Another 'I want to be a coder' thread

FreddieVanHalen

Great to hear that folks are still enjoying development work in the UK.

Many of the folks I know from my development days had their jobs outsourced to India and they had to move on to other careers...

monquixote

I expect most of the companies that did that now have shit software and regret it.

PolarityMan

roundthebend said:

PolarityMan said:

Great description. sadly because my product has so much legacy code I dont get to use these as much as I'd like but when I do get something that can be TDD'ed I find it really motivational as you feel like you are constantly making progress.

By contrast when I'm working on the nasty legacy bits that are too intertwined to TDD properly without refactoring half the universe I often spend ages coding away on something with no feedback until the end only to find out when it's done that there are loads of problems I need to go back and address.

. I've found it useful as a solo exercise, and also with a pair or mob of programmers.

Is mob the right collective noun for programmers? I thought maybe it might be "a reluctance of programmers" or possibly "a belligerence of programmers".

FreddieVanHalen

monquixote said:

I expect most of the companies that did that now have shit software and regret it.

I know of a few in that place but I'm not close enough to it anymore to see if it's very common.

It made me sick when that major offshoring trend was going down, mostly because everyone in government and business was banging on about the UK becoming a knowledge economy and here was UK plc chucking great skills and people on the scrap heap and basically giving our knowledge economy away.

It fucked me off so mightily at the time I left the tech industry all together. It's great news to hear some of it is coming back at least.

roundthebend

FreddieVanHalen said:

Great to hear that folks are still enjoying development work in the UK.

Many of the folks I know from my development days had their jobs outsourced to India and they had to move on to other careers...

There's plenty of development work in the UK. Tech startups are popping up all over the place too as it has become more and more accessible, and more and more lucrative. The problem, in very generalist terms, with outsourcing to anywhere is that you have to specify precisely what you want. But in the fast-paced industries we see now, customers want something different every week, and opportunities in the markets arise frequently. So you need agility in your software development process. You can't easily get that when it takes months to negotiate a contract - you'll clearly want to get a large scope rolled into it to avoid wasting more time on contracts later.

Even fairly ordinary programmers could get close to 6 figure gross turnover if they were contracting in London.

monquixote

Yep the main problem in Cambridge is hiring developers. 

Someone I know tried to hire a really talented grad and Amazon stole them out from under them by offering them £60k as a starting salary!

FreddieVanHalen

Sounds like I need to dust off my skilz and head to Cambridge :-)

FX_Munkee

PolarityMan said:

roundthebend said:

PolarityMan said:

Great description. sadly because my product has so much legacy code I dont get to use these as much as I'd like but when I do get something that can be TDD'ed I find it really motivational as you feel like you are constantly making progress.

By contrast when I'm working on the nasty legacy bits that are too intertwined to TDD properly without refactoring half the universe I often spend ages coding away on something with no feedback until the end only to find out when it's done that there are loads of problems I need to go back and address.

. I've found it useful as a solo exercise, and also with a pair or mob of programmers.

Is mob the right collective noun for programmers? I thought maybe it might be "a reluctance of programmers" or possibly "a belligerence of programmers".

I think you'll find it's an array of programmers.

monquixote

FX_Munkee said:

PolarityMan said:

roundthebend said:

PolarityMan said:

Great description. sadly because my product has so much legacy code I dont get to use these as much as I'd like but when I do get something that can be TDD'ed I find it really motivational as you feel like you are constantly making progress.

By contrast when I'm working on the nasty legacy bits that are too intertwined to TDD properly without refactoring half the universe I often spend ages coding away on something with no feedback until the end only to find out when it's done that there are loads of problems I need to go back and address.

. I've found it useful as a solo exercise, and also with a pair or mob of programmers.

Is mob the right collective noun for programmers? I thought maybe it might be "a reluctance of programmers" or possibly "a belligerence of programmers".

I think you'll find it's an array of programmers.

Unless they are lisp programmers in which case it's a list of programmers, or Haskell where it's a monad of programmers.

roundthebend

And a stare of developers.
Mob programming is actually a well-used phrase in some circles and refers to a group of developers, usually the entire team, working on one thing and using only one computer. In the cynic's eye it is a waste of resource, but there are benefits to be had from it which should be weighed up against the costs. I've had some really good success with it, and also had some struggles.