4 ms·

Yikes! Reminds me of my last programming job. I was working on a commercial printing company. It did a lot of products for the banking industry. The print mac

Yikes! Reminds me of my last programming job. I was working on a commercial printing company. It did a lot of products for the banking industry. The print machines were pretty old, and made by Xerox. So old, in fact, that most of the wiring/sensors were one-off replacements done by the technician in charge. It was (still is) a mess. A computer running Windows 98 (this on 2011) talked to a Linux box. The Linux box then sent the job to the board on the machine. It was all done in Java, except the low level stuff that ran C. The machines broke constantly, and they required some Oracle certified dev to come down and "fix it" (which cost thousands of dollars). One day, I asked my boss "Why don't they just buy new machines? It costs more to keep these running than to buy a new ones." His answer opened up my eyes to the corporate/bureocratric culture of mediocrity: "This works." And to to top it all off, the production manager wanted me to write him a "little" program for the Windows 98 machine. The program would be used to keep track of prodcution for the whole department. Unbelievable.

Duff 14y ago
There's probably some corruption in there as well. Management doesn't give a crap about the work function, and only one vendor is qualified to respond to the maintenance RFP. So some old-timer is probably making a mint "maintaining" the system.
- rmATinnovafy 14y ago
  You are totally right. I forgot to mention that they are locked in to Oracle and Microsoft. My job was to develop a C# based system, but they made me use VS 2005 Express (!@#$%), because they would not buy the latest version/license. That job taught me a lot about how not to treat your programmers.
  - darklajid 14y ago
    "Would not buy the latest version/license" is .. misleading. I don't want to offend you and cannot judge the motivations of your employer at that time, but .. You don't need a license to develop C#. Even if you _need_ VisualStudio (which you don't..), there's a free version available. Otherwise SharpDevelop/MonoDevelop (yes, the latter is available and applicable for Windows as well!) would've done the job. I'd probably have prefered to drop to a notepad/vim based setup before touching 2005 and looking at .Net 1.1/2.0 stuff again.
Too 14y ago
Simply incompetency, "When you don't know what you're doing you fear change."

Duff 14y ago

There's probably some corruption in there as well. Management doesn't give a crap about the work function, and only one vendor is qualified to respond to the maintenance RFP. So some old-timer is probably making a mint "maintaining" the system.

rmATinnovafy 14y ago
You are totally right. I forgot to mention that they are locked in to Oracle and Microsoft. My job was to develop a C# based system, but they made me use VS 2005 Express (!@#$%), because they would not buy the latest version/license. That job taught me a lot about how not to treat your programmers.
- darklajid 14y ago
  "Would not buy the latest version/license" is .. misleading. I don't want to offend you and cannot judge the motivations of your employer at that time, but .. You don't need a license to develop C#. Even if you _need_ VisualStudio (which you don't..), there's a free version available. Otherwise SharpDevelop/MonoDevelop (yes, the latter is available and applicable for Windows as well!) would've done the job. I'd probably have prefered to drop to a notepad/vim based setup before touching 2005 and looking at .Net 1.1/2.0 stuff again.

Too 14y ago

Simply incompetency, "When you don't know what you're doing you fear change."