Posted inExperience / Information Technology / Thank You Sir May I Have Another

Dice – This is Broken

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek
Dice site image

You would think, Dice, a site branding itself as being for “technology jobs” would know better than use Agile and off-shore labor. Nothing screams “I’m just a hack!” like using the phrase “full stack.” I don’t know for a fact they are using off-shore or visa worker labor, but that is definitely the quality of the software being turned into production. I’ve written about Agile on this blog before. I’ve even written a book on Agile. This is most definitely something professionals won’t touch with a hundred mile pole even while wearing a hazmat suit. Risk of fatal contamination is too high.

Data Processing 101

For those of you who actually went to school for Computer Science or Software Engineering degrees, what is the very first thing you are taught about software development? This is a great interview question because you will instantly weed out the hacks with a single question.

Hacks want the answer?

Never show the end user a cryptic error message.

First thing you learn about software development in college
Actual error message from Dice

I’ve been in IT over 30 years. You know I write an award winning technical book series. Error 86 doesn’t tell me shit so how do you think the people who never went to college feel when they see this?

Flurry of Changes

Over the past month or so there have been a flurry of changes on Dice. Most of them have the feeling of either:

  • I can’t go on vacation until this is turned into production
  • I know I’m getting fired anyway so joke-em if they can’t take a )(*&)(*

I started noticing this a few weeks to a couple months back. Emails started arriving saying my profile was going to be hidden because I hadn’t logged in for a year. Forwarded the email to technical support letting them know I log in most every day just to see what is there (not really been anything interesting this year), so their developer needed to go back to school to learn how to test a bool.

Honestly, when your favorite language isn’t type-safe, you are always going to turn out broken shit. Just hurl it into production because TDD automated tests are good enough, right? No! Those should be banned from the industry because they don’t test squat! Automated tests written by the developer are never going to prove he did it wrong. When you completely misread a “User Story” and merrily jump off a cliff with your “solution” automated testing will pass with flying colors and production will fail.

See above “Error 86.”

Agile is an excuse for Half-assed

It’s never okay to put it in production knowing it doesn’t work yet every Sprint poops out a turd that doesn’t work and you put it into production. Professionals don’t do that!

One expects such things on Indeed because it has never been a job site for professional IT workers. Most of its existence it has been buggy as Hell, generally only testing with Chrome.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.