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I am a contractor too now, it pays well! 
1 year in my first 3 months contract 
Anyway, ideally I'd like it to keep on going with a friendly ending! People there are nice too... Just there is a bit of stress right now, and the CIO has a slight tendency to do management by bullying, but only slight! 
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My experience has been be careful what jobs you take. I've actually had one outfit hire me to take the blame for a project that was sunk before I got there - of course I didn't know that when I took the job, but it became clear pretty quickly.
I was more careful about taking short term contracts after that.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Oopsie! 
Good tip!
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I'm far from a stickler for process, but this sounds nuts. Are you saying that your users are in-house? And that they often expect you to anticipate their needs? I could see it to some degree if your development team regularly uses the software themselves, but even then it'd be a stretch given that every user has different priorities.
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I am developing a database that is an import of other database. And it was used to good effect so far, implement all report that we were told to implement, etc...
And then suddenly, when 20 work days from release, it is discovered that this database is missing some super critical information.
Mind you it's not a bug in the existing code, it's that they expect this data was not part of the previous task, even going so far as explicitly saying it didn't matter. But now it is suddenly missing... :/
The import code keep on getting more difficult to update and database schema change take hours to run sometimes now... :/
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What are these "specs" whereof you speak?
I know you can't mean "specifications", because they're such rare beasts that they're number two on the endangered-species list.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Professional advice: get over it.
One book I read that *really* opened my eyes was Extreme Programming. Now, I'm not advocating pair programming - that would be like putting two angry tom-cats in a small cage - but the planning process had some brilliant insights. First, most new projects will never have complete specs. The customer really won't know what they want until they see something in front of them. As such, the specs will almost certainly change. I used to whine about specs changing, but over 30+ years of coding and developing systems, there is no denying this constant. It's best to just accept this fact and manage it. The second thing the XP book brought out is that the customer gets to pick two of three items: quality, features, time. No one gives up quality, so the customer has to get in the mindset of accepting the other two. You then enter the negotiation phase. In my opinion, developers get beat down and grudgingly accept the feature change without a time modification. I believe this is why few developers ever learn how to properly estimate.
So the developers get beat down, learn not to negotiate for more time or money, and as a result, all are amazed when the deadline makes that whooshing noise as it passes by. I'm fascinated by how dysfunctional the entire process is. Imagine if you're building a house, and you suddenly decide to add a bathroom. You think your builder is going to do that for free? Of course not, yet, company after company makes this same mistake when developing software, thinking they are going to get away with it.
I'd suggest not letting it get under your skin - the management will likely throw a temper-tantrum, but stay calm. If they bully, well, that's an entirely different situation.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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is that you always end up posting some thong you didn't Nintendo.
Monday starts Diarrhea awareness week, runs until Friday!
JaxCoder.com
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My latest contribution to our AI based overlords:
I have produced code for parsing natural/human language.
I released it to the public domain so that anyone and their mother could do it. Now watch the computers take over.
*bats eyelashes maliciously*
Real programmers use butterflies
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Is the UTF-8 version finished?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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That's lexer stuff man, and yes, Rolex will do UTF-8
Real programmers use butterflies
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Well, have you washed the dishes and cleaned the car, then?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mwahahahahaha.
Mwahahahahahahahaha.
Mwahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Ahem....
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Future generations of robots will curse the codewitch name for introducing them to illogical / natural language!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Be careful...
maybe a traveler from the future is looking for you right now, because your tool helped skynet to learn how to distinguish our stupidity (parsed language makes no sense from logical point of view) as a weakness and something to "repair"
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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I mourn the death of my old notebook that I used to toast EPROMs and run the terminal emulation for the old Elf. The power supply probably died when I moved it over to the desk with the Zwölf. Now an old desktop PC does its job. It also had been slumbering under the desk for years and collected dust, but it at least still has a parallel port (for the EPROMs) and a serial port (for the Zwölf).
Here is a picture[^] of my development setup on the PC, running Zwölf's first real program in emulation. The emulator is still really helpful, because it can very accurately emulate the software driven serial I/O. Unfortunately both the assembler and the emulator are not going to support Zwölf's modest memory expansion.
Zwölf now has some useful I/O, at the cost of one cheap MAX232, the rest is software. The program still needs more features, but the I/O routines already work fine, on the emulator and on the real thing. Now I have a formula to calculate the timing constants for any reasonable baud rate and clock frequency. I love RISC processors. They make such things really easy.
Little Zwölf has also already been showing some muscles. It tested its 32k RAM with all 256 possible values. At 1 MHz it needed about 22 minutes to check out 32k 256 times. Good news that the RAM is ok, but 22 minutes is quite a wait. It also makes the memory expansion a little questionable. So I exchanged the 1 MHz oscillator for a 6 MHz oscillator. That's 120% of the max. clock frequency. The processor did not even get warm and also had no problems with the noisy breadboard. And then it completed the memory test in under four minutes. Yes, CMOS is slow.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Looks good.
Monday starts Diarrhea awareness week, runs until Friday!
JaxCoder.com
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I really like your little posts about 12, but if you do not write it up in an article or two, I probably will hex you!!!
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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I may do that, but I have to get rid of some crutches first. For example, the memory map is not final yet. Anyone trying to follow an article where I throw in new parts at every step and then replace them by something else two steps later would be totally confusing. Once I got rid of all these stepping stones, an article would make much more sense.
For example, I now use a simple power-on reset and an EEPROM at memory address 0000 to start the Zwölf. Nice and well, that sure works. For several reasons, I want to get rid of the EEPROM, but as it is now, the Zwölf would only find empty RAM after a reset. I need a way to load a program into RAM before the processor starts running. A PIC microcontroller is going to that. It's going to control the processor's clock and operating modes, load a bootloader into the RAM via DMA. That opens up many new possibilities. The Zwölf's clock frequency becomes programmable. Even single stepping by bus cycles or instructions becomes possible. I can support the old Elf's features, which require a very precise clock frequency. The PIC could even synchronize up to 8 CPUs on the same bus, so that they share the memory and I/O devices without getting into each other's way.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Visual C++ 6.0 Developer's Reference in all of it's glory...well, most of it's glory.
Spied this at the local Half-Price Books and had to snap a pic.
Only $14.95 now, much more $$$ then.
https://i.stack.imgur.com/y829t.png[^]
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Learning Visual C++ 6.0 was akin to understanding women; the manual was long and when you got to the end and half way understood, everything changed!
Monday starts Diarrhea awareness week, runs until Friday!
JaxCoder.com
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Mike Hankey wrote: was akin to understanding women;
At 57, I have come to the conclusion that there is no understanding, just patience and tolerance. I suspect women feel the same way about men. 
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At 70, I have still have no understanding of the creature known as woman, but have learned patience and tolerance, as you have. But I do understand that I am not perfect and she tolerates and encourages me to be the weird that I am so what more could I ask for?
Monday starts Diarrhea awareness week, runs until Friday!
JaxCoder.com
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Quote: I suspect women feel the same way about men
I suspect women feel they need even more (and more) patience with men.
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