- Danger of being an internal IT developer - http://hjiang.net/archives/165
- Part 1 of 3 - http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/03.html
- Part 2 of 3 - http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/04.html
- “in house software.” It’s terrifying. You never want to do in house software. You’re a programmer for a big corporation that makes, oh, I don’t know, aluminum cans, and there’s nothing quite available off the shelf which does the exact kind of aluminum can processing that they need, so they have these in-house programmers, or they hire companies like Accenture and IBM to send them overpriced programmers, to write this software. And there are two reasons this is so frightening: one, because it’s not a very fulfilling career if you’re a programmer, for a list of reasons which I’ll enumerate in a moment, but two, it’s frightening because this is what probably 80% of programming jobs are like, and if you’re not very, very careful when you graduate, you might find yourself working on in-house software, by accident, and let me tell you, it can drain the life out of you.
- The key point about in-house development is that once it’s “good enough,” you stop.... It’s good enough. Get out of there and onto the next thing. That’s the second reason these jobs suck: as soon as your program gets good enough, you have to stop working on it. Once the core functionality is there, the main problem is solved, there is absolutely no return-on-investment, no business reason to make the software any better. So all of these in house programs look like a dog’s breakfast: because it’s just not worth a penny to make them look nice. Forget any pride in workmanship or craftsmanship you learned in CS323. You’re going to churn out embarrassing junk, and then, you’re going to rush off to patch up last year’s embarrassing junk which is starting to break down because it wasn’t done right in the first place, twenty-seven years of that and you get a gold watch. Oh, and they don’t give gold watches any more. 27 years and you get carpal tunnel syndrome. Now, at a product company, for example, if you’re a software developer working on a software product or even an online product like Google or Facebook, the better you make the product, the better it sells.
- That’s the Silicon Valley style of management. Managers exist to get furniture out of the way so the real talent can do brilliant work.
- http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/05.html
- And despite the fact that CS115 didn’t count towards the major, all this experience writing about slightly technical topics turned out to be the most useful thing I got out of the CS department. Being able to write clearly on technical topics is the difference between being a grunt individual contributor programmer and being a leader.
- the really good program managers at Microsoft were the ones who could write really well.
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