Yeah they spend more time arguing about my defect tickets and saying I am testing it the wrong way.

Well yeah, you need to wait for the code to compile.



/hot

serial_crusher: The majority of their time was spent on a combination of non-programming tasks, such as brainstorming, administrative tasks, environment management and testing.  Fark

FTFTFA

^^ BIG THIS ^^

Hey, now that is not true. We don't all slack off all day on Fark when we should be coding... err nevermind.

limeyfellow: Hey, now that is not true. We don't all slack off all day on Fark when we should be coding... err nevermind.

LOL! ^^THIS^^

/Oh wait.....

The guys who do write code all day are usually the Asperger's cases you put off in a corner and let do their own thing. Give them a job and leave them alone until complete and treat them nice so they don't do anything like put in backdoor vulnerabilities in whatever they're making.

Show me a programmer that codes 8 hours a day and I'll show you a liar.

I thought they spent the whole day biatching about how hard they work, and how if they ran the business we'd all get a Christmas bonus this year.

I'm kind of surprised that design and coding is as high as 50%.

I thought that half of all IT time was mandatory conference calls to figure out why the last conference call on improving efficiency was not successful.

PainInTheASP: Half the time is spent coding and the other half is trying to find out what the fark the users actually want.  And it very rarely matches what they say they want.

Operations spends all their time having meetings pretending to hash out their processes and what it is they do.

Then they meet with the coders and it's the coders who actually has out operation's processes and what they do.  Then they get to code.

/operations almost as useful as HR

redmid17: Is it just me or isn't testing part of coding? If I wrote some untested code and handed it over for a move to production, I don't think my clients or bosses would appreciate that very much.

/mostly because it probably wouldn't be very good

Unit testing is part of coding. Integration and acceptance testing is part of QA. Even if you don't unit test, it goes to QA, not production.

/Well, should anyway
//Worked in places where I had to fix live code, live. Fix the interpreted code before execution hits it.

Spend the most time going down rabbit holes.

Just got off a conf call with 2 developers in Hyderbad.  They keep telling me it is a known issue and I keep proving them wrong.  So a lot of the time must be spent arguing with QA until QA finally proves they need to get off their butts and fix this broken code.
   Pisses me off so much sometimes how good developers are at avoiding work.

theurge14: PainInTheASP: Half the time is spent coding and the other half is trying to find out what the fark the users actually want.  And it very rarely matches what they say they want.

Operations spends all their time having meetings pretending to hash out their processes and what it is they do.

Then they meet with the coders and it's the coders who actually has out operation's processes and what they do.  Then they get to code.

/operations almost as useful as HR

Yeah and then the coders miss some important, but not written down piece of business logic and operations has a moose, because the application does not function like their own internal process.

A good business analyst will get to not only the stuff that the customer is talking about, but the crap they don't talk about. A good BA winds up doing shiat like watching one person work all day and figure out what they are not talking about, watching job X from beginning to completion and figuring out what process or procedure was not written down, etc...

Good BA's are worth their weight in gold, bad ones will kill your entire department.

redmid17: Is it just me or isn't testing part of coding? If I wrote some untested code and handed it over for a move to production, I don't think my clients or bosses would appreciate that very much.

/mostly because it probably wouldn't be very good

Depends on your ship date. If the schedule slips and the contract stipulates penalties for being late on delivery, well testing is optional.

They spend most of the day thinking up new and ingenious ways to fark up my infrastructure.

/IT Manager

redmid17: I mean, in an ideal world, you're absolutely right.

I love the ideal world.

I just wish I worked with people who loved it as much as I do and cared about moving, even ever so slowly, towards it.

/only person on the team who writes tests for their code

rev. dave: Just got off a conf call with 2 developers in Hyderbad.  They keep telling me it is a known issue and I keep proving them wrong.  So a lot of the time must be spent arguing with QA until QA finally proves they need to get off their butts and fix this broken code.
   Pisses me off so much sometimes how good developers are at avoiding work.


There's your problem.

