Remove R Comic [home]-Fire fighting

Fire fighting by Gary Marks

2007-11-05

Remove R Comic (aka rm -r comic), by Gary Marks: Fire fighting
Dialog:
Words of wisdom, never bring a gas can to a fire fight.

Caption: Chicago, October 8th, 1871
Jacob: Ahhh, this looks like it's going to be a nice peaceful day.
Caption: All too often, tech jobs turn into this...

Another weekend down
Gary
As I work through yet another weekend, I realize that my job now, and in the past has very often been like today's comic, a rush to fix something for a client.

Unfortunately these problems are always last minute. Unfortunately, I've started to get used to this being what I do. Unfortunately, according to others, I'm not bad at doing this. However, at some point, I want to get out of triage and fire fighting.

As many of you in the tech industry know, this concept of fix it ASAP, and make it work vs make it work properly or well, is quite a common concept. Every job I've been in has this in it at some point. Unfortunately for those who learn how to work under pressure, and learn how to problem solve/read other's code, this becomes their burden more often than not. For those who don't know this or can't do this, more often then not, they get to write the new code that others end up rushing to fix.

Now this doesn't mean that fire fighters don't get to work on new code. It just means that they get to work on new code, and they get to put in overtime to fix other peoples bad code. To be fair, I knew coming on to this company, that I would be dealing with code that had issues, code that was written by consultants (C consultants writing Java, by my best guess now) in a rush and handed over with out much documentation. I choose my sinking ship, and therefore have nothing to really complain about.

I'm going to stop my rant now and leave new developers with one small bit of advice. If you can work under pressure, and you can read other people's code, and worse yet, you can fix it, don't let anyone know. Hide that skill, or take up a different profession.

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