Aside from the software developers working on embedded systems and hardware modeling or any other job that deals with software for or on hardware, how much should a software engineer know about the underlying hardware that they might be developing for? Should it be treated as a black box that just works or should there be a very strong w...
For example, let's say I'm working in the field of physics. How concerned should I be about the latest and greatest things in the field of physics in addition to the latest and greatest things in computer science and software engineering? Is it OK to just have a passing familiarity with the domain in which you are working? Does it depend...
Do you use a formal event to get people talking in your IT department? Like a monthly meetup in a social place, a internal wiki/chat space or just a regular "information market" with some presentations about technology or projects made by your staff for your staff? Do you invite Sales people to participate or is it a closed event for pro...
If you are sending work/progress reports to the project lead on a daily or weekly basis, I wondered if you would consider using Twitter or similar services for this updates. Say if you're working remotly or with a distributed team and the project lead has a hard time getting an overview about the topics people are working and where the ...
If you think there is, do you see it as a real problem affecting organizations? If the answer to both question is yes: What are the root causes? Is the problem not just a lack of knowledge but obliviousness as well? Who has the ability to effectively address this issue? What are possible solutions? ...
A similar question has been discussed in Programmer vs. software engineer but most of the responses miss the essential point, which is - what is engineering. The standard definition is: The application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends such as the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economica...
I work for a small ERP software firm. There are 2 guys that have seniority over me. They make 3 times the salary I take home. Here's how they managed to get there: we have no documentation to speak of. They HOLD the business "know how" for the package. They don't share their knowledge with anyone. The only way I see my way out of thi...
I read an article recently by Joel Spolsky entitled "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)". I knew nothing about Unicode before I read the article. Now, I feel like I can speak intelligently about the topic and, if I ever needed to dig deeper, I ha...
I just did some research on how to do X (it's not important what I was researching). A blog post suggested that I should try using product Y to solve my problem with X. So I went on their site - and since I had never used their product I skimmed the "hello" page, had the faint impression that it could indeed help me with my X. So I immed...
Hi there, I have been running an UPDATE on a table containing 250 million rows with 3 index'; this UPDATE uses another table containing 30 million rows. It has been running for about 36 hours now. I am wondering if their is a way to find out how close it is to being done for if it plans to take a million days to do its thing, I will kil...
What are, in your opinion, the worst subjects of widespread ignorance amongst programmers, i.e. things that everyone who aspires to be a professional should know and take seriously, but doesn't? ...
I am interested in improving my Functional Programming skills and I believe that the best way to do this is by working on a medium-sized project. In the past I have worked with Scheme and would like to continue to do so. Can someone please suggest some medium-sized Scheme project ideas? (Note: I am well-versed in C (ANSI C89/ISO C90), so...
I have a doubt about orkut's new URL Writing method. Earlier the home page was like http://www.orkut.com/Home.aspx Now its changed to http://www.orkut.co.in/Main#Home.aspx Whats the significance of "#" ? Why is it there and why have they used it? Is not "#" used to navigate to a particular section of Page using name="blah" in the ...
Where I currently work we use a lot of hand made custom web controls for things like dropdown lists, auto-complete boxes, etc. and while I have added things to these controls I never really felt like I completely understood what the heck I was doing. So, my question, are there any good books out there that might help me understand / bu...
I've seen this many times. A junior developer grows in skills and knowledge to reach some intermediate-advanced stage after about 6-9 years in the field and starts wondering "what next?". I'm collating a top-level view of a handful of paths or archetypes for such a person to consider: The Guru: This is a "growth in depth" approach, one...
How would you structure the information which you maintain to keep all of the information about your projects and clients at your fingertips. We are finding that ours is becoming so large that at times we don't know for sure what we are looking for only that we know it is in the knowledge-base. We use a confluence in a classical hierarch...
At our company we are currenty trying to define the basic things our software architects have to know about SharePoint for them to architect and/or lead a SharePoint implementation project. Many architects in our company have a .NET developer background and know a lot about .NET development and the various framework components and toolin...
I've seen a lot of job advertisements (contracts) quoting extremely high daily rates. I don't think I will ever earn anything even close to it without some experience in banking. Besides, banking looks like a good challenge with high-availability systems and big money floating around. As a bonus, I would probably know more about how to ...
With the constant updating of technologies surrounding Java, as a Java developer what is the base knowledge you should be expected to have? Should a Java developer know EJB3, Spring, Hibernate etc? ...
For all you technicians out there that ever had to assess a new collegue (e.g. a job interview or intake of contractors), what questions do you ask during such sessions in order to measure the candidates technical knowledge? For example, a common question I use is to explain the difference between an open or closed diamond in UML diagra...