Slaves2Darkness: If the schedule slips and the contract stipulates penalties for being late on delivery, well testing is optional.

:( you are so right.

It's a dirty secret, but there are projects when the time spent writing solid tests and therefore saving (multiples of)future time, can't be taken.

Schedules committed to by marketers with the real penalty of "we won't get paid if this is even a day late, but it's okay to patch continually after it's live" are not fun.

No shiat Sherlock.

Very few organizations would be able to make use of a competent programmer doing 8 hours of coding a day. The output would overwhelm the rest of the support staff that surrounds them.

Of my time spent coding on my current project, most of my time is spent working on a feature that should take 2 hours but instead takes 4 days because I'm unraveling the code vomit + clusterfark design of the last guy who apparently didn't even know what a computer was before being hired as a software developer.

rev. dave: Just got off a conf call with 2 developers in Hyderbad.  They keep telling me it is a known issue and I keep proving them wrong.  So a lot of the time must be spent arguing with QA until QA finally proves they need to get off their butts and fix this broken code.
   Pisses me off so much sometimes how good developers are at avoiding work.

Here's a major tip for you with Indian developers: be diplomatic and polite from the start! Never stop being polite. Culturally, India expects different treatment in a business situation than Westerners (especially U.S.) give.

Westerners are loud and rude and willing to talk back to and/or over their superiors, while Indians are quiet and polite and will not talk back to superiors unless the issue is extremely important. Either way has advantages and disadvantages. It's just a cultural thing and the sooner you figure this out, the happier you'll be. In every phone call and email, speak formally and politely. Start each conversation with "Good afternoon" or "Good morning", whichever it is in their time zone. End each conversation with a full "Thank you, Name".

In addition, try to think from their perspective. They are massively overworked because the general name of the game for business over there is to charge low hourly rates and compete with high-cost Western businesses. The aim is to charge low and deliver tit-for-tat value with Westerners but even in a quicker time frame. The developers you talked to (and presumably were rude to)? They are probably doing 65 hour weeks and never seeing their families.

Give 'em some slack and respect their culture. You'll be amazed at the difference. In fact, you'll make allies instead of passive aggressive enemies. This is all coming from personal experience.

torusXL: So a lot of the time must be spent arguing with QA until QA finally proves they need to get off their butts and fix this broken code.

Oh and to add on to this, I would bet they view you as an overpaid spoiled brat who tries to order them around. That kind of politics won't help one least bit your cause of getting the code fixed, no matter how broken it actually is.

YodaBlues: rev. dave: Just got off a conf call with 2 developers in Hyderbad.  They keep telling me it is a known issue and I keep proving them wrong.  So a lot of the time must be spent arguing with QA until QA finally proves they need to get off their butts and fix this broken code.
   Pisses me off so much sometimes how good developers are at avoiding work.

[pondstonecommunications.files.wordpress.com image 300x350]
There's your problem.

Whah, I outsourced critical business tasks to a bunch of cheaper workers half way around the planet and SOMEHOW quality is suffering and managing is more difficult.

torusXL: Here's a major tip for you with Indian developers: be diplomatic and polite from the start! Never stop being polite. Culturally, India expects different treatment in a business situation than Westerners (especially U.S.) give.

This is simply not true, and reflects an inaccurate understanding of native Indian business practices. Indian workers are treated terribly by their employers, often being screamed at, threatened with termination or even sometimes physically hit.

They expect better treatment from American peers, as a business advantage, because hierarchy is strictly enforced. Everyone is either below or above everyone else. When you treat them with deference, even when they are performing poorly, you are acting as their subordinate. It buys them more time to bill hours while producing less work.

They can then use the time to double-bill, and instead of doing work for your organization, do work for another client instead. That other client is less polite, so they oil the squeaky wheel. Or perhaps they use the time to fulfill their family or religious obligations, which take up a greater portion of their lives than here in the mostly-secular and smaller-family cultures in the West.

It's unlikely that a worker in all but the most modern places in India can put in a 65-billable-hour week reliably. Transportation and infrastructure problems, greater health care demands and high likelihood of injury carrying out day-to-day life are huge time sinks.

