How do you handle a programmer who is on your team but is extremely ineffective and ends up wasting the time of the rest of the team. I don't mean lazy, but I mean a person who has such weak problem solving skills, that they require a lot of hand-holding to get them to complete the simplest of tasks, that even a student fresh out of ...
So we built a website and software for a client, charged our fee and handed over the code. The client then got a request from another company about the software. The client passed on the request but said since they owned the code they would need to recieve money for it. I'm thinking there are 2 options here: Work with the client as r...
I've had a few projects on my laptop that have been developed for previous clients. I've been thinking of actually building upon the projects to build bigger projects on my spare time or when the time comes that another client is need of a more complex or less complex software, I can just modify a few things and deploy much faster. What...
It's been suggested to me that I resign, as the company where I work is insisting that I code various functionality to work in a particular way which is only supported by Internet Explorer. I believe I'm doing the right thing by complying with the policy, even though I've raised objections about it. is this the right approach? This re...
This question was originally posted with a similar title to this but was changed as the subject was not a moral issue. However it was a good topic for a wiki question. There are times when you are asked to implement features which you are not comfortable with, perhaps some mass emailing program, or something which access data on a PC w...
I was asked to make a clone of this: http://www.bragster.com/ ok, not a clone per se, but a site with similar functionality on a lower budget! How low might one ask? Under 10K, probably under 5K. My question: how do i explain to a non-tech savvy friend, that this is not possible, in the nicest terms, and convince them not to go to ren...
While this doesn't apply to my present situation, I'm sure we've all been there before. You're a Java developer who's been asked to develop an app in C#, or you're a ASP.NET developer asked to do something in ASP.NET MVC, or a PHP developer with the opportunity to do a Rails or Django site. Fundamentally, if you're a competent programm...
i'm just wondering if you guys have ever had a situation where you were offered a web development project which you turned down because you felt it was unethical or morally questionable. i've only had this once. i was offered a contract to develop a website for a meat abattoir (i.e. slaughterhouse). what's the problem you may ask? i'm v...
I was a little surprised that I couldn't find this question on SO: What ethical/legal principles should I consider if I want to incorporate elements of someone else's website into my own? In other words: the web is a fairly open environment, in the sense that the dominant _lingua franca_s - HTML, CSS, and Javascript - are distributed i...
Let's say you recently discovered some major vulnerabilities in a couple of web sites that activate mainly in your country and are very powerful in their market. The vulnerabilities I'm talking about are as worse as letting me browse the admin interface with superadmin privileges. What would you do now? I'm thinking of something like: ...
Touchy subject, I guess, but somebody has to do it. A co-worker/manager (not my manager, just a manager although he's part owner) has several side businesses that are totally unrelated to the company that I work for. One of these is an SaaS application that he continually mentions to me in casual conversation; it's not anything revolut...
Recently due to organizational change, the management is inducting a senior engineer from another group who has no experience in programming. Obviously the work is nothing but programming. There is no time for mentoring, how do one politely explain that experience is a must and programming is hard, without hurting anybody. ...
Is it ethical to access a class' private members by casting it to a void pointer and then to a struct? I don't think I have permissions to modify the class that contains the data members that I need to access. I don't want to take a risk accessing the data members in an indirect way if it is not ethical. EDIT: Had to edit this furth...
I've read a long time ago an article about why managers should appreciate the devs., and there was analogy drawn to the 7 samurais movie: that a company can't really offer much to an engineer, and that the engineer chooses to help the company -- like the samurais helped the villagers. I thought that was on joelonsoftware.com, or codingh...
Of course, most of the time this type of request comes from management that neither has a clue about what the users really want, nor does [s]he have a clue about the technical aspects of building a specific software project or software in general. See Dilbert's Pointy-Haired Boss for more detail. However, that's just one aspect. What ab...
I have written presumably some of the first code to modify the memory of a popular new MMORPG in such a way as to create a macro framework, allowing for advanced automated reactions, skill/level gain, large scale data retrieval, and botting. It's my supreme pleasure to automate tasks in this way, I can't help but think of any manual app...
I'm working on a piece of software that creates a contract and captures the client's signature via gif and applies it to the contract (and spits out a pdf). Now, we're storing the data from the contract but when it comes to the signature, I'm not sure if I should. Store it: Pros: If the pdf document is lost, I can reconstruct the docum...
As one of the core contributors for an open-source framework, I'm frequently dazzled by the blurry line between "open source help" and consulting. I'd like to ask for your advice on the matter. Frequently, people using the framework would post 400+ lines of their code and expect me/others to dig through it to find an error; there are t...
In the existing code I am working with I have found the money transfer procedure which isn't wrapped in transaction, is it totally unacceptable or it is OK because there are all the needed sanity checks, i.e. that amount of money to transfer is greater than zero, and ORM level validation that balance is greater or equal to zero. Thanks ...
I am trying to help a friend of mine break his site out of some nasty frames: example. This wouldn't normally be an issue but this particular site crosses some ethical boundaries by placing an advertisement on the top of the page that is NOT paying my friend. Here is where it gets complicated, he would like his site to be in frames for...