IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Tenks

Bronze Knight of the Realm
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Has Necrolyte followed us around? I'm sure he'd have some cool stories for this thread.
 

Xequecal

Trump's Staff
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Ask used car dealers how often their "make you wait in the office while they talk to the manager" schtick works. People are goddamn morons.

This also works through sheer exhaustion. After they do this six times and you've been sitting in the dealership five hours with nothing but stale donuts and coffee to eat and have experienced maybe 15 minutes of actual human interaction, you just want to get it over with.
 

Vinen

God is dead
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This also works through sheer exhaustion. After they do this six times and you've been sitting in the dealership five hours with nothing but stale donuts and coffee to eat and have experienced maybe 15 minutes of actual human interaction, you just want to get it over with.

Can't wait for new cars to be sold directly by the car company.

Wife and are in the process of getting a Model X and the experience has been AMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZING.
 

Ao-

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
<WoW Guild Officer>
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This also works through sheer exhaustion. After they do this six times and you've been sitting in the dealership five hours with nothing but stale donuts and coffee to eat and have experienced maybe 15 minutes of actual human interaction, you just want to get it over with.
Yeah, I don't get it. One dealership tried to do that to my wife and I when we were looking at cars and we just left. They came running asking us where we were going and I said we'd gladly buy our car elsewhere, since they didn't value our time.
 

Noodleface

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Can't wait for new cars to be sold directly by the car company.

Wife and are in the process of getting a Model X and the experience has been AMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZING.
Thinly veiled humble brag, must be a Vinen post
 
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Noodleface

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Man trying to buy a house in the city but they're all asking over a million. Kind of disappointing because I hoped they'd ask for two.
 
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Cad

<Bronze Donator>
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Man trying to buy a house in the city but they're all asking over a million. Kind of disappointing because I hoped they'd ask for two.

Even I think it's a little obnoxious the way he does it and I live around people all a lot richer than him who do that type of bullshit constantly.
 

Dr Neir

Trakanon Raider
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Credit Unions, I just walk in wanting X vehicle and state I will be using my CU. It has been an over-all great way to get thru faster until you hit the "Paperwork Guy" loan office/closer whatever you call them. Those guys dont seem to like it when I have things planned ahead, if had to guess I am screwing them out of their 1% on the loan? In any case you, have everything done and just waiting to sign off/complete the deal.

I hate paying the tax on the plate/transfer and make the dealership roll that in after I get the price down to what I like. One dealership I have gotten a few vehicles from in the past I dont hit as hard on the price, they also work with me better so it works out.
I also wont buy new or vehicles over "X" years old as a daily driver. Leasing is a NO option.

I have a great CU, have them on speed dial/fav list. All the dealerships know this CU and works well with them so it all works out in the end.

Funny story of that wait game. Had a place make me wait hours. They wanted to dump the car so bad that each time they came back to us I got them to lower the price each time. In the end I had that odd feeling neck hair things and just wanting out of the deal while in the "Waiting Game", I wasnt even out of the place and they immediately tore-up the contract they were drafting for us right on the spot.
I still get a personal high when thinking about that!

Since then, when i get that odd feeling I just leave now. I wont even give a second look and nothing will stop me from leaving. This isnt just over buying a car. I have walked in interviews before, out in about at the movies, etc.
I up a canceled family gym account years ago and within a month the place rage-quit closed. Owner had the locks changed in the middle of the night and told NOONE, not even his employees, he just quit the business and it is still there unused like a time capsule since that day.

My younger days I second guessed or questioned it, thing would go very wrong/bad.
I dont fight it, something just alerts me that something isnt right i'm out!
 

Noodleface

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I gotta say, having every other Friday off is so incredible. It's a long weekend every other week and sometimes could be a 4 day weekend. Also we get like 10 days off for Christmas and new year free (I know.. It's probably just taken from what pto we would have instead) .

While it's very old fashioned here, the benefits so far have been great for me and my family. The work life balance is surprisingly even better than it was for me at Emc.

The downside is I haven't really had anything to do. I have 3 guys that are supposed to be showing me the ropes and they're busy 99% of the time so I'm often just writing guides for stuff that isn't documented or reading specs. Also even though I'm senior they keep confusing me with the new kid that just graduated college and talk down to me quite a bit.
 

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Any of you guys work on side jobs? I was thinking of trying to find some side work for extra dough but man, looking through Craigslist gigs section is garbage. I think I live in a fantasy world where I'm going to find some mom and pop business I can bill for 10 hours a month or something.

I do. But Austin is full of tech work on the side. I've been charging 90/hour lately and steadily increasing as I get more work. Its mostly ma and pop level applications as they don't want/need enterprise software and a little database action can really change things for them. I also work with this guy who specializes in a mid-range SAP application with a smaller market share. But still plenty of work for it. Unfucking databses with like 30 years of duplicate entries as the backend app has no constraints (gag 80s database design).

I've also helped with "studies" to develop using a prototype platform of some kind and then give my opinion on it. There's a lot of that around here too. They pay you like 1k to do it just for the feedback.

May be unique to Austin but I find it to be quite nice. I am looking to do it full time in the next few years. At the moment I billout like 80 hours a month. Doing most of my work on Sundays/weeknights. One of my friends with a lot of experience in tech staffing is looking to get a staffing business off the ground in Austin as he has connections to tons of top tier talent that just doesn't happen to be in the US (not Indians either). So far in my experience Ma and Pop type shops don't like hiring people they can't meet for some reason.
 

