Haha. We have coding standards where I work which are pretty loose as far as style goes, but demand some spelling/naming conventions for consistency. One of them is that all words should be spelled in American English (i.e. color, not colour) and we had a Canadian guy who would still spell stuff with u's with reckless abandon and didn't seem to care. So annoying to interface with that code.

Can't you just replace all intances of a misspelling? There's got to be a dozen different one liner sed/perl/etc commands to do this.

Yeah, that could have been awkward though if he got pissed that people changed his code.

I must admit I suck at spelling and misspelt the word "position" when writing a chess engine years ago... Even after I knew how to spell it properly and changed the code, my fingers would somehow still want to type it the old way lol and it was a constant cause irritation.

Juk

He would have. Misspelling is far from my biggest concern on this project though sadly...

Side bar... anyone have any decent ideas for a side project? I don't really have any ideas besides a super lame hello world type project but would like something to play with as a learning project

Who cares if these guys get upset that people change their code?

The problem here is that they think the code is theirs. It belongs to the project, and if it needs to be fixed, it needs to be fixed. It doesn't matter who wrote it, what matters is that it meets the standard of the project - whether that's naming standards, quality standards or anything else.

Very true, He actually doesn't work for the small company any more.

I was straight out of college and had never even SEEN mfc before so was completely clueless (still am) so I never questioned anything

Sergeant Horvath: It's not gonna be easy finding one particular soldier in the middle of this whole goddamn war.
Captain Miller: Like finding a needle in a stack of needles.
Sergeant Horvath: But what about the company?
Captain Miller: We take the pick of the litter and the rest get folded into Baker.
Sergeant Horvath: Jesus Christ. They took away your company?
Captain Miller: Wasn't my company, it was the Army's. So they told me, anyway.

So we had this old outdated and buggy computational program in c++. so we wrote a new EMR version, pulling data from services, redundant storage, etc... But when we were launching it, the suits wanted to match the output with the old program with .1% accuracy. What's the point in matching to something that isn't correct??? How do you guys deal with such erroneous premises for a project?

1. collaborate with owners of requirements and get them to fix the requirements.
2. if that fails, do what they ask for, then find a new job.

Talk to owners and submit correct math on paper perhaps along with your code to show that you are in fact correct.

State your positions and your reasoning then just do it imo. Part of the suck of jobs is you have to do dumb **** sometimes but as long as you have an easy explanation of why it's not your fault when it goes to jelly (you explained why it was a bad idea) then you're fine. Seeking a new job seems a bit drastic, just another day in the lol factory imo

Wow. I didn't realize that moving files from Database A to Database B was so difficult.

Part of my job entails "searching stuff" on the company database. Unfortunately, this "stuff" includes things that can't be queried in a format that I can use, and the GUI isn't particularly helpful, and I of course don't have access to the raw SQL of the database.

So, I managed to pull down a ton of information down and put it on CSV, which doesn't really work properly on Excel. For example, there are no data-types on the company database, so for example, when Excel reads a date, it throws a bunch of ####### cells. Thankfully, there is an easy button to use that will let me fix this issue.

The second issue is that item id's have numbers, letters, dashes or a combination of all three. Since there was no type-casting, these can create all sorts of funky things. No biggy, write an easy script and create strings.

Of course, the date formatting is in dd/mm/yy format and not a string, which forces me to write another script and put it into something that won't anger the Postgres Elephant. (I prefer to use everything in default modes)

The issue gets out of hand in cases where, say I want to see how many of one item was sold. Instead of going to the company database and seeing how much item #ABC sold during an advertising campaign, I have to go through and see what item #ABC - [color] sold (really, wtf kind of ID is this?) and go through each color of each item. You can guess how time-consuming this is, especially if 10 items are advertised.

Client sales is the worst. We can only conjecture at who our top 20 clients are, but that isn't really possible to figure out at this point because a large company can have 30 offices and there is no way to find the companies' sales outside of going through each branch, writing down a bunch of numbers, rinse, repeat.

My first order of business was creating a product table (productId, productColor, productIdAndColor). This last cell is needed because querying over the sales history client-by-client would be impossible. I wrote a script to convert it all to strings then did a find-replace and sort of wonked my way through the last of it.

Now I have a CSV file that I am satisfied with, and alas, I open up Postgresql, run the COPY statement and it doesn't work. I searched all over and one part says I should be the super-user, but I'm just not sure if that is the problem.

