11–20 of 157 posts
Regarding this part: "they had to pay soon for Free Software. None of them ever mentions ‘Software Libre’, but they all know about ‘Software Gratuit’. " In French, we have two word for Free: Libre is for free as in free speech and gratuit is for free as in free beer.
And there are people who claim performance doesn't matter, only correctness does. Hmm.. Also: we chose C++, because it is fast.
Performance is meaningless if the code is not correct.
After all, I can make the code arbitrarily fast if I'm not going to be held to any standard of correctness: It always returns "FOOBAR". Done, and very, very fast.
> Also: we chose C++, because it is fast.
That is a bit naive. C++ is a standard, so how fast is a stack of paper?
>Average turn-over for the newcomers: 3 months, the legal time to leave your job in France. Can someone explain the meaning of this? I think something got lost in translation.
That would be the notice period. Germany is similar, it tends to be 6 weeks to the end of the quarter, and it generally applies to both employee and employer. Though it often isn't quite as applicable to the employee...what are they going to do if you don't show up, fire you?
They would fire you for grave offense (I'm not sure what the right word in English would be). But even firing or giving one's notice is long here, around three months.
This surprised me. I thought it was extremely difficult to fire people in France.
>Average turn-over for the newcomers: 3 months, the legal time to leave your job in France. Can someone explain the meaning of this? I think something got lost in translation.
You have to work for 3 months before you can quit an employer in France. It's not "at-will". At least that's how I interpreted it, and given France's stronger labor laws I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case.
> With so many files in store you may think that two people working on the same file would be rare, but it turned out that most work happened within the same 100 files or so.
Not really surprising, unfortunately. This is a hallmark of the Big Ball of Mud. Thousands of code files and yet people keep tripping over each other.
>Average turn-over for the newcomers: 3 months, the legal time to leave your job in France. Can someone explain the meaning of this? I think something got lost in translation.
That would be the notice period. Germany is similar, it tends to be 6 weeks to the end of the quarter, and it generally applies to both employee and employer. Though it often isn't quite as applicable to the employee...what are they going to do if you don't show up, fire you?
"In a country like France, corruption is not uncommon at that level, goes mostly undiscovered and is rarely prosecuted. "
My brother is working in a construction bussiness in France and he has a handfull of stories of this type of high-level corruption (house built for the ex-mayor, refection work done for a lawyer, invitations to Roland-Garros...). But as the author have said, it's the same thing everywhere.
Doing a first checkout requires taking an appointment with the version control team, usually granted a week later. Editing files is not permitted without authorization from middle management. Ah, I recognize this. It is a special level beyond workplace hell, Tokugawa shogunate hell , where the entire organization is structured to provide as much busywork for as many superfluous management layers as possible. Fifteen…
So this was a project for a government agency in France that limped along for years.