"It looks like you're writing a ransom note, can I help?"

How many extra lines of code needed to be written and maintained to build this little bastard?

Not one user liked him when exposed to him more than 20sec, that shows that you can't always trust first impressions in user testing.

Have you guys seen http://www.419eater.com ?

Scam the scammers, fun stuff!

Can't agree more. All content should be available from here to eternity. They need to find a better payment model. Instead of Netflix paying to have the content, switch to them paying per view. From a user perspective, Spotify got this one right in my book. They might need to pay the artists more, but that is not my problem.

I don't want to download music or movies, I want to listen to music and watch movies. Make it the easiest to do it legally, and most people will do so.

And stop with this bullshit that content is not available in my country. I pay, damnit, let me watch what I want. I want to give you my money, take them and be happy, damnit!!

The opening bracket is just where it's supposed to be if you follow the defacto C# standard written by Juval Löwy. To not turn this into a bracket war, I don't care where you put yours as long as you follow a standard. I chose the defacto, and it's working well for us.

Here, have the 300th ++. :)

Always prefer chunky over chatty in such interactions. Demand that he fixes it. "Loop? You kidding me? In every client all of the time? Really?"

Just like the ExpertSexchange-site ;)

Exactly like you just said, and with an estimated time of when you will be available? KISS, remember? :)

Arngren.net is a norwegian webshop for all kinds of gadgets. He used to have shops too, but they were closed some 10 years ago I think. Guess the site was so successful he decided online was the thing :)

Remember the words of Donald Knuth: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil".

Guess you haven't seen this norwegian gem:
http://www.arngren.net

Enjoy!

vb.net is a dying technology, stay with C# to stay current.

I would have walked out, saying "I'm not taking this crap for a job". But that is the attitude you get with experience and age, I guess.

Good on you for rejecting the offer, that's not an environment to work in every day. :)

The only answer you should give when someone is demanding an estimate right now is "let me get back to you". Even if they just ask "that's not much work, right", you answer "Let me get back to you". That gives you time to think it through and give a better answer.

You can even go "Let me get back to on when I can get back to you" if the request is huge and you're swamped.. :)

I've got 99 problems, but the batch ain't one.

I recommend reading "The joy of UX" by David Platt. It's a how-to for devs to get you started wirh simple techniques that'll make your customers more happy. I attended a 4-day class with David 2 years ago, and the stuff I learned really works. The 2 systems I've built using the techniques from the class (as also described in the book) are the 2 in our portfolio with the most happy users.

The most important is to talk to your users, because they are not you. They are not even like you.
The user doesn't want to use your software for the sake of using it, he wants to do his job. You need to recognize that fact.

"Know thy user, for he is not thee". Amen. :)

Sounds like you need to go somewhere better...

"We're not shipping YOUR COMPUTER!!" (damnit) 😉

@bigeyes26 Hard to say, that depends on the underlying nature of the defect. If it's a timing problem, it might be back when you "turn the light off". Or it might not. That's kinda the nature of that beast.. :(

You've encountered a Heisenbug!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Might be some kind of timing issue, as the logging probably adds some ms to each call.

I think you learned the wrong thing from that encounter. As developers we should never expect the users to do our work for us. We should never do the easy thing and expect them to have to learn how to do stuff.

It seemed that you came to a good and workable solution in the end, but one could argue that it should have been made that way the first time (not your fault, obviously).

Other examples are stuff like how we format dates. Why should the user be forced to input in a special format when computers are very good at converting stuff? Just because the devs are lazy, that's why.

We live in 2016, UX is everything, my friend. If you haven't already gotten it, you will be forced to. I recommend Dave Platt's books "Why software sucks" and "The Joy of UX" to get you on the right path. Good luck! :)

Yeah, that IS a real thing. We even have consultants that writes buggy code for us and then charges us for fixing the bugs. How is that even possible??

Reminds me of this Dilbert strip.
http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13

And the road to hell is paved with spacer gifs and nested tables, someone told me once. :)

Yeah, and let's just build the kitchen now and worry about the foundation, plumbing, electrics and all that later. Just because one in computing basically can put up the paint in thin air and back the wall into it later, doesn't mean that it's a good idea..

Yeah, a really good PM doesn't need to know much about the details of the project, they should just need to know how to run a project and make it move forward. The tech stuff should be left to the architect and or devs. A good PM can run ANY project, because a project is a project no matter what it produces.
That said, the symbiosis from great cooperation between a PM and a architect can be really great for a dev project.

Yeah, never do that.. Suddenly your funny test data or names ends at a customer, they won't be amused... 😃

To really find out if the candidate gets it, ask them to show a violation of LSP. That shows if they have just learned the definition, or really understood it.

@Lasse Basically Liskov says that you always should be able to use a derived class everywhere you use the base class without that altering the functionalty. That means that the derived class should not alter the base class functionality, just extend it with new funtionality. You see? :)

Borland Delphi, it's based on Pascal.

Find the manager in the position to decide, and get him/her to sign off. You might need to go far up the food chain..