The error reads "There is no data found in column 'color'" and this made (somewhat) sense, so I altered the table so that color defaults to null. Still get the same flippin' error. I attempted to change the string delimiters from ' to " to ' in order to be sure it all matched up, and this didn't work. I guess I'll look at the super-user angle again and see if that doesn't fix the issue, though I really don't know at this point.

If all else fails, I'll just write a script to convert it all to INSERT, connect to the database, and let Python push it in that way. Might take all day, but hey, can't do any of the work I'm asked to without something.

Somehow, my company got contacted by a technology consultant and they asked me to contact him.

Well, before I did so, I went to the guy's website. After waiting about 90 seconds for the site to load (not an exaggeration), I was already feeling sour. Open up the page source and the whole site is div-soup, drag-and-drop WordPress. The site itself didn't look awful (not great either), but is really too much to ask that a Website Technology Consultant has a fast semi-professional-looking site, and maybe even one with hand-coded HTML/CSS by a professional?

Where do these people come from?

The faults are already all documented, and never fixed because this was old legacy code that we rarely touch, and actively working towards replacement. The manager isn't an idiot, but the .1% diff tolerance seems unreasonably narrow. We couldn't really change their minds so close to migration date, and we had plenty of work still to be done. Not looking for a new job either. Just wondering how you guys have dealt with it.

Claim victory over fixing all the .09% and smaller errors and move on.

We've done one better. Got to within 1% and shipped the new product to QA on the other side of the world. It's their baby now.

congratulations, sylar, you're one of Them now.

Eh, certainly wasn't my decision. Everyone left my team over here. I was the last guy standing, so the product simply had to go somewhere for support. I did end up in a more interesting space though.

30 minutes after writing my post the answer hit me. Writing out an issue really helps with understanding. The problem is that I didn't delimit the empty values. I won't know until Monday for certain though.

That explains the glitch in the system...

1. He's too busy with actual clients to update his own website (the problem at my current job)
2. He does primarily back end stuff, and so doesn't know much about HTML, and doesn't really care
3. He's good at his job, and gets enough referral business that it doesn't matter

He's advertising himself as a tech and design consultant, not a programmer. Can't find crap on Google, and his site doesn't indicate any current or past clients.

If his goal in life is to really to go out and interview people to do good design and programming, then there should be some evidence somewhere that he can keep his own house clean. Maybe the guy is a friggin' genius consultant, but there's no way I can know.

I can sell myself as a writer, but I guess that since I am too busy with clients, it is okay for my website to be full of grammar / spelling errors and unclear language.

A poker coach is too busy coaching students, so it's perfectly okay that he lost 325k this past year since he had no time to work on his game.

Marketing guy lost his company $100,000/year, but we should go ahead and give him the job because he was too busy working and didn't have time to learn basic math and data analysis skills.

We should hire a new sales person although she couldn't sell a sauna to a hypothermic Eskimo because she was too busy making friends with rude people.

We should hire a graphic designer even though she was too busy to learn PhotoShop and she prefers to use MS Paint instead.

It's not like the consultant has to build anything: just post an employment ad on Stack Overflow, interview 10 people, and get the thing coded and designed correctly. That's what he's saying he's good at. ****, do it at least once, and if only once before, on his own site.

Why oh why would anyone hire a web developer that has a crappy personal site? I mean, maybe they really are good and have tons of referral business, but I have a hard time believing this is true. This is akin to a homeless person asking for a job coding at your web-dev house (if that's what you do). Maybe you turned down the next [fill in your hero's name], but why on earth would you take a chance? If the homeless guy just tells you honestly that he's too poor to buy clothes, you'd not care at all. I would hope that any web-dev house would take enough pride in itself to create a decent site. Saying you don't have time to create a good site when you are a web-dev house is patently absurd. I can't imagine how much money a company like that stands to lose.

Maybe my minimum standards are too high?

Is it really?

We have more projects from paying customers than we can complete as it is. How can we reasonably tell a customer they need to wait another 3 weeks while we take a developer from their project and have them do an internal project?

In a vacuum, I might not hire a web developer who doesn't have a good website. On the other hand, I wouldn't be hiring a web developer in a vacuum. You look at projects they've done, try and get recommendations from people you know, etc.