Talented Web Developer Looking For Work

Well, TechPhob has finally done it. I saw this coming for a long time, but this is almost funny. Well, it would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. Ever since last fall, things have started to go downhill. Then suddenly two months ago the slope became so incredibly steep that I thought to myself, “This cannot be happening.” Things kept building, and last night I would say that we leveled off and now the cliff is right in front of us.

My boss is being “moved” from his position as manager of IT for our division, because our division manager has had some complaints.

Complaint #1: (I have to be careful what I write here) We lost a bid we really wanted and it is all your fault. My boss’s reply: How is this my fault, you didn’t include me on any of the meetings when we wrote our estimate; a week after you had it you told me you needed our estimate; I gave it to you and we lost out to another office. That was not my fault.

Ok, fine. Complaint #2: Our communication is not working. My boss’s reply: You think?

Div Man: I think you need to work on it.

My boss: I need to work on it? I’ve asked you for over a month, emailed you, and you have never gotten back to me on our marketing brochure.

Div Man: You sent your email on July 17.

My boss: Really? I was on vacation then. I’ve sent you multiple messages.

Div Man: Oh, I guess I need to work on my communication.

Ok, fine. Complaint #3: (This is a doozy) People come to you looking for help with something, and well they ask for a Pinto and you always want to give them a Cadillac. You are here to give people what they want, not what they need. My boss’s reply: Did you hear what you just said?

My boss is pissed (rightly so), and apparently they are dissolving our IT department. I am being moved to a position that He had, under The Asshole himself. Asshole: I think we should do it my way; I’ve worked with Access before so I know a thing or two about relational databases.

My thought to that: So my years working with Oracle, Teradata, M$ SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and even *shudder* Access count for nothing and you know better than I do?

I need out of TechPhob now. Anyone have a job for a talented web developer looking for work?

Book Progress

I decided to make a little chart of my progress with the book…

First Draft of Book

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
100%	100%	100%	100%	100%	100%	100%	100%	73%	2%	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-

First Draft Deadlines:

1. July 21, 2006 – 2 chapters of book (DONE)
2. September 1, 2006 – 50% of the book
3. November 24, 2006 – First draft of book
4. December 18, 2006 – Completed manuscript

I will let you know when I know more on my deadlines…

My Lucky Coworker

A coworker of mine just stopped by my cube to tell me he had given his notice, and that he got a full-time position at Maryville University teaching Art History. I said good for him!

I am not jealous of him in the “I wish my life was like his” kind of way. It falls more in line with “I’m jealous of you, because you have found a way out of TechPhob.”

I am really digging this writing thing, stressful as it may be with deadlines looming. It is putting me more and more into the academic mindset. My coworker got a job in the academic world after years of trying, and I couldn’t be happier for him. I admit I will miss him. Having a conversation with him was more stimulating than with the average Joe. But he got the kind of job I really want.

He is four years older than me, but I still have to even return to college and get my Ph.D. (or as it will turn out if I ever go back, a D.Sc.) My worry will always be that I will not be able to get into a graduate program. My lack of caring when I was in undergrad doomed me to a B- average for my B.A. (and I still wonder why a B.A. instead of a B.S.) Yes I had an A average in the courses for my major, but still.

All things come with time, right? I’ve always had a problem with that, especially the whole earning your due. Things come natural to me, and I am probably more gifted than most people I work with (okay, I have come to find out that it is very rare for me to meet someone I consider an equal.) I can’t help that I have always found things easy, or that I am good at a lot of stuff. I should get my due, without having to go through the process of waiting for it. I earn it because of who I am and what I can bring to the table! I just wish anyone else would see it that way.

If I find someone that knows more than me, it usually doesn’t take me very long to learn it myself, and then I learn it better and know it better – that is, if the subject even interests me. My biggest problem is staying focused on one subject. There is too much to learn in one lifetime, but by god, I am going to try.

