671–680 of 794 posts
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I have had this job before. You have two choices. 1. Start a side gig. Be busy at work make extra money. 2. Work on open source. Find a project you like or want to work on and do that. PS: set up a home lab and learn to love SSH tunnels.
You cannot legally do 1 or 2. They'd both belong to the company because ip work laws
They were in the process of moving from paper to digital forms. This meant for each field in a form updating about eight different data objects across three data abstractions. Imagine a form with thirty fields.
Now this is tedious and prone to error, but it gets worse
The form I was working on was not well thought out, but we had to build it anyway. So on the first demo to the functional designers, or 'stakeholders', we pointed out several oversights, which we were asked to correct. And ofcourse process some other changes they found themselves. This is half the fields in the form, so we already did a lot of useless work. But it gets worse.
The form in question was about the city being able to judge if somebody would be entitled to benefits. Citizens with benefits would be asked to volunarily fill in this form, and judged if they could keep their benefits. Yes, voluntarily. Would you fill in a form, which could make you lose monthly income? Or not fill it in, and keep your benefits?
Pointing this out had no effect. For me, the form was useless, and so was the technical implementation.
I left that month.
I used to work for a defense contractor. There was a 3 month period where I had nothing to do. I was supposed write firmware for a piece of hardware, but the hardware was broken and wouldn’t even turn on. I was told to wait for the electrical engineers to fix it. I sat in the lab all day, for 8 hours a day, with no internet access (it was forbidden), pretending to write firmware that I couldn’t test, with no directio…
As a web developer of 17 years, I'm dumbstruck at the idea that you're making three times as much doing this as you did at a damned defense contractor. They must have been totally chumping you.
Started really low since I knew I wanted the job and it would be temporary, didn't have any students loans (Europe baby!), and eventually ended up in position that pays better than 99% of software devs in Europe. Not most rewarding work, but its just work for me, life that matter happens for me when I log out.
I once worked on an in-house ERP system which had been developed over about 15 years by various developers. It was the engine of the entire company, everything passed through it. The CFO and some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for their shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat. When new management took charge, an initiative was started to replace the system with an industry standard solution. Both myself and the…
That is surprising, the industry of implementing industry-standard ERP systems is pretty established. I'd have expected it to go way over time and budget (they always do) but eventually succeed. Usually success is in proportion to the company's willingness to admit they're not special and can do the same things as other companies instead of having everything bespoke.
I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online. It's way better than any other available option. I've never shared it with the magic community because I think wizards of the coast would just send me a cease and desist, so three years of work is just sitting idle. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
I made a website about Tintin (the Belgian comic) where you can search any cell from any album by its text content. There's also a game where you have to find which album a cell comes from. The owners of the intellectual property wrote to me and just asked that I stop using the domain name I was using (which was the name of a character) and that every cell contains a reference to them ("Tintin is copyrighted to blah…
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I manage a team of Consultants at a small ERP firm focused on mostly manufacturing and distribution the #1 cause of failure is summed up greatly by Isaiah Bollinger, paraphrasing "most bad implementations are because people are trying to buck the system they bought, rather than work with it, understand how your ERP, eCommerce or other system does a workflow and match it. There's billions of dollars going in and out o…
> most bad implementations are because people are trying to buck the system they bought, rather than work with it, understand how your ERP, eCommerce or other system does a workflow and match it. This is insane cope. We make technology to assist end users perform the tasks they do. To say "well you're doing the task wrong, the tool is made so you do task X way instead" is to put the cart in front of the horse.
I once worked for a VP who needed to sunset an old internal tool that people were unwilling to part with, so he asked me to make it suck intentionally. Added random sleeps to slow down performance. Random alert messages about fake errors. It was weird. EDIT: Since this is getting some votes I'll add some more details. He would also come by to tell me how happy he was about all the complaints he was getting about it.
Different but similar. I once wrote a trivial lotto number selector app, at the request of some colleagues. It just emitted a few unique random numbers. Silly but why not. They hated it. I added moderate, random delays before emitting each number. They loved it, and used it every week for quite some time :)
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I was a top 0.1% salesperson nationwide in car sales. I read a bunch of lean startup stuff, learned to make a minimum viable product, and then started selling to companies with 20-80 employees. I'm likable and good at selling, so I got 34 companies using this garbage I made. It's the worst nightmare ever to keep people motivated to use it, keep fixing things I made as a rookie developer, keep adding or saying no to f…
Amazing story. Love your honesty. Is there a world where you hire someone to build a more maintainable replacement?
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I was a top 0.1% salesperson nationwide in car sales. I read a bunch of lean startup stuff, learned to make a minimum viable product, and then started selling to companies with 20-80 employees. I'm likable and good at selling, so I got 34 companies using this garbage I made. It's the worst nightmare ever to keep people motivated to use it, keep fixing things I made as a rookie developer, keep adding or saying no to f…
> now I'm stuck working on it. Why not put those sales skills to work and sell the business to someone else?
Deep down I know the product isn't that well liked, and a lot of the renewals are based on my salesmanship. I know I have a chance at fixing the bugs, because I wrote everything, while someone else would be screwed IMO. It just wouldn't be fair to sell it to someone because I know they'd be making a mistake.