29 Aug 2007, 12:58 pm
From my experience, all of the good ones.
Most of the best ones I've known had AS traits. The NT ones, for the most part, don't give the attention to detail the work really needs. I also saw a lot of "close enough for the deadline" code go out the door, only to have it come back and bite us.
As for management, remember they're only trained to reach a consensus, not a conclusion.
Depending on the companies you have worked for, projects may be monitored through the use of 'Gantt charts'. Basically these are fancy schedules formatted to show, in linear fashion, all the steps involved getting through a manufacturing project (software release, hardware, whatever). Managers eat these for lunch because: 1) they don't need to understand or sweat any of the details 2) They can present them up the management chain - they look good, and reassure those who have an even lesser understanding 3) It's easy to point fingers at individuals who are creating a bottleneck and slowing things down, or perceived to be.
How do we know the product is ready to ship? In the eyes of NT corporate kiss-ass types (including managers and worker bees), "it has to be ready because we stepped through the Gantt chart". This reminds me of the old joke, "there has to be money in my account, I still have checks".
This has all sorts of dire repercussions for AS workers. We know that there are problems that haven't been sufficiently resolved. The product will ship and result in months of dealing with bugs that crawl out of the woodwork, resulting in all sorts of unexpected interruptions and crises which are aggravating. Finally, throughout the development process, we are expected to put our nose to the grindstone and "just complete" the steps. As many of you know, this process is not inherently linear. You come up against issues which can't be resolved according to a calendar because they are either too involved, or require the type of thinking where you drop the issue for a week or two, and return to it afresh later, often with a more mature perspective.
It's my theory that hi-tech work life has been increasingly infected by the Gantt chart rot. It used to be that AS types could find refuge in R&D, off the beaten manufacturing track. With increasing emphasis on specific profit margins, this is becoming increasingly difficult because we all have to demonstrate value to a specific product, at a specific time, which is expected to generate a certain rate of return, during a certain quarter of the business cycle. Yuck.
Welcome to my world, except they're called 'work breakdown structures' rather than gantt charts. And they're totally BS. We usually just start with the date the project has to ship then work backwards to fill in the rest the 'milestone' dates- and get blamed when we miss them.
30 Aug 2007, 9:32 pm
30 Aug 2007, 9:45 pm
So, look at the coder next to you. If he's social, then it's you
01 Sep 2007, 12:29 am
01 Sep 2007, 10:16 am
07 Sep 2007, 1:01 am
09 Sep 2007, 7:04 pm
I just put all of them are, I want people I can connect to in my future workplace!
Brian003
Velociraptor
Joined: 10 Sep 2007
Gender: Male
Posts: 402
Location: University of Michigan Ann Arbor
11 Sep 2007, 10:30 pm
My supervisor is not, but I wish he was. Then he'd be less annoying.
Hello, I'm new here: I'm just quoting you to post here.
I tried Computer Programming my sophomore year in College.
Was probably the worst(And most boring) school class I had ever taken in my life. It was okay at first but it got into writing codes for crabs game and I got out fast.
The only reason I was interested in Computter Programming was because I like games. Programming is nothing like games though(As I found out). Man, I don' even see how Aspies can like programming, itsjust so boring; it seems like something a computer should do automatically
.
12 Sep 2007, 3:38 am
17 Sep 2007, 3:51 pm
.Heh... well in order for the computer to do anything automatically (which really is the idea behind computers ultimately), someone has to invent the automation. If that invention part were easy then very few people would really be able to earn a living programming computers, because everybody would just do their own programming, the way that people mow their own lawns or write their own newspaper ads. Give it another hundred years or so and that may be the case, like the characters in Star Trek who program the holodeck via a simple conversation with the ship's computer. That's an example of the automation catching up to your notion of programming being done automatically and you notice in the show, none of the characters ever ask anyone for help programming anything, they pretty much all do their own programming "work" because there's no point in asking someone else to "come in here and tell the computer to dim the lights".
21 Sep 2007, 9:21 pm
From my experience, you often can tell from the code (and structure) a software developer writes.
Aspie code is more often very ... em ... dense. We tend to tinker with the details more often than a typical CS student.
Well, at least i do. I once rewrote a program a fellow developer (NT) wrote. Well the software worked beforehand - most of the time anyway - and after i tinkered with it, it was twice as fast and the code size was about 10% of the original. Thinking back, in the course of the development, i once spent a whole week on a single line of code that replaced a 100+ line function.
I only met 3 or so other aspies in the trade, but we shared another distinction from the NTs: We all hated paperwork and the design-phase; when the boss stopped explaining the new project, we sat down for a coffee, made up the software design in our heads and started programming. We were mostly finished by the time a group of NTs with a similar task finished design phase, so we were free to tinker with the code until deadline
25 Sep 2007, 10:07 pm
There are two of us in a department of twenty or so. I'm not a programmer, I test software, they've found out I'm good at spotting things that aren't working properly without even knowing what is wrong, I just know it 
... The other guy codes our hardware abstraction layer, he's a bit more NT than me (he's a father for starters), but he has more problems with tapping than I do with my knee shake so swings and roundabouts..... we've got plenty of good coders who are perfectly NT though, you don't have to be an Aspie to care about good code......
chrisc
26 Sep 2007, 10:33 am
Brian003
Velociraptor
Joined: 10 Sep 2007
Gender: Male
Posts: 402
Location: University of Michigan Ann Arbor
12 Oct 2007, 9:04 pm
15 Oct 2007, 12:43 pm
| Similar Topics | |
|---|---|
| Tories: Lunch is for wimps and sandwiches aren't real food |
Yesterday, 7:05 pm |
| Grace Hopper - Pioneer of Computer Programming |
24 Oct 2024, 10:47 pm |
| Why do people recommend working in IT/Computers for Aspies? |
21 Nov 2024, 10:26 am |
