mgraybosch

I chose the wrong day job, too, but it seemed like a good idea when I was 18 and my family's idea of a good job was bartending. I was a failed musician who took up writing, and I had just enough sense to realize that I'd need a day job.

If cleaning toilets paid $25/hour I'd still be doing that. Somebody has to do it.

My coworkers think I'm some kind of guru. They've never worked with a real guru, so they mistake me for a the real deal because I read Design Patterns once. You should feel sorry for them. :)

Headphones and power metal are my most reliable coping mechanism.

Flawed spec? Oh, please. My first job didn't even have a spec. It had two reams of paper worth of MicroFocus COBOL listings and a directive to implement that code's functionality for Windows using Visual Basic 6.

It also had a VB6 codebase that half a dozen contractors had hacked into the sort of unholy mess that even H. P. Lovecraft knew better than to try to write about.

This is no joke, people: every variable was global.

Hi, deaconblues. I'm guy who write this article. I can't speak for anybody but myself, but developers who don't live and breathe code probably don't work in the major tech hubs or for startups.

I'm a contractor who does a hell of a lot of work for state governments. An NDA precludes my naming names, but I work in a Microsoft shop and I've spent the last year helping reverse-engineer a legacy system implemented in COBOL than ran on an IBM mainframe.

It isn't sexy work, but somebody has to do it. Why not mercenaries with bad attitudes like me? :)