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[penguinofhonor]

Wait, you're a Louisvillian as well?

From August to May I am.

[RedKing]

Job searching. Goddamn, jobs....Y U NO AVAILABLE IN MY AREA?

Only government jobs even remotely applicable to me in this area are with Forestry Service or Army National Guard (and would require me to be in the Guard). I'd actually be halfway amenable to the latter, except that I doubt I'd pass the service physical. And you have to join the Guard BEFORE you get the job. If you wind up not getting the job, you're locked into a commitment to serve. Still wouldn't be that bad, if there wasn't a distinct pattern of mobilizing and deploying Guard units to foreign wars.


Followup rage: My graduate alma mater has an opening for a lecturer position in the department I got my master's in. And they're only requiring a master's degree. AND significant experience and collegiate teaching experience. Which is almost impossible, because virtually all colleges require a Ph.D. to teach. And I have no significant experience in my field because it's almost impossible to get jobs in political science these days unless you come out of Georgetown or Columbia or the like, and my alma mater's job placement assistance was a sad joke (and their 100% placement rate was total bullshit).

tldr; My college is trolling me.

I'm tempted to apply anyway. My CV is non-existent, but part of the application involves submitting a sample syllabus and sample assignments. Maybe if I came up with something impressive-looking enough, they'd overlook the utter lack of credentials.

Meh, who am I kidding? I'm not qualified or certified for jackshit. Probably not even the job I have now (noticing a lot more "B.A. Comp Sci required" in the tech support jobs out there)

[Fenrir]

Is it a flash-based game, greatorder?

[GlyphGryph]

Everybody I work with seems to have taken up the glorious hobby of "code obfuscation".

I am looking at a webpage, and there is quite literally no way to tell where this button comes from without following every single step of the page loading, all 7000+ lines spread across 7 files (and counting).

Still no button in sight.

And the worst part is, I don't even need to know to fix it - I could add a bit of code that would fix it right now. But lord knows what it would break.

[Aklyon]

Yay for hiding your code's problems in a giant pile of other stuff?

[MaximumZero]

"code obfuscation".

If I may? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. Seriously, WTF, programmers? You know other people are going to be looking at your code. Why be a dick about it?

[GlyphGryph]

Because encapsulation and blackboxing is good, and some people do it... very poorly.

[Scelly9]

Its hilarious. Its the same thing with video game programmers. They put millions of dollars worth of DRM in their game to stall the crackers for another hour or so.

[RedKing]

"code obfuscation".

If I may? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. Seriously, WTF, programmers? You know other people are going to be looking at your code. Why be a dick about it?

Because if you're the only one on the planet that understands how your code works, they can never fire you.

[MaximumZero]

"code obfuscation".

If I may? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. Seriously, WTF, programmers? You know other people are going to be looking at your code. Why be a dick about it?

Because if you're the only one on the planet that understands how your code works, they can never fire you.

Were I a boss/manager looking over code and I saw something like that, I'd fire the programmer that wrote it on the spot. Then, I'd waste the rest of the day getting people to take it apart and put it back together the way it was supposed to be written. I hate seeing resources wasted like that.

[nenjin]

Then, I'd waste several months getting people to take it apart before I decide to scrap the whole thing and spend several hundred thousand dollars having someone make a new one, where they will pull the same shit. I hate seeing resources wasted like that.

FTFY. You don't just pop into an entire program and start tinkering until it's "how it's the way it's supposed to be." That's like trying to take the brain out of a living animal, pop another animal's brain in and hope it gets up and walks.

Programmers know this, and RedKing is right. It's job security. When your choices are the licensing fees for an entirely new piece of software, versus swallowing your rage and pride and spending a couple grand to bring in the programmer who made it to fix it, the choice is not hard. Especially when your software is doing something like supporting a website, managing a few million pieces of inventory, or whatever. Those aren't things that can just stop for a week so you can switch to different software. Or if they are, it's still a week worth of non-business. Most managers aren't willing to do that.

My dad used to tell me stories about a programmer he knew. Wrote a kill switch into the software he made, so the program simply stopped working at a set date. Companies were forced to call him in and pay him to come in and literally flip a few bits around so it'd start working again. This was the late 70s, early 80s, but I imagine it hasn't changed that much.

[RedKing]

Wow. Now that's pretty wicked.

But yes, one of the things I learned a long time ago is that if you want job security, keep the "institutional knowledge" in your head rather than written down. For example, most tech support desks have a sort of knowledge base that people are supposed to maintain and update as they find new tricks for various problems, document the little idiosyncracies of the network/devices/etc.

On paper it's so that new hires can be brought up to speed quicker and so you don't go nuts trying to remember everything. But in practice, most experienced techs leave a lot of shit out of the knowledge base, because if you put everything in there, they don't need an experienced tech anymore. They can show you the door and hire some random CSR for half your pay who will just follow scripts based on the info you provided.

As a programmer, if you completely and thoroughly document how your code works, then can ditch you and bring in a cheaper programmer who will follow your notes.

[MaximumZero]

Maybe I should be glad I'm getting out of the programming racket. Those two last answers make me sick.

[Korbac]

Maybe I should be glad I'm getting out of the programming racket. Those two last answers make me sick.

Yeah. 

[Nadaka]

As far as programmers are concerned it is not really true as long as there is new work to be done, even though some half wit ass hat managers might try it.

One experienced developer can do everything a dozen fresh from paper mill code monkeys can do, and can also do plenty that they can't.