[Courses] [Careers] Diverse Hats

[Mary]

On Sat, Feb 19, 2005, Poppy Casper wrote:
> However, there's a lot of restrictions placed on commercial
> programmers in the market right now, and the programmers really don't
> determine what the program is and will do.  Not in a commercial
> environment like the one I work in.

I tend to find one thing that's wide-open in commericial programming is
back-end systems (networked servers, things that push data around, not
the stuff that displays results).

End-users are very very picky about what they can see and touch,
naturally enough. So you end up getting a lot of "I have to click here,
and then see this, but in this font not that one, and in these colours."
(Tangent: I've read that you should be careful about this. Don't ever
show a client a complete working pretty GUI unless the backend is ready
too.  Otherwise the customer will see exactly what they wanted from you,
and won't be too pleased -- or may not be prepared to understand -- that
the interface may be ready but the rest of the project is chicken-wired
together. They may not appreciate that there *is* a "rest of the
project. Some people go so far as to get their UI person to mock up "one
quarter done", "half done" and "three quarters done" UIs to go with each
stage of their demos -- even if the UI is completely done two weeks in!)

But if you're writing backend stuff, you have a lot of scope for
choosing things like the tradeoffs between data storage choices, how to
manage system failures, and quite possibly doing your own specifications
from scratch or as you go for the vast majority of the work, because the
customer wants to specify the interface, not the entire design.

This may be team dependent though: some teams will have a manager who is
very controlling and does all this for them, leaving them just to put
the code in the files. And some teams, especially in very small
businesses, may be directly under a boss who's never done project
management before and falls for the "the UI is the whole project"
fallacy.

-Mary