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What job do people take way too seriously? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by const_void@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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[–] treadful@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I used to manage a software team - once I was trying to explain something to a coworker and asked them to write some code to loop from 1 to 10 for me, and they couldn’t do it. I even prompted them by saying “you know, write a for loop” and they said that they kinda knew what for loop was, but they wouldn’t know how to write one. I asked them to give it their best shot, just write the word “for” and then see what flows from there, but they were just not able to proceed. I explained how to do it to them, and then they asked me what an int (integer) was… but I had already explained what an int was the day prior. This person had an honours degree in computer science.

Are you sure you managed the team? I'm joking, but how did this person get through an interview, let a lone survive so long working as a dev?

[–] Blake@feddit.uk 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Haha, it’s a fair comment - it’s a team I inherited, it wasn’t my hiring decision. I don’t know what the interview process was like before me, but I’m guessing it was a very old fashioned “where do you see yourself in 5 years” affair.

I’m pretty sure that they just muddled through by copy/pasting stuff seemingly at random and tinkering until it worked. Which can be a good way to learn, for sure, but it’s not really what you want from a professional developer, full time.

The guy who managed the team before me didn’t believe in object oriented design, and not in a cool Haskell way, in a really old fashioned “I can do everything with batch scripts” way. The team was using a programming language that was so old that they were using dosbox to compile it because the compiler was a 16-bit application.

[–] theshatterstone54@feddit.uk 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because the compiler was a 16-bit application

Name the language, mate. This sounds a bit too insane to be true.

[–] Blake@feddit.uk 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, it was called DataFlex. The vendor has released new versions of it called Visual DataFlex (VDF) and then renamed VDF back to DataFlex, but this language was what we called “character mode” DataFlex. It’s still used by the company as their main data entry application even today and a lot of their processes still are written in DataFlex. A lot of the work that my team did was rewriting a lot of the old crap in C#, but there was just so much of it built up over the decades.