[Sussex] Anyone actually met any Gods ?

[Geoff Teale]

Steve wrote back:
=================
> > 1/ Not by choice
> 
> I know (but some digs can't be missed :-)

Indeed :-S

> > 2/ Not exclusively.
> 
> For which you must be grateful.

Well.  Yup.. but mainly by my own design.  They sent me on a training course
for the inhouse prorietary TASK language the other day.  I spent 4 hours
listening to a Civil Servant trying to teach me what an IF is.... ...time to
go methinks....

They seem to be of the opinion that if they train me in a language that is
only used in this one office in the entire world then they've got me (this
seems to have worked for a lot of the staff here).  What they aren't
counting on is I actually am geeky enough to be constantly working on new
and interesting things at home.. *devilish look*

Anyone know the Tom Wait's song "What he building in there?" - I like to
project that kind of image at work.. :)
  
> > 3/ I learnt to program and then learnt VB on the job (most 
> > VB's programmers only ever go down the second road).
> 
> You mean pure VB programmers learn to program - are you sure?????

Read more carefully Mr Dobson :-P.  

I'm suggesting they never learn to program, they only learn what it says in
"Learn VB in 5.65 seconds"... first you click that button and drag the
database fields onto the form.. and then the magic fairies pull back the
data for you .. then you get the user to manually step through every record
in the one-table database until they find the one they want (..cause that
won't get old when the database has been running for 5 years and has 800,000
records..).. etc etc...

> > 4/ I recognise that, whilst not _having_ to know what's going 
> > on close to the bare metal is often a boon to speedy development,
> > not being able to find that out (never mind control it) is often
> > an extremely bad thing.
> 
> A good point that turns a programmer into a powerful programmer.
> And is the reason I have been so vocal on how the INSIDE server
> is to run and be configured.

You'd be suprised how many people in the windows orientated world think the
best approach to anything is to sacrifice anything for the ability to go
through life without understanding their jobs.

On the INSIDE front should mention that I have at last had time to progress
things a little.. I've learnt enough of libXML2 for our needs and I've
actually succesfully parsed PvC files.  

Next job is to turn it into a factory for PvC tree objects!

...that last sentence sounded a little too "Yellow Submarine" for my
tastes.. man.. :)
  
> Even the one who don't know about Java!

Obviously you'd give the VB programmers jobs to people who _have_ a clue.
 
> I worked for a company that wanted to replace it's Unix systems
> with NT - I left - So did you.  SNAP!!!!!

Story of my working life (stop me if you've heard this more than five
times):

for (int age = 21; age < 65; age++) {
	
	geoff->accept_job(	(const char*)"Technical Architect",
					(const char*)"C++", 
					OS_UNIX
				);

	// This "if" is pointless - this function always returns true
	if ( manager->Decision(USE_OS_WINDOWS) )  {

		geoff->reassign_as(	(const char*)"Technical Architect",
						(const char*)"Visual Basic
6",
						OS_WINDOWS
					};
		geoff->stick_it_out(6, MONTHS);
		geoff->quit();
		return(666);
	}
}

- Geoff

-- 
GJT
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk




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