The hacker is always the last to leave, late at night, which impresses the MD
Counterpoint:
Hacker uses disciplined development languages and RAD, dynamic languages (e.g., Perl) to get their work done during regular 9-5 hours (often ahead of schedule), and never needs to work late or demand more budget/schedule/employees.
Slacker throws sh*t at the wall until something sticks, relies on the buzzword languages de jure (Java, .NET, etc.), ends up putting major extra hours in to cover their own screwups, goes over schedule and over budget.
Slacker gets awards, promotions, and raises, while hacker gets layed off, since PHB sees "Slacker goes the extra mile to get difficult projects done", while "hacker doesn't seem committed to the team".
| [reply] |
Reminds me of a time when "the team" was asked to stay up late to help with a server upgrade. The upgrade was a wide-awake nightmare! The "admin" decided to upgrade all the software on the production server to the current version; this included major version changes on the OS, database, Apache, Perl, you name it. Perl alone went from 5.00503 to 5.8.3! Of course nothing worked, and everything on the site had to be retested and debugged that evening, er, morning. We're still finding broken site elements to this day.
I worked my usual 9-5, went home and had dinner, then worked from 7-10:30 and went to bed exhausted. I come in early the next day to find (surprise!) that I'm the only developer there. All those "team players" took the morning off! Customer service, marketing, and suits are asking me "WTF happened?"--not a single message had been forwarded to them to let them know what was working, what was borken, anything at all. I try to reproduce from sporadic late night email exchanges what is working and what is not.
That afternoon, PHB gives me a hard time for not burning the midnight oil; looks like I'm "not a team player". Meh, I stopped caring long ago. Oddly enough, the rest of "the team" thought I did the right thing once I explained it to them. And as long as the ladies in customer service still like me, I'm OK. :-)
| [reply] |
"...working on fixing a crashing bug in the inhouse editor instead of..."
Of course, companies that insist on creating their own in-house editors, mail clients, programming languages, etc. are a whole class of problems unto themselves! | [reply] |
This was in the days when the PC was just coming on the market - the hardware was also designed and built inhouse.
Another programmer that started around the same time as our hacker brought his own PC in to work, and insisted on doing all his development on that. But by avoiding using the system he was writing for as much as he possibly could, he ended up learning nothing about the system. It isn't clear whether that was the only reason his code was crap.
Hugo
| [reply] |
