The Whiteboard

7:24 AM

@gnat Believe me, I know. Migration to Java 6 and WAS 7 is planned. But it's a different task altogether... — Silver Quettier 15 hours ago

@SilverQuettier I see... it's very smart of IBM to lock their customers that way. Anyway, I belieeve damage done by subtle-wrong-Throwables is much much less than one caused by the fact that you can not use up-to-date language platform, features and libraries. By funny coincidense I just finished reviewing diffs of 200+ files migrated from Java 1.4 to more modern version and I can tell with strong confidence: you loose a lot

12:20 PM

@gnat I used to get angry at IBM that they actually try to sell that flaming turd they call WAS, and I used to feel sorry for companies that were locked into it...

now I no longer feel sorry for such companies. They jumped into a contract with IBM for political reasons without consulting qualified technical professionals on real comparisons between WAS and a real JEE application container

My buddy is currently trying to get me into a department in the parent company for where i work now

they literally just bought everything IBM has to offer ... and don't have a single experienced Java developer on their team

He desperately wants me to come help train them, but honestly, I want to tell his boss that my passionate hatred for WAS and IBM in general is just too much for me to bear.

They are doomed to failure before they even started. IBM is offering them training but 95% of their developers can't even explain what a classpath is

They won't fire them either... short of sleeping with the CEO's wife there is NO way to get fired there

Well I digress... I love this guy, oldie but a gooie from his blog...

steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile_27.html

@maple_shaft well mybe it would be interesting exercise to find out how they technically could migrate out of this black hole (my own encounter with WAS is rather minor but negative like yours). and maybe it'd be even more interesting to find a way to communicate this...

...without breaking your career :)

at one of my past projects tech lead taught me that stuff like that can make for challenging, interesting design work

puzzles, tricks and such

12:36 PM

@gnat I must admit that I am intrigued... I love challenges

I also love teaching and mentoring

but I also love my current job, just wish they would pay me a bit more

I told myself I would never again leave a job I love, for any reason

I did that once and it ended in nearly career ending ruin

@maple_shaft these are difficult type challenges; involve much time and effort; and usually also involve discussions with guys you disagree with. Thing is, this sort of stuff requires precision and accuracy in details to succeed - and nothing could be better than passionate design enemy to find weak points in your approach...

...and to verify when there are no weaknesses left anymore :)

@gnat Strengths.... they have a bunch of sheep .NET developers who are desperate to follow somebodies lead

If I assume lead then I am the lead

Negatives... there are some highly political architects that randomly make obscure technical decisions with no research or thought, and these are not negotiable

they don't even prototype things before dictating them, they read a whitepaper or a blog about something being bad and decide such and such thing should never be used

Pros: Leadership, Mentoring and more money
Cons: IBM, WAS, Political roadblocks

Maybe I should ask a question on Programmers...

> WAT DO? PLZ DECIDE MY LIFE FOR ME!!!

Thomas Owens

@maple_shaft Obligatory "quit your job" comment.

@ThomasOwens Oh you

@maple_shaft "decisions... not negotiable" is a tough challenge. Stuff like this typically needs a lot of time to change, and is not guaranteed to succeed. Pretty tough

...I would think twice whether to dive into

do you have a backup plan? in case if things go wrong?

I mean plan for the case if you decide you better leave

12:53 PM

@gnat the average tenure of the architects is something like 10 years. The CIO tenure is 25 years. Middle managers over 20 years. That is a LONG time for incompetent people to build up

Directors and PM's however rarely last a year

which itself is probably just another bad sign

@maple_shaft dealing with "incompetent people" is a skill, and one that is trainable, one just needs a lot of patience to F@#$ WITH THESE IDIOTs

:)

@gnat My entire career is a training lesson in dealing with incompetent people.

it is the single hardest thing I find about software development

And I am not an arrogant person, in fact I think I am a rather awful programmer

@maple_shaft well. if you have a patience, and a backup plan, and haven't been in environment like that before, it is likely worth trying. "More money" part plays a role here, too - just don't let it hold you if you eventually decide to leave them

Yegge's a good rant, I have read it before but thanks for reminding anyway

@gnat I really struggle with this... I honestly don't know what to do

rather... I have a number of choices but I am afraid to make the wrong one

The safe choice, stay where I am at.

