@WorldEngineer <3

Work... yawn

boss... rage

@mapleshaft Do you mind me asking what kind of work you do?

@Rachel I am lead developer at a startup

we are mostly a java shop

@mapleshaft I see, I was just curious :)

lead developer is kind of a false advertising though

i am a team of one currently and no matter what we seem to do we can't seem to make enough money to hire anybody else

we have steady income for the next 5 years but it is too small to be bigger than an 8 person company

Hrrrmm need to find investors. I feel like you can't make money without first spending a lot of money :)

I am starting to think our sales people suck

Are they all friends/relatives of the owner? :)

no, they just don't understand software enough to sell it

they can sell IT, support, auditing services, but they can't seem to get into the mindset of selling software

they also clearly don't understand why it is so complex

it feels good to vent

lol I use chat to vent all the time

There are some things that only other programmers can understand :)

@Rachel true... what do you do?

if (Status.getCurrentStatus() == Status.FLUE_STATUS) {
        trow new IllegalStateException("Coding Not Supported For Now");
    }

@mapleshaft Pretty much anything programming/IT related for a mid-sized company

They're about 150 employees, maybe 100 at this branch, and we have an IT staff of 3: programmer, network admin, and me

@Rachel Neat. Yeah in some ways that can be less stressful than working for a software shop where if you don't sell your product then you may lose your job.

... OTOH management tends to look at you like you are a cost on the spreadsheet

Yeah it's a good job if you don't mind the tech support calls (and I don't usually, because I like helping people)

I usually get given projects and am allowed to do them any way I want.

@Rachel Read Programmers ;)

Learning from other programmers is overrated. Most don't know as much as they think they do

lol but they know a whole lot of stuff that I don't know :)

And I think that's part of why I like P.SE so much.... I learned a lot from it, especially it's early days where not everything had a clear-cut answer or was only tangibly related to programmers

Wait there is one part of my job I hate.... building custom reports for management >.<

@Rachel Call me a masochist, but I actually like writing custom reports for management. I find it therapeutic to take tables with hundreds of thousands of records, and write SQL that compiles statistics on the data.

I like to think of myself as a Data Prospector, mining for gold.

I just like statistics and making charts of things

Oh it's not that I mind. It's the formatting that drives me crazy... such as "can you have the headers show # of days instead of months", or "can you make this number highlighted in blue if it's over X"

I really hate Crystal Reports and Excel's VBA, which is usually what I end up using for reports. I guess to be fair, it could be a lot worse.

@Rachel Oh yeah... that does suck! I usually just do an Excel pivot table and be done with it. Thankfully our management are all Excel power users which is NICE.

Whenever I need to make something pretty I just give it to an intern lol

I want interns!

they suck

Yeah, but I could push the tedious jobs like formatting reports onto them ^_^

not intelligence or capability wise, most of them just have zero work ethic

also they simply don't understand proper office ettiquette

I knew not to roll in late, swear, be loud, walk into peoples offices without knocking, etc...

Yeah.... I've never had an intern so I wouldn't know the downsides. All I see is the glory of telling them how to do things, and having them do the actual work :)

Only part that really scares me is having to figure out what they're doing when reviewing their code...

commanding them feels nice, but they are like cats seriously. Even if they listen to you, they do it poorly

I love cats :)

And part of it is just for that reason

i do too but I can't have them

this is the reason african-grey.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/…

cuteness abound

=O I'd love a parrot

We'd totally have one if we didn't have cats

@Rachel I advise against it. I love my little guy but it was a mistake. They are wild animals and aren't meant to live in cages. You figure this out fairly quickly.

that being said, I try to give him the most comfortable life possible considering

shoot, meeting, later

lol alright, cya later

Shouldn't this question: programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/140848/… be closed as not constructive? It falls in line with the discussion here: meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/3325/…

@MikeL It's close to being closed already, with 4 of the 5 close votes needed. I think the biggest difference between the two questions is that one is asking why a specific programming language was used, while the other question was asking why a specific character was used. We can answer questions about programming languages, but we no experts on the creation of programming languages

(And FYI, I voted to re-open the 2nd one because I found the answers lead to useful information about other languages. It currently has 3 of 5 reopen votes needed)

@Rachel Thanks for the info. I just feel we need to be consistent. I flagged two similar questions recently that both got closed. I see TO edited the Java Android question but I feel it's the same type of question as the semicolon one. "Why something was done this way" although interesting, really is not the purpose of this site.

@MikeL I suppose the biggest difference is the answer the question is looking for. If the answer can be found in an programmer's expected knowledge base (such as why choose one language over another for a specific task based on language specs), then it's on-topic. If the answer isn't found in a programmer's expected knowledge base, or could be better answered by another profession, it's off-topic.

@MikeL When it gets that close I don't think the mods like to touch it. It is always better for the community to close a question than a mod.

I'm tempted to ask on the UX site, "Should programming languages use semicolons as statement terminators?". But I can't decide if it's constructive or trolling.

@MarkTrapp Vote to reopen :) We only need 1 more vote...

@psr I'd say that question is better on programmers than UX

WTB Mark Trapp as moderator again...

Awww no it's been starred, I can' t delete it now and hide evidence that I ever said that!

@Rachel - The UX question would be if semicolons are the right choice. (I already voted to reopen the programmers question)

@psr I keep forgetting UX doesn't necessarily mean UI... I was reminded of that when I saw this question on the most upvoted questions list

If that's not a user interface I don't know what is, but point taken.

I just thought it was a funny question to see amid all the other questions related to UI designs for software :)