So you want to be a computer programmer when you grow up?

[Gremlin]

IT would be such a pleasant industry if there were no users.....

Thats just what I think when people break shit .... constantly....

mmm Visual Studio... and coding within it... what a suppressed memory that is Funnily enough, I ran out of uni at the end of the degree thinking hah, how useless, I'll never code again, and walked straight into a job where the boss wanted me to write a program to process logs

Since then, I've actually come to like batch files and vb scripting, as its mighty useful... so who knows... can be useful

[Edbear]

I know.



Sorry. Just felt like I had to vent.

And we do seem to have had a fair handful of threads over the years from people asking about careers in IT, so I thought that a fresh and detailed perspective from the trenches might be a useful tidbit to add to the archives for posterity.

Quite rightly, too. You have helped me immensely, I had no idea what you were talking about until the last line, therefore I have decided not to be a computer programmer...

Funnily enough, my second and third jobs were in forestry...

[Ixion]

C followed by anything is wanking. there is only C. Pure and simple. Port it to Cobol, it'll run faster and be easier to maintain.

[Bonez]

1.7 million lines of C++.

That's the size of the project I have loaded into Visual Studio 2005 right now.

Throughout vast quantities of it that haven't been touched in the last five years, STL iterators are treated as equivalent to pointers, and STL vectors are treated as equivalent to arrays.

The pointers dance their cryptic shuffle across what are supposed to be generic template containers, while iterators are randomly dereferenced and picked up again via the address operator on anything that happens to be the same type.

All of this has been masked up until now, because the product has spent its last 7 years being built with the STLport libraries. It so happens that these libraries are implemented in a way which quietly works with the above treatment.

Naturally, nobody who wrote any of the relevant code still works here.

And now, The Powers That Be have decided that they must Move With The Times, and therefore The Product must be built with the Visual Studio STL, rather than relying on a dusty old open-source third-party library.

The task of doing whatever is necessary to achieve this, Dear Reader, has fallen upon me.

All hell is breaking loose as Microsoft's standards-compliant compiler and libraries start gagging and dying on the horrible way that this vast wad of vomit is abusing them.

I pick my way through the sea of incomprehensible 30-line error messages, one at a time, my psyche slowly dessicating with each successive file that I find myself checking out of Visual SourceSafe.

Ladies and gentlemen, contract software engineering on MIS products will steal your soul. What good is a fine-sounding hourly rate when you shuffle home every night with deadness in your eyes and no spring in your step?

I really just wanted to be a lumberjack.

Go for an evening ride.

[marty]

Now i've got a student loan, and instead of being a pilot already i'm only just getting started, but im fucking glad im not a programmer thats for sure!

what stage are you up to with flying? did you go with north shore ?

[xwhatsit]

And now, The Powers That Be have decided that they must Move With The Times, and therefore The Product must be built with the Visual Studio STL, rather than relying on a dusty old open-source third-party library.

Erm, I'm not one of the fellas wot hired you, but isn't that kind of painting yourself into a corner? Proprietary STL, wont to change at the whim of a pack of idiots somewhere else in the world -- compared to something that, however dusty, you can always grab the source and fiddle with it yourself? And you're paying somebody how much to make this regression?

C followed by anything is wanking. there is only C. Pure and simple. Port it to Cobol, it'll run faster and be easier to maintain.

As much as people keep telling me I'll want to get excited about OOP to be successful, my mind and heart still iterate together in pure C.

Can't quite share your enthusiasm for COBOL, you syntax-happy, white-shirted, blue-suited old man

[Ixion]

I *likes* Cobol I does. A very underrated language. You can do a lot with Cobol. Did you know that you can use ocx controls in Cobol?

[El Dopa]

a job where I process logs

I do that for free every morning. Get some peace and quiet to read a bike mag while I'm doing it, too. Let me know how I can get paid for doing it - that would make it perfect.

[doc]

Shouldn't be a problem for you old chap. You've done 2.8 million lines on KB in just 6 months.

Right on, he's a good counta cos he has just counted another 1.7 million.
I just count minutes to the next smoko and it is really hard sometimes.

[McJim]

So we don't program in Forth, Pascal or Basic anymore?

[limbimtimwim]

I *likes* Cobol I does. A very underrated language. You can do a lot with Cobol. Did you know that you can use ocx controls in Cobol?

But *why* would you do that?

[limbimtimwim]

The task of doing whatever is necessary to achieve this, Dear Reader, has fallen upon me.

Just say 'no'.

[Ixion]

But *why* would you do that?

Sheer devilment.

[Tank]

C#, C++ cobol (FFS), Pascal, turtle, OOP, agile programming methods, 1.7 million lines of code.

Jesus and you wonder people point and laugh at nerds.

I also work in IT - but if people ever ask me what I do for a living, I tell them Im a builder. Then I never have anyone utter words like syntax to me at a party!

[Tank]

what stage are you up to with flying? did you go with north shore ?

or Finsbury Park mosque?