There's a common conception in software that x% of projects never get finished... but to be honest, I'm not sure at all if it's the case - and it's hard to know because most projects that don't get finished, rarely get talked about. So I pose the question to a bunch of other developers: How many projects have you worked on that tanked/d...
I'm facing a career decision. I currently work for a huge, huge, huge company (this should bring 3-4 companies to mind) as a programmer. I work on a really big (3 million lines of code) J2EE web application. I've been out of college for 2 years and I pretty much know that big corporate life isn't for me. There is a career opportunity to...
Are programmers products of their working environment? Two programmers A and B get hired at the same time at different companies. Imagine programmer A working in a small company (2-3 people) that undertakes small projects and has no intention of educating its staff (certification courses and other educational opportunities). What are ...
I am a new graduate (in the last four or five months), and like many in my situation, I'm having serious difficulty finding a job. I've got a good degree (BEng in Comp. Eng.) from a top-three school in my non-American English-speaking Western country, a pretty good resume, and a terrible GPA. I've been making contacts (applying, person...
Is there something online like personalMBA for a CS degree? Something like a list of courses with syllabus and books. After going through everything you are sure to have covered everything they do in a normal college. ...
What are a programmer's reasonable options for a source of income? If you'd like you can include more than one, listing pros/cons, etc. ...
I am currently unemployed and i am fortunate enough to have two job choices in front of me: Web development for an american company that is about to open an office here (Mexico), this company owns a few portals. They work mostly with open source stuff (LAMP development, integration of 3rd party API's). Enterprise web application develo...
I have a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, and have a couple years work experience doing mostly QA (and a little development) on a networking related software product. Currently, I am not working and I was wondering if acquiring a Network+ certification would be worthwhile. The Network+ certification seems to cover rather general m...
I did my first paid programming job with 16 while I was in school. The application, a special CAD editor, is still in productive use after nearly 14 years and many enhancements. After that I always did some paid programming work besides school and university, just to get practice and money of course. Now I work nearly five years as a sof...
I am currently in a role that requires me to concentrate on programming and at the same time, mentor junior devs (read constant interruption). It's very challenging for me to switch gears and maintain focussing on the job at hand. It's not only frustrating but also time consuming. I feel if I master this art of multitasking, I could defi...
Questions How do you know when to make the move from a programmer into a manager of programmers / projects? What are some risks to make the jump to manager and can you go back? NB: I'm looking for some specific bullet point questions that a developer can ask himself/herself to help in the decision making process. ...
I am currently a BA (business systems analyst) and i want to get more technical. How difficult is it to start programming at 27? I know the basic concepts but haven't really "sat down" and get hands on. What would you recommend doing? I got some c# asp.net books for beginners is that a good way? ...
I'm in the position of inheriting a number of small (between 5 to 20 hr) jobs which largely involve providing fixes and changes to existing systems on a contract basis. I've never done the self-contracting thing before - all my previous wages were set by the customer / employer. How do I decide how much to charge? I don't want to under-...
In my career I have had two programming jobs. Both these jobs were in a field that I am most familiar with (C# / MSSQL) but I have quit both jobs for the same reason: unmanageable code and bad (loose) company structure. There was something in common with both these jobs: small companies (in one I was the only developer). Currently I am ...
I'm seeing less and less of this on job boards, and I'm having trouble hiring an interface engineer who specializes in XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. Is this because designers are taking this on with their design duties, or programmers are now responsible for building out pages, or is it because this work is easily contracted out to companie...
I have recently considered going on a training course for WPF so I did a quick search and at the top of the list was this training course from Learning Tree. It seemed like possibly what I wanted however when I looked at the price I nearly choked. £1700 for a 4 day course. As if that wasn't enough I was greeted with this tempting phot...
I am a software developer and I have been programming since the past six years. I simply love the mental challenge involved in trying to come up with solutions to hard problems, reading up programming literature, blogs by prominent developers and so on. I work on Microsoft platform and I have trouble keeping up with the pace at which v...
I have recently become interested in the possibility of actually attempting to contribute to one of the many open-source projects out there. I'm interested in not only gaining development experience, but also gaining experience tweaking UI's, improving usability, etc. I found this and this regarding getting involved, and there are some g...
I've been developing Windows Forms/Windows services/webservices for most of my career using VB (before .NET), then strictly C# since it was released. Now, I've recently lost my job and starting to think I may not be able to get a job in my town - Las Vegas. I'd like to be able to apply for some of the Java jobs to increase my chance of...
The title pretty much says it all. Do you do any preparation when switching jobs? I've been reading up on some of the technologies in place, is there anything else you've found helpful? ...