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Technology Stocks : OBJECT DESIGN Inc.: Bargain of the year!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sea Otter who wrote (1980)	5/28/1998 3:27:00 AM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3194

On Topic: Evanescent Success As far as this breaking into the big time goes, oh come now. You don't seem to have understood what everyone else knows so well. You expert programmers aren't worth two cents. You are creating junk that has a six months lifetime. During that period of time your clients go through hell while the big timers strut around blown up with their pretentious puffery. The reality of their great creations is endless debugging much by the public. The better the developer the longer it takes to debug the great creation. The more elegant, the harder it is to maintain. That quality code after one rewrite becomes absolutely topologically entangled confounding all attempts to stabilize and become amenable to change. And it always grows. So what's the point of retaining skilled spaghetti bloat masters? Not one of them believes they are doing what they've been taught they shouldn't. They end up doing whatever is dictated by the team leader. That's called "people skills". Keeping your mouth shut and doing what the head honchos want. As far as this interview song and dance goes in order to become one of the Silicon Valley Elite, the first screen is whether you have the appropriate background. Appropriate means Comp Sci. They don't want to see your code run, they want to know if what you've been doing fits into their narrowminded plan. They don't want to know about your coding skills, they want to know how quickly you can learn their COBAL variant, UNIX flavor, or C extension. . None of them wants to receive and run any example programs. So tell me, how can these intellectually advanced individuals reach conclusions based on appearances, prejudice, one dimensional blockheadedness. I'll tell you how. They are programmed to be stupid and they can't kick the habit. They're being paid to produce junk. They don't know how to craft quality because quality isn't necessary and surely isn't profitable. For them the only thing that is necessary is doing whatever keeps the flow of dough in gear. So what test have you put yourself to? What do you think working in a start-up gives you? Before you got out of grade school, I had inspected and evaluated hundreds of start-ups. Most were busts. Most were poorly conceived attempts at believing themselves into success. Almost all had the sole goal of receiving venture capital. That isn't the way to succeed. What qualification is needed to talk in the areas I have. Comp Sci? Who says your firm will survive? You've had nothing but good times, the greatest times in history for your field. What happens when that ends? Then you can tell me all about how qualified you are to run a firm or tell me how unqualified I am to assess great expectations built on false hopes.

To: Sea Otter who wrote (1980)	5/28/1998 9:58:00 AM
From: Mark Finger	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3194

Sea Otter, I disagree with you whether Ahahaha knows programming, because of a number of comments he has made. I am responding to you because I can see that it would make no impression to him to respond to most of his comments. First, good programmers write bug free code because they plan and design it that way. They get a lot of the bugs out before the code is written. They have very few bugs to remove and they remove most of them with "unit tests" before they pass the code on to others and they have stressed the limits. In particular, I consider it a major failing if someone finds a bug in my code. Second, there are very few good programmers out there. By this I mean the ones who really understand the fundamentals of the subject. They may know the meaning of the word "encapsulation", but when given the opportunity to really show what it means on a test, they make very common mistakes. This is just one example that I consistently see in the dozens of interviews I have been involved in. Third, part of the reason programming is in such a sad state is that business and others who want the program do not expect/demand quality in the program. They give lip service, but there is no penalty for failure. Most people accept some attitude for "good enough". Witness the numerous bugs in Windows 95. On one recent project I was involved in, we encountered 7 critical bugs (crashers) in Windows 95 in code that was running correctly on Windows NT. Everyone of these bugs was traced to a problem in 95 that had to be worked around. There is not enough of a penalty for this kind of thing. MSFT, for example, does not even fix simple bugs when reported to them. I reported one bug in Visual C++ that required change in one entry in a header macro. 3 version upgrades went by without any fix after the report. Incidentally, although I am a programmer, my degree is in Chemistry. Many of the better programmers I know are not CS majors.