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Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

> A perfect score? You want to work there. More than 2 things they don't do? You don't want to work there. 1 thing? Maybe look into it and see how important it is to you.

That's all well and good if you have the luxury of picking and choosing from multiple offers. Here in the real world (i.e., not in SV), getting a decent offer (if you're not entry level) that's at least equal to your current pay generally takes 6 months - 1 year of hard interviewing. If I demanded a prospective employer scored even 50% on the Joel Test, I'd be perpetually unemployed. Which is probably why employers generally get away with providing sucktastic working environments for software developers.

I find it especially disheartening that the only one of Joel's 12 'tests' that's pretty much a universal 'yes' these days is uses source control.

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I'm not from SV, but I am from a tech hub, so I'm sure our experiences are pretty different. Regardless of that, adding granularity and ambiguity to the score doesn't help much in your case either (particularly since things like source control were removed, probably because "it's a given" where that might not be the case outside of startups)

While I haven't seen a shop that completely eschewed source control in a long time, I did once work at an especially dysfunctional company where only one designated person (the QA) was allowed access to the svn repo.

So individual programmers were basically forced to work without any of the benefits of an scm. The designated repo master would place a zip of the latest code in a folder, the programmers would copy it to their home area, and when we wished to 'commit' something, we'd copy our files to a staging area and put in a request with the QA to do the actual commit.

Can't I just commit to a branch and let the QA merge the branches into the trunk later? No.

I need to edit a file, time to: cp file.c file.c.bak1

If all you want is structured save points, git runs locally! See also git-svn and its ilk, which allow you to interface with a different SCM while you keep using a familiar git interface.

Assuming you're entrusted to install software locally, that is.

> Assuming you're entrusted to install software locally, that is.

BWAHAHAHAAA! No.. :(

At my current job, I've been waiting on a software install request (you know, just an IDE, a small thing) since early February. Coding in Notepad++ till then (w00t). Been waiting on a RAM upgrade (stuck at 4GB) for... well, since I started back in October.

Programming as a job sucks. Can I do something else and just keep coding as a hobby (at home, where I have decent tools and don't have to ask permission for every $%@! little thing)? I swear, if I could get paid just as well to bag groceries/serve coffee/etc. and not have to deal with an antagonistic/uberpolitical IT dept run by Vogons, I would do it in a heartbeat.

I would find a job in another company post haste.

Maybe your area really sucks, but i've never had the misfortune to work at jobs even half as bad as the two you've described here. I'm not in a tech hub at all.

Programming as a job doesn't suck. You were just unlucky enough to find one of the shittiest companies out there, and it sounds like you decided to live in an area without much competition. I can tell you right now, in an area with a halfway decent number of employers competing, you wouldn't have that many problems, and would more easily be able to switch jobs.

I hope your situation improves soon.

Can you relocate? I have seen shops like this, but if you can relocate that expands your options by several orders of magnitude.

One example: where I work we have our choice of windows/mac/linux (though if you want to run a linux other than debian, ubuntu or redhat/centos, you're on your own as far as IT is concerned); workstation upgrades are every 3 years. I'm due for a new one in May, so I only have 8GB of ram right now. Every desk has at least two monitors, and every office has a door[1].

This is not in SV, nor is Fog Creek (where Joel wrote the "Joel Test" from).

It costs nearly $200k to employ a software developer after taxes and benefits, so not being willing to shell out a few thousand a year in tools that will give a performance benefit (even if it's just making that person happier in their job), is wasteful.

1: There have been points in the past where cubes were used as a stopgap while we were finding more square-footage, including when I started. The person getting me set-up apologized for putting me in a cube.

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