leaders

I remember the first Java project we got put on, that was amazing. It was a team of four devs. We were producing set top box software, so it was almost J2ME, highly embedded. We wrote all the code using VIM and we used Win-CVS. We just checked out the code and we checked it back in again. We resolved the mergers between us and all using the same code base; no branches, nothing funny. The simplest project imaginable. We had some really just stupid rules in that company, like every line of code should have a comment. I remember doing full Java docs for every single method I wrote and just going: it’s just so obvious, why can’t we just miss it out for this one? But we weren’t allowed to because of the company policy.

I remember distinctly going to my team leader: I didn’t understand the design document I’d been given and I was trying to get somebody to explain it to me. They said they’d get back to me when they had time and I should get on with what I thought was right and so I did. Then I went back to him a month later, and said “Look I still don’t know what I’m doing here. This is what I’m doing, can you at least confirm that this is right?” And they went, “Er, I’ll look at it.”

I didn’t get anything back until I actually went to the Project Head and it’s 70 people to a project and I was pretty junior, so I was a bit nervous, I said “Well, look I’m just trying to find out whether I’m doing the right thing.” And he went, “Sure, I’ll look at it.”

I found another job with an investment bank - after about a month and a half there they told me that they were letting me go. A number of people were being let go at the time from their contract, but they told me they were doing it because I didn’t test my code thoroughly enough. I was a bit angry about that at the time, because I thought that I did test my code. I know I test my code and I was one of the better people on that project in terms of just getting things tested. But I also took ownership of more bugs than anybody else. I was the only person on the team that was unit testing. I’ve

I joined a local software house and I was there for five years. For three of those years I was stuck in the basement doing VB (and I didn’t like VB). I wasn’t getting too well with one of my leaders, with looking for feedback and not getting it basically, with the usual result. The environment was very bad for my health, my eyesight, my optician recommended I get out of there. So I taught myself Java, because I realised it was quite heavily in demand in the industry and the software house had hardly any Java coders. And then I told some people that I’d learnt Java. Apparently there were abou