pseale

I just read your blog post and couldn't leave a comment there for whatever reason, so here goes.

Regarding interview attire, people ask because some teams are flip-flops and gym shorts casual while others wear suits every day. Wearing a suit to the flip-flops team interview is almost as bad as dressing down for the business formal team. Given the interviewee can't divine ahead of time with which type of team he's interviewing, the only safe thing to do is ask.

Yeah, it's somewhat frustrating how some people will screen you for sending a .DOC, and some people will screen you for NOT sending a .DOC. For extra fun, let's ask whether we should wear a suit to the interview: must wear for consideration, or immediate disqualification/no-hire? There's disagreement there as well.

The only safe advice is to ask ahead of time; unfortunately for you, there was no one to ask. Dysfunction is unfortunately common.

I'm going to guess TFS/VSTS from Microsoft, which is both a relatively new product, and fits his description of aggressive expansion.

One of the things I like about the TDD experience is it assumes you're not a 'strong enough programmer' and works with your failings. If you're the perfect OO programmer who has memorized all APIs, TDD is worthless, because you can just bang out code the first time correctly. If you write perfect code, why bother exercising your code first in tests when you write it correctly the first time, every time?

For me, it helps. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it will help you too.

If you haven't tried TDD, I'd recommend attempting it at least once, maybe try running through a simple problem with a partner or at a coding dojo.

Takeaways from this article:

* (assumption that primary job of corporate software developer is to develop software)

* Programmers are not soldiers, so military attitudes to management don't apply

* Big Bank management of software developers is poor

* Dress code correlates with command/control type management structure, which is undesirable, so dress code is therefore an indicator of an undesirable job.

* Due to this correlation, you should never accept a job with a dress code.

I don't like these types of op-ed pieces and yet I still read them. Something's wrong with me.

Oh. MS's SharePoint premier support is definitely staffed with contractors; the two times I called, I talked to non-employees. I wouldn't draw any conclusions about the development staff from that though.

I'd be interested to hear where you get the Akamai Technologies-SharePoint link, I've only heard that SharePoint is wholly written by Microsoft.

If any of you are considering building your own enterprisey-ish system, just beware of what extensibility points you provide your customer. Once you provide an extensibility point, you're responsible to maintain it as-is, and unable to change that piece of your product. Provide extension points to every piece of your product, and you've completely frozen its architecture.

This helps explain why new products like Wave are so much better than established enterprise products, and why enterprise software ends up the way it does.

Here's the article's doppelganger ('Cha': Tea-Drinking for IT Developers): http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/philfactor/archiv...

This sounds vaguely like the test given to Paul Atreides in Dune, testing to see whether he was Human or an animal.

Jeff is presumably choosing to build his reusable HTML widgets in functions, which is one valid way to do things.

Here's a good overview of all options available to ASP.NET MVC: http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/jimmy_bogard/archive/2009/01...