..."Date-Oriented Programming" I missed that in prior reading. At about 2005-2006 (when article is posted), my manager back then taught me "commit either on date or on features but never on both", turned out pretty good approach

1:01 PM

@gnat Depends if you are the one doing the committing or if you have somebody else doing that for you

@maple_shaft "afraid to make the wrong one" I'm afraid this means you don't have a backup plan. Get one and proceed; if not then, well hard to tell what then

@gnat thanks... I will have to think about that

@maple_shaft Well last 6 or 7 years it has always been someone else been spelling commitments, not me. Was hard in the beginning, but as time went by I think I learned how to influence "talking heads" to commit what I need :)

And, have to admit, after learning this I found it suits me better. As long as commitments are ones I want I really prefer to avoid talking and announcing. I like coding

design, reviews, stuff like that. Not fond of meetings and presentations, if someone else carries that weight I don't mind - provided of course things move where I want them to

@gnat I like both. Kind of bored with coding lately though. I would rather design software and let somebody else write it

I like coming up with processes, systems, and prototyping new things

@maple_shaft oh that's another thing to consider a plus there then. Setting things into order in such a messy place is tough no doubt, but it has a potential to teach you lots of tricky things. When going gets tough, tough gets going". But you better get a backup plan anyway, Carthage delenda est

user55340

2:33 PM

@maple_shaft I was laid off to IBM outsourcing. And yes, it was a political decision. The comment about the developers that were outsourced to that the managers (who argued against it) made was "IBM has a good sales team".

@MichaelT How terrible. For the company I mean. They will literally suck the life blood out of that company now

user55340

The phrasing was "development within IT is not a core competency of the company - we should outsource it all." So every developer who wasn't on a management track of some sort (lead, project management, etc...) was laid off. And yea, it sucked... and I don't feel too sorry for them.

@MichaelT That is the way things are going unfortunately, but then that only means more development jobs as a consultant happen as more companies follow this core competency model

user55340

Especially the "I spent three months training my replacements" which 6 months later when the contractractors turned over became "they spent three weeks training their replacements" which another 6 months later was followed by "they spent three days training their replacements"... and then the management found out that no one knows how any of the old code works.

The world is going to consultants. if you can't jump into a mismanaged codebase in a new company and be semi productive within a week then you are a dinosaur

I think more companies are turning away from employees in general and going to contractors and consultants for everything

sometimes even core competencies as ridiculous as that sounds

user55340

2:47 PM

The companies that have the mismanaged codebases are typically the ones that are hiring consultants because they won't spend the time to manage their code bases properlly.

user55340

There are places that have good code bases that consultants never see because they don't need consultants because they are able to keep all the good coders because they have a good code base.

user55340

The Dead Sea Effect - good developers leave with the poor ones staying and accumulating - brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/…

@MichaelT Well... I don't think codebase quality is a reason for developer turnover

at least not for me

it is more of a symptom of a bigger problem

user55340

It is one sign of it problems with turnover.

I like working in shitty codebases as masochistic as that sounds

it is challenging just to do simple things

The best codebase I ever worked on was so good that even complex business requirements became dead simple. I was bored out of my mind

Jim G.

2:49 PM

@WorldEngineer Hmm. I'm trying to be very objective here. Must... disregard... the gravatar!

user55340

One of the joys of programming is making something better. There is lots of potential joy in making a bad code base great.

@MichaelT That is where consultants take pride and satisfaction

even when frankly their clients don't deserve it

user55340

However, making something that is started out bad also typically deals with needing to fix management to realize that making something where you can get a change in a week rather than a month takes a year of fixing it.

