Job thread

[Sky]

If I could go back to school, it would be for an MBA. Yes, they're a dime a dozen, but it's a dime that you need to open a lot of doors. I also enjoy the management and team-building stuff and was held back from jumping over into management by lack of a degree (an MLS in this case), so there's a bias there.

You'd also have a good head-start if you want to open a small business at some point. That opens a LOT of opportunities. We live in a capitalist society and the MBA is the recognized standard.

[Yegolev]

I'm not really down with the "but everyone has one" argument against a MBA.  Said they guy without a Bachelor's.

[Viin]

Good point.

[Sky]

I'm not really down with the "but everyone has one" argument against a MBA.  Said they guy without a Bachelor's.

Hey, I've got a certification!  I balance my fiancee's 2 BAs and MLS, imo.

[Yegolev]

Well, it does bother me a bit that I wasn't able to pull it together.  I have enough credits to have at least a master, perhaps a doctorate depending on the degree, but they don't add up to anything.  I just leave off any mention of education in my resume and hope they don't ask.  It does keep me from certain gubment jobs, though.

It doesn't mean I think I'm uneducated.  I do think I have made some poor decisions, though.

[Yegolev]

Yesterday I discovered that SUSE uses python for at least some system executables.  Which version do I need to learn, 2 or 3?

[Trippy]

Both?

It's likely the scripts SUSE is using are in some version of 2.X. However 3.X has been out for about 4 years now so some new stuff may be written in it.

[Yegolev]

Makes sense, I got the idea v3 was a recent invention.  I might have just went with the latest automatically but I'm still after reading about Perl 6.  Maybe the thing to do is start off with v2 because I do believe the system scripts use that, but pick up v3 when I have about a 50% grasp of it and start writing my own stuff.

[Salamok]

v3 has been out since 2008 I think.  Problem is for 4 years everyone is looking around and saying I can't move to v3 because not enough people are using it yet.  Most of the major projects have still not been moved over, so if you just want to tool around using it to script some minor stuff for the OS v3 is good enough, if you want to actually create something of any sort of complexity then go with the latest version of 2 (2.7 I think).  I have heard that django is releasing a v3 compatable version soon, when that happens v3 will be much more of an option than it is now.

[Quinton]

Yeah, 2.6 and 2.7 seem to still be very dominant.  Haven't worked with python in a few years though -- was great for prototyping, horrible for maintaining (common problem with very dynamic, scripty languages).

[Salamok]

Yeah, 2.6 and 2.7 seem to still be very dominant.  Haven't worked with python in a few years though -- was great for prototyping, horrible for maintaining (common problem with very dynamic, scripty languages).

Using a framework addresses the maintenance problems and this should be done for any non "utility script" project that is intended to be taken seriously. For me Django is the most compelling reason to use Python, it is one of the best MVCish frameworks available for any language, if they port to Python 3 I may finally quit talking about it and switch from PHP to Python.

edit - In jobby related news my manager is leaving and just as everything appears to be on the verge of flying apart at work I get a call for an interview from an application I put in 2-3 months ago.  It is a MS stack position but their web site is in such a state of decay I seriously doubt being immediately up to speed on the backend would be a priority or much of a factor at all.

[Yegolev]

Not sure if bad or good.

[Salamok]

Not sure if bad or good.

Probably good for me and bad for everyone else I work with.

edit - lol if I leave it means over the last year our team will have gone from a combined experience level of 50+ years (with 30 of that on this particular "project") to a combined experience level of like 5 years, with only 1.5 years of that being on this project.

[Yegolev]

I assumed a bit of that, I was looking forward to the "state of decay" position.  Sounds like you would have time to read some books but you might also have to get elbows-deep into a pile of shit.

[lamaros]

So I got the job. In three weeks I wont work at home anymore and will get paid less. Also I will have to work more hours. Yay!

[Yegolev]

Yay?

[Lantyssa]

Gratz on becoming more of a corporate drone!

[MrHat]

Gotta love working at a job that is suppose to be objectively reviewing cases, yet when it comes to quality review for promotions a totally subjective review is given instead.

[Yegolev]

It's always who you know.

Unrelated, I'm not sure how I feel about grouping via indentation.  It's either genius or horribly evil.

[Trippy]

It's evil.

[lamaros]

Yay?

It's in a different industry and related to what I've been studying, so hopefully it's one step back before a whole bunch forward.

[Salamok]

It's evil.

If we are back on the subject of python, then this man speaks lies! Braces and brackets are handy but do not ensure readable code, indentation does more to ensure readability than just about anything other than programmer skill.

[Trippy]

Editors like emacs have been able to reindent code to match whatever style you like since the 80s.

[Yegolev]

If anything convinces me to use something other than vim to write code, it's going to be python.

[MrHat]

It's always who you know.

Definitely.  I'll have to chock it up to one of the negatives of working from home 1400 miles away.

[Salamok]

So my interview for the new job with the totally f'd up web site went very well, I was told it would take an hour or so and was there for 2 and a half.  I accidentally pulled off a Costanza leave behind move that resulted in a 15 minute follow up conversation with my interviewer a few days later.  My references have told me that they are being contacted. 

If I get an offer I wonder if it would hurt if I requested a tour of the work environment before giving an answer.

[Quinton]

It's evil.

If we are back on the subject of python, then this man speaks lies! Braces and brackets are handy but do not ensure readable code, indentation does more to ensure readability than just about anything other than programmer skill.

The problem with Python's syntactic whitespace is that not everyone agrees on tabs vs spaces, nor on how wide tabs should be.  As long as you're the only person working on a Python program, you're safe, but as soon as you start collaborating, unless everyone configures their editor the same way, you run the risk of changing the meaning of code by changing the way lines are indenting, in a way that can be effectively invisible.  This can be extremely not-fun to debug, especially since indentation changes can still be valid (no "compile" errors at parse time) but behave quite differently at runtime, so they can lay dormant if they happen in uncommon code paths.

Moral of the story: Python coding benefits from extremely aggressive style guideline enforcement.

[Yegolev]

Moral of the story: Python coding benefits from extremely aggressive style guideline enforcement.

This has become apparent before I have written anything.  I generally used three-space tabs, but I will obviously benefit from using the style standards and have abandoned any religious zeal I might have brought to the party.  I'll save my creative indentations and semicolonization for Perl.

[Miasma]

A three space tab?  That way lies madness.

[Quinton]

After a number of years of Linux kernel development, I've adopted their "hard tabs, tabs are 8 spaces wide" model for C/C++/java code, which tends to drive just about everyone but kernel people nuts.

[Lantyssa]

Yep.  Indent is two spaces, no tab.

[Salamok]

  is the jobs thread headed to politics over the great white space discussion?

[Quinton]

I'm sure we can defuse this by all agreeing that GNU Indent Style (where the {}s go on their own lines, *halfway* between the indentation level of the outer and inner blocks) is where true madness lies.

[Yoru]

I'm sure we can defuse this by all agreeing that GNU Indent Style (where the {}s go on their own lines, *halfway* between the indentation level of the outer and inner blocks) is where true madness lies.

Thanks, I was looking for a way to drive my team up the wall. Time to go change the published Visual Studio code formatting file and see when people notice.

[Salamok]

I'm sure we can defuse this by all agreeing that GNU Indent Style (where the {}s go on their own lines, *halfway* between the indentation level of the outer and inner blocks) is where true madness lies.

I just can't make myself do:
}
else
{

instead of:
} else {

Maybe I could if I had a larger monitor but for now this is my single biggest style guide hurdle.