Friday, August 28, 2009

Yes!

Sometimes you really aren't surprised by someone's statement. A colleague was strutting his stuff (or at least trying to) to one of the junior programmers and stated, "Would you believe I was a self taught programmer?" My first thought was to shout YES BECAUSE YOU ARE A CRAPPY, SLOPPY, SLOB OF A PROGRAMMER!! But I wisely kept my mouth shut while he continued on, "Yea I went to school, and by the end I was teaching the professor stuff." This does not surprise me, that he thought he was teaching something to the professor, he has that high an opinion of himself. I had heard enough, and interrupted with work, interestingly enough to go over one of his 'improvements' that I needed to rebuild from scratch to extend the functionality of. To me, he will always be a stray cat and this was just another of his rodent's I was having to clean up.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

When yoda speaks, listen, you should.

Working in software, you time is valuable. In addition, your time is often billable to clients or capitalizable for your company. You track your time, what projects you are working on, defects, bug fixes, client calls, planning meetings - you track it all. You don't do this because its fun, you do it because it is necessary. You especially do it when times are tight, because if you bill your time to clients it makes the company money and when you capitalize your time, the expense is spread over time and both those things makes the bottom line better. Your company buys MS project organizing software that allows you to track it painfully. Oh, did I say that out-loud, of course what I meant is that they buy time tracking software that allows you to track it painlessly (or not in our case.) When you switch to a department where most of the time is on capitalizable projects, you beg endlessly for you manager to setup - oops that out-loud thing again - ask your manager to authorize you to log time against the department's projects which of course are already setup (or not in our case.) And so when you get to the end of the quarter, there your department is with 80% (or 0% in our case) of your time either billed or capitalized and the VP of the division is a happy camper. In our case, he isn't and my manager and his manager both got called out on their failure. All I have to say is, I TOLD YOU SO!