Day In The Life of Baz

Today was an interesting day at work. But the thing is we need to take a step back before we fully analyze it. Yesterday, like any ordinary day, I went to work and worked on stuff. If you recall I work at a Software Company as a programmer or Software Engineer as the fancy title goes. Now in a nutshell: the program is stored on a main server and when we need to work on a certain portion of it we check it out, make our modifications and check it back in. Simple enough task right? This morning we had our regular status meeting where we discussed a fix that I had made the previous day. After listening to a few point of views it was decided that we would take a different approach to the problem than the one we used originally. So I was supposed to undo my previous changes and make some new ones. I was instructed to “Roll Back” my changes. If left up to me, I would have just checked the files out made new modifications and checked them back in. But I specifically heard the words “Roll Back”. I felt a bit funny about it, but hey, orders are orders. What I was thinking is: “what happens to the changes that people had made before this?” Anyways, the system is rather sophisticated so I clicked the “Roll Back” button under the assumption that it would be smart enough to merge in the changes made by other people or at least ask me. Well it did ask me one thing: “The Roll Back function cannot be undone, do you want to continue?“. Like an idiot I clicked yes. So there goes everyones work from 5:05 PM yesterday to 2:02 PM today. Luckily, the file we were talking about (although it has frequent changes) the changes can usually be re applied in under 20 minutes. So I had to send a department wide email alerting people that they need to redo a couple things and of course, apologize for my incompetence. This is where the trouble starts. Now we all should know by now that I am a horrible speller. This is why I set up Outlook to automatically spell check before it sends an email. Now although I can’t spell, I’m usually in the ballpark of the word, so I usually just accept the first suggestion it gives. Keyword: usually. I suppose today was an unusual day. Below is the email I sent to the entire Development department (which includes the vice president of the company):

Popularity: 12%

Today was my One Month Informal Review. Needless to say, I was a bit paranoid about it. Here are a couple of exerts from the review:

• Baz is smart and bright
• He has a great attitude and gets the help he needs to complete his work. He has good communication skills and talks to the various support reps to gather the information and business knowledge he needs to complete his taks.
• He also gets help form his team members and is not shy to ask for help when he needs it.

Phew. That’s a load off my mind and I’m not sure whether all of it is true. About my communication skills: I really hate bugging people. Everyone looks so busy and there are always deadlines, so I usually try to drudge through it myself. But on the other hand, I’m so scared that I might break something that I guess I ask a lot of questions.

Hey, I’m just happy that they’re happy. Next step is the application for my H1B Visa.

Popularity: 7%

Introduction

OK, now I did promise you some information about my new job, so here goes. First off we need a little background information.

How It All Started

Sometime back in October of 2006, during my last semester of school, a Software company came to my school to recruit programmers. They are situated in Texas and they provide a Software Package for companies in Texas. They have about 85% of the market cornered, so business is really good. Business is so good that they got a new client in the state of Washington. For this client, however, they were doing a complete rewrite of their software from Visual C++ 6.0 (with all that MFC stuff) to a .NET product written in C#. So they were looking for programmers to work on the new stuff. So they were going from university to university looking for some programmers to handle the new contract.

I was supposed to be one of these programmers, but things didn’t really work out that way. I went to the interview at my school, took a test, got another interview for a week later, and went to that interview. I thought everything was all falling into place, except I didn’t hear from them every again. About a month and a half later I decided to call to see what’s up. I was informed that all the positions were filled. Needless to say I was disappointed. About two days after that I got a phone call asking me whether I would be interested in a Visual C++ position. I said “sure, why not”. I did a telephone interview and got the job.

Popularity: 11%

In the world of web design you often come across people who don’t exactly know what they want. And that is usually a good thing for you because you can then charge them for the minimum and increase based on “added features”, which they should have seen up front, but they don’t always. This has the slight problem of having a contract with an indefinite time period.

A time period is usually scheduled for delivery of the product in the contract. This ensures the buyer that the product will be delivered in a reasonable time frame so that you don’t keep extending the job for not real reason. One thing I’ve learnt, however, is that you need to also specify a time frame that the user has to review the work and ensure that everything is to his liking. You absolutely need this if you’re not charging by the hour.
This is the problem I ran into a couple weeks ago and I’m still trying to get out of. I did a website for this guy a couple months ago. We agreed on a fixed price because it was supposed to be an easy enough job: a nice static layout, not much PHP, a Gallery, etc. A prototype was done in about three days. He was amazed by the quality of the website and had nothing but praise. Everything is good right? Wrong. He now had to burden of supplying content for the website. To make a long story slightly less long, this took a couple of months, and he only supplied pictures for the gallery and content for one of the six pages (not the home page). Now you may be thinking what does that have to do with me if the guy’s website
is empty, he paid for a design and that’s what he got right? Well I would agree with you there, but the problem was he had not yet paid the balance on his bill.

Popularity: 10%

Had a jolly good time at work today. I work at the Information Desk at the University. Doing basic things like answering the phone, taking messages, and just generally pointing anyone who asks in the right direction.

So my head is down and I’m minding my own business and when all of a sudden the fire alarm starts going off. It was kind of funny to see people with this confused look on their face. I first looked up, then left, then right. There didn’t seem to be any fire or any smoke. I calmly packed my stuff up and slid out. Yeah we’re not supposed to leave the desk unmanned, but hey, the building was on fire.

People were walking by all confused and stuff looking at me and asking me what was going on. I gave them the lil’ shrug and continued moving. I called the cops then waited in the library.

There were these guys doing some renovations to the book store at the school. I was told that they knocked over a ladder or something and it clipped on of the sprinklers and set the system off.

Oh well. I hope I still get paid up till 4:00PM.