The Development Abstraction Layer
I used to look at this site a lot a few years ago and I just rediscovered it today by looking at Bloglines Top 200 Feeds. I found this article very poignant because it echoes closely what the developers (all two of us) go through here.
Don't get me wrong, I like my job, especially compared to my last one, but is too much to ask that we not be stuck in a room with 9 other very loud customer care people who constantly interrupt us all day with their questions?
Is it too much to ask that the room that we spend 9 hours a day in be kept at a temperature less than 80?
Could we have at least one person who could test our code after we write it? Because anyone who has ever programmed before knows, its pretty difficult to break your own code. Subconcsciously we just can't do it.
The whole air conditioner portion of this article made me laugh because last summer they finally bought us a new window unit, but it was so freakin' hot out we couldn't wait 2 weeks for the maintenance guy to put it in so me and the other guy assembled it and put it in ourselves. It must have been a funny sight to any onlookers on the street seeing me, all arms and legs, hanging out of a third story window, 60 feet above pavement, adjusting the levelers.
The most angry I have ever been, I think, was the day I came in last fall and the maintenance guy had taken the AC out for the winter and I wasn't allowed to put it back in. It actually hit 83 degrees in here one day. In the dead of winter. And I don't think the temperature ever got below 80 until I put the AC back in a couple of weeks ago. We opened the windows every day, but the cubicle walls actually do a great job of preventing air circulation.
And lastly, this is us:
"You've got your typical company started by ex-software salesmen, where everything is Sales Sales Sales and we all exist to drive more sales. These companies can be identified in the wild because they build version 1.0 of the software (somehow) and then completely lose interest in developing new software. Their development team is starved or nonexistent because it never occurred to anyone to build version 2.0... all that management knows how to do is drive more sales."
Yeah. The .NET conversion we had been planning on doing this summer for over a year has now been pushed back. Actually, no, it hasn't been pushed back. We are expected to do both, continued enhancement to the old while building the new and any changes we make to the old need to be incorporated into the new. Redundant programming. Gotta love it.
I am no primadonna and honestly I'd much rather be driving a tractor in the burning sun, but since that doesn't pay well and I am stuck here, is it too much to ask that the room I am in is cool and quiet?
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4 comments:
Anybody (not just you elitist software programmers) who works in an office these days has to deal with noise. A good pair of headphones goes a long way towards that.
Instead of dealing with all of their quirky demands, a lot of companies let their software designers work from home. Maybe you should convince them to let you do that.
Whatever. I sit in the middle of a freakin' call center. And I have headphones, but I end up having to take them off every 10 minutes to answer questions like, "so and so is trying to view a pdf document on her iBook with os 9 and it is coming up blank. do you know why?"
Sorry, man - I was just kidding.
you just convinced me that i don't wanna be a programmer.
i'll stick to my dreams of owning a twelve million square foot datacenter.
and it will have the most reliable HVAC system known to mankind.
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