

Dream jobs that you're glad you didn't pursue: computer programmer - Confusion
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/dreamjobs/dreamjobs5.html

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iwwr
This one's good as well:

"So you wanted to be a veterinarian"

<http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/dreamjobs/dreamjobs4.html>

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togasystems
Funny, I just finished designing, programming and deploying a healthcare
system. Though it didn't take me three years, it did take considerably longer
than expected due to the incompetence of the health care company. They wanted
to remove a universal search bar because it was too easy to use. Five meetings
later, they put it back in. It is now the most used function of the entire
platform.

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rick888
This is more common than you think.

At my last job, I worked on their new e-commerce site (it was really just
custom additions added to oscommerce).

The boss decided to make every design decision by committee. One week one
person would want it one way..and the next..another. The boss would even
change his mind on things every few days. I beat my head against the wall
trying to explain to them that our project would never get finished this way,
but nobody would listen to me.

Something that should have taken 2 months ended up taking over a year. In the
end, management started trying to figure out why things took so long...and
would not attribute it to starting a project, stopping a few days, weeks, X
amount of time into it, and starting over.

The company is now almost out of business (they let me go a couple of weeks
ago), which doesn't surprise me in the least.

I am surprised at all of the incompetent business owners that manage to make
money going against good business practices when there are so many people that
do everything right and still can't succeed. I think they are either lucky or
they have good people working for them that can compensate.

As an aside to my story, if you are thinking about using Oscommerce, Zen cart,
or Oscmax in any e-commerce project...think again. In addition to the
nightmare of code that you will need to maintain, it's difficult to keep
secure. This is because template code is not separated from main application
code. If you need to make any custom changes (which you will if you are
changing anything about the default design), all security updates will have to
be made by hand...which isn't impossible..but tedious.

The code itself is atrocious. It's a hacked together, spaghetti mess. If you
look at the history of Oscommerce, the foundation (which hasn't changed that
much) was built by inexperienced developers (and it shows).

I would recommend the Interspire shopping cart. Even though it costs money,
you get support for a year and the code is very well organized and the plugin
system makes it really easy to make changes. I've also heard some good things
about Magento (which is free)..but I've also heard it has a scaling problem.

