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

I think we're on a 6 week release cycle here

I'm not really sure, we have a full QA team that's pretty massive in Shanghai that has a giant automated test suite with thousands of tests. We don't get into the nitty-gritty with them unless they catch something.

I enjoy developing my own tools and solving my own problems, but I don't think I could code on a team and have people pick apart my code because it doesn't follow some standard or guideline or whatever. I see the developer dudes at work arguing all the time about stupid shit and know for certain I'd hate working with them.

On another note, even though it may be a bad decision (I'm already a defense contractor so my decision making process is flawed anyway) I think I might take this RedHat gig. 125k annually, substantially cheaper health care and other perks are pretty good. That's about a 20% raise (25% if you count the almost 5k per year I save in health care costs) and I get to keep my clearance since it's public sector consulting.

Noodleface said:

You could also just look on indeed or wherever for part time freelancing/contracting work. Yeah, you'd be working a lot more but it would give you an idea if you liked it.

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Has anyone tried this? Something I am sorely lacking is experience with other code bases. I've worked on two applications for my current job (one is an old ass ASP.NET WebForms application, the other is a newer Angular 2+ / WebAPI contraption), but that's all my experience involves. I'd love to see what architecture and patterns other enterprise level applications have used.

So I had considered looking for part-time work just to see what other stuff out there looks like.

alavaz said:

I enjoy developing my own tools and solving my own problems, but I don't think I could code on a team and have people pick apart my code because it doesn't follow some standard or guideline or whatever. I see the developer dudes at work arguing all the time about stupid shit and know for certain I'd hate working with them.

On another note, even though it may be a bad decision (I'm already a defense contractor so my decision making process is flawed anyway) I think I might take this RedHat gig. 125k annually, substantially cheaper health care and other perks are pretty good. That's about a 20% raise (25% if you count the almost 5k per year I save in health care costs) and I get to keep my clearance since it's public sector consulting.

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It isn't really picking apart, and adhering to a coding standard keeps things looking clean and consistent. Yeah sometimes you get the autistic guy that complains your spacing doesn't look right, but in general I've found it much better than that.

alavaz said:

I would think that you could include a public key in your DLL that then generates the "encryption" key at install time. As long as it is signed by the public key then your downstream application should trust it for encryption.

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So if anyone gives a shit, this is what I decided to do:

Our application's installer is now passphrase protected. This passphrase was used to encrypt the symmetric key used in our application. The encrypted symmetric key is what exists in the installer program. During installation the symmetric key is decrypted using the passphrase that was entered at the start, then immediately re-encrypted using the .NET DataProtection class (basically Windows takes care of it auto-magically) and is locked to the installation machine. The resulting cipher is then stored in the database. So, if anyone actually gets access to the database this cipher-key is useless as it can only be decrypted on the installation system.

I like this solution because it has the least amount of moving parts and allows Windows to manage the real symmetric key storage.

Lendarios said:

move to react.

Both those technologies are dead.

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Both of what?

Noodleface said:

It isn't really picking apart, and adhering to a coding standard keeps things looking clean and consistent. Yeah sometimes you get the autistic guy that complains your spacing doesn't look right, but in general I've found it much better than that.

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I'm all for having internal standards and style guides and stuff. To clarify, I more meant that I hear dudes arguing about external standards (that I'm not even sure exist) by like Google, or Microsoft. If you ever want to kick off a small scale civil war, ask .NET devs about Entity Framework and watch the room divide.

alavaz said:

If you ever want to kick off a small scale civil war, ask .NET devs about Entity Framework and watch the room divide.

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Right tool for the job and all of that, but I can't imagine why anyone would rather use ADO.NET or write SQL strings over EntityFramework. I guess I can see it if you're primarily a database guy and want absolute control. But, my God, that shit is awful. AWFUL.

I use linkedin mainly nowadays. I do use indeed too, but it's heads or tails if it's worth it.

Usually I just kind of browse company websites to see what they have and submit through them

Deathwing said:

So I polished up my resume(it really helps to get stuff done with the family out of town) and I realize I'm not sure what the site du jour for finding jobs is. Last time I use linkedin and I think monster? It's been over 5 years at this point. I've seen indeed mentioned. Any other sites I should be using?

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It will depend on your location and what skills/certs you have, but all I did to get my current job is post my resume on linkedin and clicked the button saying I would be interested in offers. Took all of a week before I had the folks reach out to me who got me my current job. Been here for 2.5 years. Pay is decent. If I get the urge to move on I will cert up and do the same most likely.