Archive for the ‘Consulting’ Category

Professional Programmers have a Responsibility

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

…To themselves and to the industry.

On a private mailing list I recently read a message which included this paragraph – this paragraph is totally off topic to the topic of the mailing list.

Author name has been excluded to protect the unprofessional programmer. (license breaker facilitator)

I’ve been working professionally as a programmer for nearly 20 years and I’ve rarely seen businesses that pay for Enterprise licenses, much less an "Enterprise" license that is only good for one Developer.  There will be tons of license abuse at this price point within businesses. Heck, most of the places I have worked at outfit their Developers with Visual Studio they got from one copy of the MSDN.

My response is this:

It is your professional responsibility as a programmer to point out to these businesses that they are breaking a EULA and if the software make found out they would likely be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.

These types of business should be buying a copy of MSDN for each developer — that is how it is licensed. Or they should be investigating other options. And there ARE other options, whether it is Express editions, or a program like bizspark or open source such as SharpDevelop.

Posted in Consulting, Tech | Comments Off

Excellence in Hiring and Practice

Monday, April 6th, 2009

There was a Off Topic discussion on a mailing list recently which left me with these thoughts.

There is nothing wrong with expecting and even demanding excellence. It is these things which make society a better place. People do have a tendency of at least trying to live up to expectations. People want to succeed. The sad part is that there are so many employee positions which do not encourage or expect excellence. I feel it is not unreasonable that you have high expectations out of your interview candidates. I feel that it is important that we all recognize this problem in our community and recognize that it impacts the world as a whole.

While I’m not directly in the hiring position like some of the people ?venting? on the list, I will say that I’ve also been very impressed with a few of our straight out of college hires.(actually all, I credit good interviewing by the awesome people with which I work)

Extending this beyond just interviewing candidates, I was recently reminded of the importance of seeking excellence as we work. Sometimes as consultants we feel like doing things for our clients is a balancing act and that sometimes pursuing the best design isn’t the best thing for the client. Maybe sometimes that is true. But I think I realized that I was leaning toward the side of “settling” for non-excellent design. I shall not continue that. I shall provide a better balance of excellence.

Posted in Consulting, Programming | Comments Off