Ballmer's Peak

I LOL-ed, hard..

My New Environment

I'm gonna tell a bit about my work. Currently I'm working with a company that provides telecommunication services. The pay is quite decent, considering that I only have a little bit more than 2 years of working experiences. Salary aside, the environment is nice. To tell the truth, this is my first time working within big organizations. My previous employers are small-to-medium organizations, with employees less than 10 people. It was quite a shock for me at first, imagining that I need to work with a large number of people. I admit that due to I'm used to work with small companies, I tend to be self-organizing and thus reluctant (or ignoring, to be more precise) on the standards defined within my unit. Oh yeah, I'm attached to R&D unit. Seeing that I came from software houses, my managers see this as a blessing while some of my colleagues see this as a curse.

Firstly, I rejected *all* development tools that they are currently using and I use my own that I am familiar with. They use WSFTP, I use CuteFTP. They use 1stPage 2000, I use EditPlus. They use HeidiSQL, I use Query Browser. This sometimes causes communication errors due to the terms used in these softwares differs although the functions are similar. But then nonetheless, some of them (mainly those experienced ones) started to understand why I use my own tools and begin to learn the advantages of both and exploit those advantages.

Then, there comes the coding part. When first assigned for a project, my supervisor gave me her (yes, her) source code from previous project with hopes that I'd just follow her coding standards and change whatever necessary to suit the new project. Lo and behold, to much of her horror, I redesigned her codes from scratch, removed any unnecessary functions and changing 90% of the code structure. To be honest, there is actually no standards at all inside her coding. There's no proper indentation, variables are declared on the fly instead of pre-assigned, unused functions/variables/procedures are carried over from previous projects and too many rubbish such as xMsg = xMsg. I mean, who the Hell writes this? But then although this sometimes irks her, my managers and Head of Department (HOD) like it as they now starting to see quality (and readable, this is the important thing) codes within the company's code repository. I do admit that I didn't take any programming certificates to boast about my coding ability, but if you are coding at least please make your code readable if you can't make it efficient. I'd rather look at a readable but inefficient code than efficient but incomprehensible code.

Working there is considered a godsend to me. The workload is minimal as compared to what I endured in my previous job. This do sometimes make my colleagues wonder why I'm so laid back in any development task. Things that are major to them, are considered as small to me. Those worked with me before knows that when I do my codes, I like to do it right the first time. I hate debugging for simple problems, it's just a waste of time. Unless it's big thing like non-working API or query optimization (as example), I'm not really thrilled in doing debugging process. So when I received a project White Paper, I like to iron out the system logic flow before I start typing my codes. This, in return, will save me time to change my code later as I have already expected the requirement changes and be prepared for them.

But then this evening, while I was doing the process flow for my project, I asked one of my colleagues on a small flow error that I want to clear off first. "No no no no, you don't care about this first. Do the core engine first, I worry you don't have time to finish it. Leave this part first, it's not important."

"Fuck la. I've code, install, debug and maintain system bigger than this okay. This thing that you call a system, for me it's just a programming tool."

Of course, this was just roaming within my brain. I was very tempted to utter it with my mouth actually, but then my brain was quick as usual. Let the error undone and unnoticed. At least when it's discovered during testing, I know who to blame.


There you go. Actually this post is just for me to vent out my frustration with the incompetence of some of my colleagues in deciding which is important and which is not (that's why you'll see the post seems like to scatter everywhere). Ah well, as long as I get my pay every end of month, the current workload isn't killing me, I can live with that. Just enjoy the minimal work while surfing aimlessly during office hour..

p/s: with my current salary, I'm now required to pay for tax. fuck..