Found this little nugget of gold at the end of Junior programmers: Earn Respect in 5 Easy Payments (+$19.95 P&H):
It is perfectly acceptable to ask questions of people on your team, even if you are ’senior’ or leading the team. The one trait that is hated from a junior team-member is asking too many questions. This trait is not all that common but when it is encountered it is probably the most annoying problem to have in the office. Only ask a question when you have spent a reasonable amount of time (say at least 15 minutes) trying to find the answer yourself - go through the sourc-code, search the documentation, Google it. Only when you are completely stuck should you get some help.
So many times I have been asked something like “what does this message mean” and I have found the answer on the very first hit of Googling that particular error message. This is embarrassing for the question-asker and annoying for me because I was distracted for an easily found answer.
How true it is. This is a horrible problem at our office. Because we have “lax standards” (yes, I’m being very nice here), there are a number of people around on a daily basis that either don’t have the mental capacity to actually figure out a problem as it pertains to their job description, or who are simply too lazy to figure it out on their own.
As a result, those few who actually do posses that kind of common-sense reasoning ability get “dumped on”. Sure, maybe I could figure this out on my own, but why bother? Chris is right across the room! He’ll be able to tell me what I screwed up, even if it doesn’t actually have anything to do with his job!
He didn’t write that reports program and he’s used it twice in his entire career, but I can ask him anyway!
Now to be fair, I’m not sure if this reflects more poorly on their manager for not firing incompetent employees, or on mine for not telling people in no uncertain terms to take a hike… Either way, I’m the one that ends up suffering because “management” isn’t doing their jobs appropriately in one form or another.
Beware all ye who enter unto the Systems department today…
What’s Open on Your Machine?
So what do you have open right now on your machine? Is that pretty standard? Anything else you normally have open (for work / home?)?
Right now I’m at work, and on my work PC we have:
Have I mentioned how much I love Office 2007?
Our phone system is software-based. This app serves as a gateway to all its wonderful features - company directory, caller ID, etc. etc. etc.
7 tabs open - Local copy of the site I’m developing, production copy of the site I’m developing, our internal Flyspray bug tracker, a random PHP.net documentation page, an Oracle function documentation page, and the stylesheet for some random site1
2 copies - One test / development server, one production server. Usually there are many more copies open - 2 servers x 2 or 3 users - 5 or 6 instances with countless queries, procedures, etc. open are quite normal.
LAMP (+Oracle - LAMPO?) configuration for site development.
Microsoft’s aging source code control system. It’s no SVN, but the interface is so simple a 2 year old could probably roll back my latest screw-up.
The Microsoft Management Console has all my Exchange server and Active Directory management snap-in’s configured. Sadly, I spend so much time in here that it just hangs around in my taskbar all the time.
3 windows - My network home directory (specifically my saved SQL queries and results folder), my htdocs directory, and a set of data files I’m importing into our system.
Our home-brewed ANSI 837 health insurance claim EDI importer. At the moment it’s eating half my RAM importing a 100MB text file of claims data into our database. Fun times…
My laptop is much simpler:
5 tabs - Google IG homepage, (mt) Account Center, 2x Google Apps for Domains GMail inboxes, and this write post page.
Gotta have coding music!
Mmmm… RSS is yummy!
Gotta keep up with fellow Wordpress-loving geeks!
So those are my machines at the moment, and pretty standard. Give or take a Photoshop and Textmate session on my laptop, and that’s about it. How about you?