Tenks

Bronze Knight of the Realm
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So you basically just do the schema design for their data and slap an ORM ontop of it and ship it out? Sounds like easy money.
 

Cad

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So you basically just do the schema design for their data and slap an ORM ontop of it and ship it out? Sounds like easy money.

This is what I did from 99-2006 like 50 times at various places and for various types of applications... making their apps talk to their data in an extensible, efficient, and modular way. Doing this in a non-retarded fashion is harder than it seems.

Although so much of it is in frameworks these days, hibernate didn't even exist when I was writing odbc/jdbc frameworks.
 

Tenks

Bronze Knight of the Realm
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Yeah I'd just use an extremely high level ORM. Anymore with Spring & Hibernate you'd be able to ship out a RESTful API to talk down to a Postgres/MySQL with very, very little code written by yourself. Just boot it up inside a Tomcat on some server and write the web UI to talk to your server and you're good to go. That is basically what I did for a few sample projects I did when applying to Blizzard to try and get my feet wet and the Spring4/Hibernate/Database integration was very slick these days. There is actually a really nice archetype out there on Github doing it all for you. It already has all the plumbing set up for your Spring4 webapp to startup in Tomcat, accept web calls RESTfully and persist whatever you want to a Postgres. It even has Spring Security built in so it does the login page for you and persists the users (securely) into the database as well. Within hours I had a little webapp up that a user would register/login and be presented a messaging queue. I'd hand these messages off to a RabbitMQ queue for "processing" (did nothing except echo the message I just wanted to get Rabbit up) and would persist the messages back into the Postgres for future retrieval and logging.

Hardest part for me would be writing the web front-end since I have no experience using Angular or any of the other sexy frameworks.
 

Cad

<Bronze Donator>
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Yeah I'd just use an extremely high level ORM. Anymore with Spring & Hibernate you'd be able to ship out a RESTful API to talk down to a Postgres/MySQL with very, very little code written by yourself. Just boot it up inside a Tomcat on some server and write the web UI to talk to your server and you're good to go. That is basically what I did for a few sample projects I did when applying to Blizzard to try and get my feet wet and the Spring4/Hibernate/Database integration was very slick these days. There is actually a really nice archetype out there on Github doing it all for you. It already has all the plumbing set up for your Spring4 webapp to startup in Tomcat, accept web calls RESTfully and persist whatever you want to a Postgres. It even has Spring Security built in so it does the login page for you and persists the users (securely) into the database as well. Within hours I had a little webapp up that a user would register/login and be presented a messaging queue. I'd hand these messages off to a RabbitMQ queue for "processing" (did nothing except echo the message I just wanted to get Rabbit up) and would persist the messages back into the Postgres for future retrieval and logging.

Hardest part for me would be writing the web front-end since I have no experience using Angular or any of the other sexy frameworks.

I'm about 10 years out of date but you could do this with hibernate if you were slick back then, you'd create your data model in the database, point hibernate at it and let it auto-generate all your persisted java objects, use some generic hibernate methods for your basic REST api, and you'd be good to go for simple applications.

But nobody calls consultants for simple shit, leastwise not well paid ones. Half the time you show up and they have 2 billion rows of broken data, a data model that looks like some indian ran it through the swahili translator a few times, and they use an odd mix of stored procedures, business code in the servlets, and straight SQL queries embedded right in the html/js....

Oh and they want it to be fast and efficient when you're done too.
 

Tenks

Bronze Knight of the Realm
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I'd probably tell them I'm going to write my own data model and just import the data from their broken database. But of course all of that takes time and I have no clue what the expectations are for these consulting gigs. I'm actually investing a bunch of my free time in actually trying to learn Unity. I figure if I work in a place that sells games I may as well know my way around the basic structure even if I have no real aspirations of that side of the coding world.
 

a_skeleton_03

<Banned>
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Yeah I'd just use an extremely high level ORM. Anymore with Spring & Hibernate you'd be able to ship out a RESTful API to talk down to a Postgres/MySQL with very, very little code written by yourself. Just boot it up inside a Tomcat on some server and write the web UI to talk to your server and you're good to go. That is basically what I did for a few sample projects I did when applying to Blizzard to try and get my feet wet and the Spring4/Hibernate/Database integration was very slick these days. There is actually a really nice archetype out there on Github doing it all for you. It already has all the plumbing set up for your Spring4 webapp to startup in Tomcat, accept web calls RESTfully and persist whatever you want to a Postgres. It even has Spring Security built in so it does the login page for you and persists the users (securely) into the database as well. Within hours I had a little webapp up that a user would register/login and be presented a messaging queue. I'd hand these messages off to a RabbitMQ queue for "processing" (did nothing except echo the message I just wanted to get Rabbit up) and would persist the messages back into the Postgres for future retrieval and logging.

Hardest part for me would be writing the web front-end since I have no experience using Angular or any of the other sexy frameworks.
We need to talk about REST and API's and Blizzard.

I have a project that I would like to do.
 

Cad

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I'd probably tell them I'm going to write my own data model and just import the data from their broken database. But of course all of that takes time and I have no clue what the expectations are for these consulting gigs. I'm actually investing a bunch of my free time in actually trying to learn Unity. I figure if I work in a place that sells games I may as well know my way around the basic structure even if I have no real aspirations of that side of the coding world.

You can't nuke their data model because then all their custom hacked in garbage hardcoded SQL won't work at all and it'd break their business and they can't afford to start from scratch.

These aren't tractable problems, mostly, you just try to leave it with less cruft than when you started.