A lot of issues wrapped up in "culture" are really just economic issues resulting in mild corruption that manifests itself in a demand for very costly deference. Or, maybe it's just that bending to the schedule of workers halfway across the globe has got me cranky :)

mccallcl: It's unlikely that a worker in all but the most modern places in India can put in a 65-billable-hour week reliably. Transportation and infrastructure problems, greater health care demands and high likelihood of injury carrying out day-to-day life are huge time sinks.A lot of issues wrapped up in "culture" are really just economic issues resulting in mild corruption that manifests itself in a demand for very costly deference. Or, maybe it's just that bending to the schedule of workers halfway across the globe has got me cranky :)

The racism is strong in this one!

Nah, I'm mostly talking about the Indian developers I've worked with who are living here overseas for a long-term temp. position. Even so, the same applies to the ones over there too.

It really is a cultural thing and they are humans and nice people too, whatever the delusions and false reality you'd like to build up in your head to make the panties wadded up your ass feel like something good.

Disposable Rob: The guys who do write code all day are usually the Asperger's cases you put off in a corner and let do their own thing. Give them a job and leave them alone until complete and treat them nice so they don't do anything like put in backdoor vulnerabilities in whatever they're making.

Or go postal in the office

/ aspergery

When the stars align, I have a big task ahead of me, no distractions, and I hit "the zone," I can code for days without stopping.  The downside to that is I wind up burned out and basically useless for a week or so afterwards.  I go from pure creation to a numb inability to even comprehend what's on the screen in front of me.

UberDave: PainInTheASP: Half the time is spent coding and the other half is trying to find out what the fark the users actually want. And it very rarely matches what they say they want.

I just spent the last hour responding to a client e-mail(s):

Them: "We need 'blah'...it doesn't let us do 'blah'..."
Me: "It does let you do 'blah' in this tab and by using this filter option."
Them: "Well, it should do 'blah' automatically."
Me: "Ok, do you want the application to do 'blah' automatically when it runs or periodically while it is running or do you want it to happen behind the scenes? And what should I base the auto-freqency on?"
Them: "Wharrgarbl?!"

It is worse if they are coherent. Then you get what I call the "Efficiency Cycle".  It goes like this:

User: My biggest problem is that I have to actually do my work.  Fix that by making the software do it automatically.  Here is how you codify it: {non-wharrgarrbl}
You: Ok (fixes it)
User: Automation helped, thank you.  Now my biggest problem is that I have to spend time doing these more boring administrative tasks since I no longer have to do my previous time consuming work.  Fix that by making the software do it automatically. Here is how you codify it: {non-wharrgarrbl}
You: Ok (fixes it)
{repeat forever, or until the worker requirements himself into management}

torusXL: The racism is strong in this one!

India is a country with more than 2,000 ethnic groups:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India

I couldn't possibly claim to speak to the ethnicity of the workers I've experienced, and it would be wholly inappropriate to discuss it, even if I were educated enough on the subject to do so (which I am not).

torusXL: Nah, I'm mostly talking about the Indian developers I've worked with who are living here overseas for a long-term temp. position.

I figured for sure you would be talking about Indian citizens, not using "Indian" the same way some people use "Mexican".

torusXL: It really is a cultural thing and they are humans and nice people too, whatever the delusions and false reality you'd like to build up in your head to make the panties wadded up your ass feel like something good.

Yes, they are very nice people, I have never argued that. I also have not argued that they should not be treated politely. I am just saying they are responding to market forces, same as everyone else (with the additional incentive of desperation). The idea that there's some cultural entitlement to deference is expensive. If your organization can afford it, then good for you.

I am not going to be "sensitive" to an Indian who is lowering my wage.

No job spends 100% of their time doing 1 thing.
Even on an assembly line, the line stops from time to time.

pacified: I am not going to be "sensitive" to an Indian who is lowering my wage.

Yeah.  How dare that bastard try to raise himself out of poverty by competing with you.