@MichaelT If managers thought that way then at least half of software developers across the world would be out of a job

I don't want that

you don't either I am sure

Let them manage things inefficently... part of the reason for the lame recovery of this economy is that globalized corporations are TOO efficient and just don't need to hire people, then people don't have as much money to spend, and everybody suffers

Capitalism is literally so effective that it is self immolating

user55340

@maple_shaft I doubt that. Every place I have worked at there is a 5+ year backlog of work. The current estimated hours for changes to the code I'm working on is 60k hours of work on a team of 5. And that is the right now - 3 months from now, there will be more.

user55340

3:01 PM

Even if this code base was ideal, what, you might kick that down to 30k hours... we're talking about a decade of possible work to do.

user55340

5:58 PM

From programmers.stackexchange.com one can click on 'hot' but such a tab does not exist from programmers.stackexchange.com/questions - is there any reason to this design choice?

user55340

I tend to browse from questions not front page for the active / newest tabs. But seeing the 'hot' ones and knowing that there is possibly assistance needed in these to keep them managed well means several clicks from where I normally am on the site.

@JimG. I'm sure you're not the only one, however I feel that many of the people I see labeled as "help vampires" could actually be constructive members of the community one day if someone actually sat down and talked with them about how the SE sites work, what not to do, and why. And publicly pointing out the private information that someone is question-banned on another site is probably not a good way to get that done....

user55340

@Rachel However, there is no non-public communication... and thus in order to inform someone that something action (posting on another site because of restricted posting on another) is not appropriate, there are no other channels available.

user41796

6:16 PM

Am I the only one who thinks that this is really just a plug for the book instead of a question? programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/184139/…

user55340

@GlenH7 It certainly has some aspects of that.

user55340

@Rachel The question is how does one mentor such an individual? Mentoring takes active participation and work on both sides and isn't something that someone who pops in for 15 minutes every few weeks to ask a question would be too open to.

user55340

The help vampire type typically is trying to avoid work (not understand the problem). I've seen in the past a help vampire that bounced from asking co-workers to asking forum to forum to forum as he kept asking for "give me the codes"

Jim G.

@Rachel Yes, I agree with you and I really wish this opinion was considered more often across all StackExchange sites. Abrupt, arbitrary, and borderline closures really send the wrong signal to newcomers.

user41796

@MichaelT - I agree. The "help vampire" Venn diagram overlaps considerably with the "Google; cut; paste" crowd. They're not interested in help; they're interested in someone doing their job (or schoolwork) for them.

Jim G.

6:28 PM

@GlenH7 Yes, often this is exactly what's happening.

user55340

Personally, the "understand the question" is exactly the reason that I prefer being on P.SE over SO. I find a good P.SE answer to be addressing the underlying knowledge of the problem while the SO good SO answer is addressing the more particular instances of the problem.

user41796

@JimG. - I agree with your comments on sending the wrong signals. Part of the problem is that people who accidentally fall into the help-vampire category can't easily find out what they need to do to get out of that classification. Getting out of a question ban requires a degree of sophistication and knowledge regarding how SE works.

@MichaelT A better solution would be to tell them their question is off-topic here, is more suited on StackOverflow, and to tell them if they have any problems with their acount on SO then they can visit [the Meta SO site] for assistance.

user41796

@Rachel - there are at least two recent instances of being question banned on SO so they are asking here instead.

user55340

It is the case that we are unable to see the questions that have been deleted and I am unsure if the comments on the questions that are not visible to us addressed that time and time again.

6:34 PM

@MichaelT We advertise as a Q&A site, I can understand people thinking "I have a question, I should go ask over here". Often they don't understand that we don't want to be doing their code for them, and that we try to deal with higher-level conceptual questions

@GlenH7 Right, so guide them to MSO so they can look up how to fix the "my account has been banned" problem

You don't need to publicly share the information that they have been question-banned on a related site in a comment, as that discredits the user and can lead to users unfairly judging the question and user based on the existence of a question ban on another site

user55340

Pardon my age, but back in the days of usenet it was known and proper for an individual to lurk in a group a bit before diving in. It acquainted a person with the norms of that community and what is and is not accepted. Frequently the FAQ was there and read by all. I am dissapointed that the current generation doesn't follow similar practices... but then I've got a few gray hairs and may just be getting to be an old guy who wants the kids off his lawn.

3

user41796

@MichaelT - afaik, unlike question, comments are permanently deleted once they have been deleted.

user55340

@GlenH7 I suspected so.