At my current job, I have free reign to use whatever tools/frameworks I please. Such as NHibernate, OSS, Subversion, Castle MonoRail, Windsor and other cutting edge tools. I am feeling like I am not being challenged enough however. I can learn new things, but there is only one other developer that I mentor and it's getting a tad old. I w...
I've recently been offered a 6 month contracted programming position with a company through a temp agency. I've never done business through a temp agency and am wondering what questions I should ask when I speak with them. I've compiled a small list of things I think I ought to know. I realize they sound like general employment question...
I have been invited to do a second interview for a company recruiting for a software engineer. This interview will consist of a 45 minute programmatic test on a laptop followed by a whiteboard presentation on the solution. This position is Java/J2EE based so I'm assuming (hoping) the test will be implemented using Java. Have you ever do...
I wondered whether people had any ideas for a means of escaping an internal IT job under the following circumstances:- No Computer Science degree Very passionate about programming Trying hard to develop progranming skills outside of work As argued so well by Joel Spolsky and many others, internal IT has no, or very little, business m...
I always find it really difficult to try and determine where I am salary-wise compared to my peers in the area. Sites like salary.com always have a wide array of job titles where many sound very similar and it's hard to tell which title really fits you and their salary ranges seem a bit inflated to me. In the rare case when job posting...
I hear stories about the mythical "Highly Paid Consultant". They are the people who the corporate bigwigs call in to design and implement the huge, mission-critical systems that will make or break the business. Let's assume that I was an expert in some field of computers (I'm not, but let's just assume). How would I become a consultant?...
I am seriously considering actually reading through the whole Art of Computer Programming by Don Knuth. Though I know not many people actually manage to do this, and it's a ridiculously huge task to attempt, I wondered what people thought reading the whole lot will give me? I believe it'll give me a deeper and wider understanding of pr...
In light of the current worldwide economic downturn, is now a good time to be looking elsewhere for a job? I'm currently in the process of interviewing with a few different companies, but I'm worried that I'm not doing the right thing. My main reason for looking for other employment is to gain the technical experience I don't feel I'm g...
Having worked in software development for 12 years, I've recently started to worry about ageism in the industry. Seeing I'm not too bad at what I do I've never really worried about where my next job's going to come from, but the more I look around me the younger software developers seem to get. Although I feel I'm now at the top of my p...
What advice do you have for software engineering performance reviews? What have you done to prepare for and during your past performance reviews which has worked well / poorly? ...
Should software engineers and computer scientists know the fundamentals electronic engineering such as circuits, capacitors, VLSI and other important concepts? Do you think that training in this area makes for a better programmer? ...
At work I have found it very difficult to 'sell' the idea of refactoring to management and senior colleagues. This is despite us having inherited a truly awful codebase (we all thought it was awful including them) from a programmer who really shouldn't be in the profession. I recommended over and over that we refactor and it simply didn'...
I'm the only developer in the (small) company that I work for, although I'm fortunate that my boss is very technical. What tips do other people in a similar situation have. I'm wondering about how you handle some of the following issues: getting advice and mentoring (from a person) not having another coder to run a solution past deve...
There are a lot of skills that needs to be acquired by programmers to create software in a professional way. My question is, how do programmers go about acquiring these skills. For example, to be a better ASP.NET programmer, one should have strong knowledge and skills on ASP.NET C# Database (like SQL Server / Oracle) OOAD and UML Conf...
I wondered what people's opinions were regarding self confidence as a factor in ability as a programmer. Personally I've found it makes a surprisingly big difference to my ability to code quality software. I've found that when I've felt less confident about code I've been willing to settle with suboptimal code and not explore potentiall...
For me, it's my uncle who let me use a Commodore Pet and then a Sinclair Spectrum from the college that he worked at. This experience sparked a fascination with computers that lasts to this day. So aside from yourself, who has had the biggest impact on your software career and how? EDIT: thanks for the answers, there's some great advic...
Hi All, I am currently working as a Quality Assurance manager for a software development company. However, I am finding that what I really enjoy is programming. Unfortunately, I feel I do not have enough experience to actually be hired as a programmer. I have the opportunity to do some programming in my job (for example I am writing a...
Recently, a member of our team got burned out and had to leave. Basically, he got into a death march situation on an overdue project, started by working late to catch up which grew into stranger and stranger hours. Eventually, he was leaving when everyone else was arriving and starting work in the evenings. Consequently, he developed s...
Based on the tags page here, C# is the big winner. Freshmeat lists far more C projects than anything else. ...
Hi, I am wondering what performance indicators people encounter, and think are realistic, for programmers in the workplace? I've seen numerous articles (I can't recall a really good one that I read right now) that detail how programmers will optimise for the metric they are being measured by (whether that be lines of code etc.). Howev...