Should Have Paid Me More

So I had worked in a company that specialized in maintenance and service.  During my time at this organization I started a career as a software developer.  I dare say that it came naturally to me, being the lazy person that I am.  At this organization there were 2 developers that were primarily Java developers.  At the time, I was using .Net.  Oddly enough, I learned most of what I know from those 2 developers in spite of writing in different languages and for this I am eternally grateful.

So one day I decided that I may have better opportunities somewhere else.  So I got a new job at an insurance company and was now exposed to a very pure .Net atmosphere.  The main role I would have would be developing and maintaining the portal that they used for their agents.  Seems relatively simple.  Certainly there would be some quirkiness to this portal but the whole thing would be able to reuse a few abstract patterns right?

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A few years ago I interviewed with a regional insurance company for a “Senior Software Developer” position.    The application I would be working on was described as an Online application that allowed the companies agents to quote and sign business.  It was a ‘robust and flexible’ system that had been developed and enhanced over 9 years.  The application was primarily developed by consultants (Boy THAT should have been a red flag), but the division was recently acquired by the regional insurance company and the new management wanted to do development in house.  I was to be the first of a dozen new hires.  I took the job.

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Note: You may wish to read Part I and Part II of this series to gain context.

I enjoy using tables. They clearly demarcate the boundaries between datum, creating an easily-understood convention for interpreting information while retaining amazing flexibilities. They’re dead straight simple to program – an HTML layout table be created using as little as six tags with very logical names, a JSPWiki table simplistically requires only a few pipes, and Microsoft created an entire program designed around tables. They call it Excel. continue reading…

Note: You may wish to read Part I of this series to gain context.

When first assigned to the Plus project I was told to play the role of “bug manager”. “Jim (see Part I) wants to do the right thing,” the boss remarked. “so he’s informed his new company that he’ll be providing bugfixes and support on the Plus project during his first month. We can contact him about bugs at any time during work hours and he’ll try to have a fix coded and checked into SVN before the next day.”

Given Jim’s apparent charity, my role in the project was simply to aggregate bug reports from the 150 users, de-duplicate and prioritize them, and ship the result off to Jim. This seemed decently straightforward; after all, I didn’t know anything about the 500-class codebase or the difference between intended functionality and broken features, and there wasn’t any requirements document, project documentation, or decent in-code documentation available. As the voluminous bug reports crashed in like a tidal wave in monsoon season during an earthquake, I went to work. continue reading…

When I interviewed for a programmer/analyst job at one company I was impressed by the high-class technology and excited by the opportunities it represented (“You could be a god here” was mentioned several times). Shortly after starting work another member of the company’s four-person development team took off for greener pastures with a year of employment under his belt. This programmer, whom we’ll call “Jim”, had been the sole developer on a revolutionary project we’ll call “Plus”.

Plus was intended to be a company-changing desktop application giving remote field technicians the ability to record site visit information offline and later “sync” it with the company’s servers. The product was released straight from Jim’s development machine to production on 150 technician laptops just two weeks before Jim’s last day at the company. Being the only available developer, I was assigned to the project in his stead. continue reading…