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

**jrandom** · 26th March 2008, 22:13

Originally Posted by xerxesdaphat

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?

Your perspective is flawed, dear lad.

Microsoft invest very significant R&D in their development tools. Far more than has ever been invested or will be invested in the open-source library to which I referred earlier. Any bottom-line-focused software company is silly if they fail to leverage that.

While it may be the instinctive reaction of a student or unemployed Free-as-in-Speech hippie to grab the source and fiddle with it because they can't afford a couple of grand for an MSDN subscription, time is money, and quite frankly, the thought of maintaining someone else's STL implementation should quite rightly give any software company CTO the screaming heebie-jeebies when they're assembling project timelines.

The company I'm working for hasn't the faintest hope in hell of being able to meaningfully invest in developing an open-source library to the level of anything that Microsoft supplies in its branded development tools, and in the end, all that matters is delivering a high-quality product to customers on time and on spec. Philosophical niceties and penny-pinching be damned; the average licenced installation of this product is worth close to seven figures of revenue.

Welcome to the real world, where working software equals profit.

**cowpoos** · 26th March 2008, 22:26

Originally Posted by jrandom

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.

Need real work stories??

**RantyDave** · 26th March 2008, 22:28

Originally Posted by jrandom

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?

For rental of my soul? $200/hr.

Fine. Get some other fucker to do it then.

Dave

**jrandom** · 26th March 2008, 22:29

Originally Posted by RantyDave

Fine. Get some other fucker to do it then.

Oh, don't worry, I'm about to.

**Pussy** · 26th March 2008, 22:32

Originally Posted by cowpoos

Need real work stories??

Yep, and here's me getting pissed off when I get cowshit all over the aeroplane... pales into insignificance

**jim.cox** · 27th March 2008, 08:02

Ah, The joys of cutting code...

**Brett** · 27th March 2008, 08:48

I respect what you guys can do. But I wont pretend to understand it!

**avgas** · 27th March 2008, 09:04

Originally Posted by sels1

Yes, Ive noticed
So do accountants, schoolteachers, and rugby players. If we all wrote threads about our work the site could get a little busy. No offence...just an observation

Dude its not like fight club or anything - we all have to bitch about work somewhere. Not all of us get paid to loose rugby games lol

**avgas** · 27th March 2008, 09:09

Originally Posted by McJim

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

Nope and my shed full of cards with holes in them is useless too

**tide** · 27th March 2008, 10:52

Originally Posted by avgas

Nope and my shed full of cards with holes in them is useless too

ah punch cards... those where the days...

thank f..k I grew up in the modern era...

**Finn** · 27th March 2008, 10:57

Originally Posted by tide

ah punch cards... those where the days...

thank f..k I grew up in the modern era...

Yeah, now we punch our computers. I know I do.

**forkoil** · 27th March 2008, 11:00

Originally Posted by tide

ah punch cards... those where the days...

thank f..k I grew up in the modern era...

Agree with that (although it was fun using the IBM 029 duplicating and holding the source card to insert a column or 2 in the new card - who will remember THAT). But alot of things are worse now, like the proliferation of stuff, all too f*cken confusing now, theres absolutely no sense or comfort that you pretty much know everything anymore! And everythings TOO SERIOUS, wheres the FUN at work these days!!