Dipshits are the best. I’m often one of them. But I like getting called out early enough to fix a thing. Keeps my cocky “it’s perfect” in check ’cause “no it’s not”.
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Programmers are almost always optimists, especially when found in packs. This makes them productive but cocky and stupid.
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I’m content with old school hacking. I ask myself: Can it be done? Can I do it? and then I try. I go “look I did it” and move on. Woe to anyone who tries to use whatever I did for reliability.
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Had to train 3 guys to maintain spaghetti code thing I hacked together. Made it in ’99-ish, passed in on in ’02. Was in use at LEAST ’til 2012 with whatever changes they needed. I was long out of it at that point and felt kinda bad for anybody who had to go through my things to maintain, upgrade or fix.
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I was a temp hired to copy/paste. Got bored, automated it. Next thing, I’m designing what became a multi-million $$ generating reporting system for Schering-Plough in their launching of Claritin, Clarinex and a few others.
I had to tie together impossible data from way too many sources — in Microsoft Excel. So the code was mostly VBA and a miracle it worked and was robust with the shit ton of data I threw at it.
It’s not what Excel was designed for but I made it work – and it got me hired, which I didn’t want. (I was ready to leave. I asked the max $$ I could get and I got it).
THEN a year after getting hired, they tried to duplicate what I did. Paid $2 MILLION for a few consultants from Microstrategy to do a “Data cube”.
BUT… they didn’t consult ME. It was behind my back.
I had everything push-button automatic. Push one button and it RAN for about 4 hours, creating and emailing, even sentiment analysis before that was a thing , all driven by the data.
What’d they do? WEB BASED. Open each file seperately. A year they worked on it and didn’t know that my thing was opening THOUSANDS of csv and text files and processing them.
They got let go. I stayed then bolted a year later myself.
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