read a book on “Windows NT for Dummies”. We tried to sue the headhunter for fraud, but come on - we know how well that works in real life…sup[/sup]
sub The answer is - it doesn’t.[/sub]
HA HA HA HA HA!! That really sucks, but it’s so out of a Dilbert calendar you have to laugh.
We just got rid of a guy that was being paid - get this - $20,000 a month! A MONTH! An EARTH MONTH! And in December, he didn’t show up or contact anyone in the office for two weeks, then finally made contact and said he was sick. This, of course, happened in our European office and we never know what the hell goes on over there. So my boss stepped in when he heard about this and ended the guy’s contract as of Friday that week (he should have booted him that day, but I think he wanted to appear reasonable). Of course the contracter didn’t bother to show up the next day and do you know what the freak who runs the London office said?!? She actually said “Well, can you blame him?” She wanted to KEEP the guy because she thought he was doing a good job. Well, maybe she had him doing some projects “on the side” because the work he did wasn’t worth 20 bucks, never mind 20k!! And here I sit like a freakin’ monkey - yes, a Desk Monkey - in my little cube with my wilting plants and a warm Diet Coke.
But hey, Tomcat, good luck with those contracters you plan to use. ~hee hee~