emptying my brain onto the internet since 1998…
Hi, my name is Jason and you are reading my blog. Â I am currently looking for work.
Check out my resume!
In short… I’m a computer programmer, been doing ASP.NET and C# for the last four years, and am looking for work in the Atlanta and Northwest of Atlanta (Marietta/Kennesaw/Acworth) area. Â I’m not looking to relocate unless the company is willing to help me sell me house.
As a programmer, I pride myself on being able to, after the grunt work is done and the program is made functional, make my programs look pleasing, pretty. Usually this involves picking a color scheme using the well known color wheel (paint stores usually provide free ones, they are worth picking up). I start with the company colors and pick others that are complimentary and so on. I pick colors that sharply contrast for things such as alerts, alarms and errors, to make them stand out. I also usually fire up my trusty copy of Paint Shop Pro and craft some graphics to help round out the designs of menus and reports, and I always keep the sizes small so they don’t impede the loading time of the pages.
Then I give the program to the testers and the clients who usually come back with the most idiotic of requests. “Can we make the highlight color a light green text on a purple background? It will be easier to read.” “Can you remove the graphics from the menus? Just leave them blocky tables, we don’t need them to look good.” “Can you make my name appear on the top of every single page in giant 48 point font so that I always know that it is me who is logged in so I don’t use someone else’s account?”
And I have to do them, because my boss thinks that “the customer is always right”. But I know, since it happens every single time, that once the testing phase is done, they are going to ask things like “Why does my name appear in 48 point font on the top of every page?”, “Green on purple is awful, why did you choose those colors?”, and “These menus are so bland, can you jazz them up a bit?”
People wonder why I hesitate to put in my best effort the first time around…
Sometimes I just feels good and right to blow off responsibility and do something else. Today I decided that it just wasn’t really worth my time and effort to actually go to work. My boss and our main backend programmer are both on vacation, and my immediate responsibilities involve redesigning a page layout so that its “printer friendly”. So last night, in a burst of brilliance, I turned off my alarm and slept the sleep of the contented soul. I woke up and did my best to do nothing upwardly productive all day long. I played computer games, I browsed the web, I went out for lunch, I went to a bookstore and bought crappy books off the bargain table by authors whom by sheer virtue of their being published I respect but by the fact that they were only published once I figure from their work I can get a taste, perhaps, of how not to write.
Damn, I think when I bought those books I did something that might be considered productive. Crap. Now I’ll have to skip another day in a couple weeks and try again.
There are days when I love being a contract programmer, and confident in the knowledge that no amount of work they can throw at me will ever be more than I can deliver on time.
Its one of those things that on one hand I can understand, but on the other hand its really overstepping: Browsing the Internet from work and security. Now, I completely agree… block porn sites and other stuff that people should not be doing at work. But I’m a programmer, and there are a number of times that I come across the need to do something that I don’t know how to do. I check with my co-workers, and none of them know either… so I head to the internet. However, where I’m working now, they have a content review department. They log the urls of sites that everyone visits and they audit it for content. The more often you visit, the sooner the audit. Anything they deem “not good” they block. Many of the best programming sites on the net have ads to support paying for the site. The companies that pay the most for ads are those “scam-like” sites where their promise you “a FREE iPod*” if you punch the monkey. The review department bans any site with those ads. So, the more useful I find a website, the sooner it gets banned.
What?
I mean, I could understand if they reviewed the content, then banned it because its not work appropriate. But banning a site because of the people who buy ads on the site? Huh?
Whatever happened to monitoring people’s usage, then warning or firing them when they do something wrong? If someone wants to visit porn at work, you should let them, once, then fire them. But if they use the Internet in order to do their job better, why the hell are you trying to stop them? Why?
There are times where I run into a person who utters words that lead me to believe that it is by sheer luck alone that they continue to survive. Today, I was asked to have a report run and email it to a desired individual “on demand” without any user interaction.
Now, I’m a pretty good programmer. And on a report, I can give someone a field and a button, or even a drop down list and a button, that allows them to specify a person or email address and then send the report when the button is clicked. I can even set up a program to run at intervals, like daily, and execute the report and email it on schedule. But I have yet to actually find a way to program telepathy… if I could, then the middle manager who asked for a report to be emailed on demand to different people based on his mood would be out of a job.