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To answer the original question: I have been a programmer for 11 years and love it. There are ups and downs, but mostly ups. Also being a corporate developer i

To answer the original question: I have been a programmer for 11 years and love it. There are ups and downs, but mostly ups. Also being a corporate developer is not awful at all. It is great. It might depend on the environment and the corp that you are talking about. The big factor that I have noticed in my enjoyment is working in an Extreme Programming environment, specifically pair-programming.

demallien 18y ago
Yup, corporate work is not necessarily as evil as it sounds. Take my situation for example. In theory, my company sells a library that is embedded into set top boxes. It's written in C, as that is the only language available for many platforms in the embedded space. But in reality, I spend most of my time hacking in Ruby, doing tools. For example, a while back, to stuff up pirates, I transferred the lib to run inside of a virtual machine. I wrote a tool that took a relatively short description of an existing processor, parsed the file, and generated the C code to emulate the processor. Then, in testing we found that asynchronous cryptography was just too slow in the VM, so we needed to move it back out to native. I then wrote a tool that could examine the two that were compiled (inside the VM, and native), identify the missing functions, and then parse the header files for each lib to automatically generate the code that serialised the parameters crossing the interface of the VM. Right now I'm working on a tool that is very similar to distcc, to speed up our compile times - when we prepare a delivery of the software, we have to verify that everything compiles correctly without warning on about 30 different platforms, with about 6 different options being available. that makes nearly 200 builds, with each build taking about 10mins. You can get old checking for compile errors, and then correcting them. We're hoping, with the help of a server farm and my tool to get that time down to about 10 mins. In fact, I can't remember the last time I actually worked on the actual problem domain at my company. I spend most of my life working with binary files, compilers, simple parsers and other pure computer sciencey stuff. So much for corporate work being boring. That said, I'm working hard on an application for the Mac that I'm hoping to sell, as I'm over having to play politics to convince PHBs that there are improvements that can be made to the product.

demallien 18y ago

Yup, corporate work is not necessarily as evil as it sounds. Take my situation for example. In theory, my company sells a library that is embedded into set top boxes. It's written in C, as that is the only language available for many platforms in the embedded space. But in reality, I spend most of my time hacking in Ruby, doing tools. For example, a while back, to stuff up pirates, I transferred the lib to run inside of a virtual machine. I wrote a tool that took a relatively short description of an existing processor, parsed the file, and generated the C code to emulate the processor. Then, in testing we found that asynchronous cryptography was just too slow in the VM, so we needed to move it back out to native. I then wrote a tool that could examine the two that were compiled (inside the VM, and native), identify the missing functions, and then parse the header files for each lib to automatically generate the code that serialised the parameters crossing the interface of the VM. Right now I'm working on a tool that is very similar to distcc, to speed up our compile times - when we prepare a delivery of the software, we have to verify that everything compiles correctly without warning on about 30 different platforms, with about 6 different options being available. that makes nearly 200 builds, with each build taking about 10mins. You can get old checking for compile errors, and then correcting them. We're hoping, with the help of a server farm and my tool to get that time down to about 10 mins. In fact, I can't remember the last time I actually worked on the actual problem domain at my company. I spend most of my life working with binary files, compilers, simple parsers and other pure computer sciencey stuff. So much for corporate work being boring. That said, I'm working hard on an application for the Mac that I'm hoping to sell, as I'm over having to play politics to convince PHBs that there are improvements that can be made to the product.