Sorry for the abrupt topic changes; that is how my mind always works.

CS Versus CIS

I seem to be on a bit of a rant right now, so why stop with the last post. This thought was kind of planted in my mind a long time ago and recently began to grow when I was talking with my wife’s cousin’s husband, who just so happens to have a CIS degree. My bias may just be because of the people I know who all got CIS degrees and graduated from the same university.

Back to this rant. This guy I was talking to was telling me a little about the work he is doing with .NET development in VB.NET. I shuddered because of the VB.NET more than the .NET probably. Then he said that VB was his favorite language. Thus begins this rant.

VB? Seriously? Was that the only language you ever learned? I know from a friend who graduated at the same wonderful school that his development projects were in VB as well. I am kind of stunned. VB is not a language to teach computer skills (certainly not Computer Science, but I didn’t think for Computer Information Systems either). VB was not taught at SLU when I got my CS degree. Hell, they were just upgrading their program and using C and C++ instead of Pascal as their intro classes. Furthermore, I never once used a Windows-run machine for any of my work the entire time I was there. Everything was UNIX or Mac for high level languages and Math work. I don’t even want to get into the architectures I learned for design and assembly language classes.

I knew Basic and QuickBasic because those were the first languages I learned when I was little (and yes, I think 8 counts as little). So I understood the syntax of VB if it ever came up when my friend would ask for programming help. But that is the extent that I would even touch VB. I regarded VB as most people would regard a dead rodent; dead in the St. Louis summertime heat for several days, as they had to hold it by the tail to dispose of it. There were no benefits to me liking the language.

And why is it being used in CIS programs? I always thought that CIS was a mix between CS and MIS, but that can’t be the case either. My wife got her degree in MIS before going on for her JD, and I remember helping her and her friends write C programs for their classes. That’s right C, not VB. We used to joke that those that couldn’t handle the Mathematics required for CS (let’s face it, you come out of your degree with enough math for a Minor in it) would drop out and join the easier MIS program.

My point to all of this is that CIS people do not have the same technical skill set as CS people. They lack the logic and science skills, and they lack some of my respect when their favorite language is VB. (Sorry Kelly). So why do they get the same jobs we do? Why do they get paid the same as we do? They have an inferior degree and we have to treat them as our equals?

Something is just not right with the technical world.

.NET Development

Let me preface this post with the following: I have never been a fan of .NET.

My experiences with .NET started when .NET was still in beta while I was contracting at Anheuser-Busch. Another programmer, Prerit, and I decided after much deliberation that we wanted to make the application we would be working on standards compliant. That’s not too much to ask, right? We quickly discovered that using the Web Forms within Visual Studio did not produce standards-compliant source. What were we to do? The only logical thing, we abandoned the Web Forms and wrote everything from scratch. Visual Studio became somewhat of a suped-up Notepad.

And so it went, for two years of development, I never touched Web Forms. Then I left A-B and .NET, at least for a while.

Now I work for TechPhob, and I have recently been put on a C# project for a big bell. I sat in on a workshop where they were introducing us to the client’s environment, and winced (probably visibly) when I found out they would still be using Visual Studio 2003 – I had learned by then that Visual Studio 2005’s Web Forms produced standards-compliant source.

But the real shock, and I guess the point of this post, is that as I watched this workshop, I found, to my horror, that these .NET developers (client side and those working for TechPhob in California) were putting all of the style for the components directly into them. My god! No thought to the cssClass or to setting a properid on the component. These were supposed to be professional .NET developers, and they had no thought to using CSS.

Did they not see the benefits? One of the TechPhob developers had mentioned at one point of his desire to use a MVC design pattern for all new development. So he was savvy enough to recognize the usefulness of design patterns, but not of a very simple and very important one – separate presentation from structure.

So, my general question to all those professional .NET developers out there – do none of you rely on CSS for presentation, or do you just use the easy tools that Microsoft provides?