Coderific

rating for Softscape

1.0 The worst job I've ever had posted on December 06, 2006

Softscape was my first 'real' (not part-time) job after college. It was probably the worst job I've ever had. The pay was poor. There were no perks. The hours were long and the environment was drab and flourescently lit.

This should be enough for anybody: the CTO was the President's son, and the CEO's brother. He was also the worst programmer I've ever seen, and I had a gig tutoring freshman and sophomores in intro CS courses all through college. To give you an idea, his idea of "internationalizing" an app was to create N copies of the source tree, one for each language. The *source code* was shipped off to translators, along with unstructured text files containing lists filenames and line and column numbers where strings to be translated were found. Anyone who had anything negative to say about this, or even suggested a better solution, (have one copy of the source and swap in different strings at runtime, say) was fired immediately.

The company made webapps built around a few magic DLLs, each with a squillion special-cased, side effect-causing function definitions. One level up from the DLL, the programming was done in a kludgy homebrewed templating system, that required (not just encouraged) mixing together content, logic, presentation, javascript, and basically everything else. This system would have been novel in 1993, but this was 10 years later. It would have been incoherently designed in any era.

There was no meaningful development process to speak of. The idea was for developers to bang something out as quickly as possible, and ship it to QA. If QA found any bugs, there was big trouble. This is a paraphrased conversation I had with one of my bosses. (Imagine Bill Lumberg but worse.)

while(true)
{
Boss: Soo... QA found some bugs in your code... why is that?
Me: The code is in seven languages, it's hard to make sure changes get propagated to each one.
Boss: What can you do about it?
Me: Write some unit tests -
Boss: No, you're paid to write code, not tests. Have QA do that, they're cheaper per hour.
Me: But I need to test the code before I give it to QA to make sure it works, right?
Boss: Just make sure there aren't any bugs.
Me: How should I do that without testing?
Boss <shrug>
}

So, horrible code, horrible bosses, very unrealistic deadlines, and in general the most dehumanizing treatment I've ever experienced. Avoid this company at all costs.

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  • Happy and climbing the ladder posted by codeguy on January 28, 2007 03:43 PM

    I work there now, have been there for over three years. It is also my first job out of college and I've been promoted three times and now run a team. The environment has been fantastic to learn from as well as grow.

    Whoever posted these comments looks like they were fired and are looking for excuses as to why they failed. Advice to them- get over it and try to find an easier job since it seems like you didnt make it somewhere that was looking for smart people. Maybe a job where you have a grill and a fryolater would be better for you.

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  • Re: The worst job I've ever had posted on January 29, 2007 03:11 PM

    I never worked at a place with as high of a turnover rate as that place. I'm so glad I'm out of there!

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  • Re: Happy and climbing the ladder posted by thehacker on February 05, 2007 05:37 PM

    Wow, you'd think I'd insulted you, not your job! I'm the guy who wrote the original post. How's it going?

    You're actually right that I got fired. I also "failed", but only at an impossible and absurd task. I was assigned to take a large spaghetti-code web app that was 'translated' into 7 or so languages (7 copies of the source!) and add some features. The features were complex, and had been partially implemented by earlier developers in some copies of the source but not others. (It seemed like previous developers got partway done and stopped abruptly before they finished - I wonder how that happened!) I had to figure out what changes had been applied to which copies of the source and reconcile all of them. This was made harder by the clunky source control system. Then I had to make the rest of the changes to all 7 copies of the source (if you don't see why that's error-prone and a bad design choice, I can't help you) and make sure that everything stayed in sync over several hundred source files per language.

    I was given a week to do this. It really should have taken a couple of months.

    On top of all that, the translators for all the languages, and the non-latin-script ones especially, added some typos to the logic and structure of the sources they translated. These caused bugs that were extremely difficult to track down - everything failed silently, there were no automated unit tests, there was no debugger, etc, etc, etc. I had no tools except for Textpad. When I installed Cygwin so I could use Perl to automate some of the most onerous text-wrangling tasks, I was reprimanded by my boss and the IT guys.

    I'm happy you like your job. But outside Softscape, the development practices used there are considered backward at the very best, and hopelessly dysfunctional at the worst. There's a better, more fulfilling world out there!

    I'd been looking for another job for about the month last month of my time at softscape. In a funny twist, I actually accepted an offer from a much better place the same day I got fired and perp-walked out of the building. My boss said he found my resume online. Oops! Haha. I never did get to finish working on that insane webapp.

    I now have a much better job. I get paid (MUCH more than at Softscape) to write GPL'd software that solves large-scale distributed-computing problems for the health-care industry. My coworkers and I just submitted a paper to an academic journal about the work we've been doing. I use a nice IDE. We write unit tests and use SVN. The stress level is low.

    To all the Softscape guys out there, there's hope! The job market for programmers is much better than it was a couple of years ago. To people thinking of working at softscape, don't!!

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  • Re: Happy and climbing the ladder posted on February 06, 2007 12:11 PM

    I've been out of there for a long time (I quit for a much better job) but I remember the owners contacting me about having my resume on the internet. So for those of you who actually take a position with Softscape, hide your resumes on the internet when you are looking or there may be hell to pay.

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  • Re: Happy and climbing the ladder posted by rogu on April 13, 2007 09:19 AM

    I actually got fired for posting my resume, too. You're right about the SC. A gigantic VSS that failed...oh, twice a week. What ended up happening is that each developer stored the whole thing on their system, and "maybe" checked in code when the VSS was working. Textpad was the only tool. I actually got reamed for suggesting that we use XMLSpy for generating XSDs so that we'd have a documented schema more easily. While I did not have the experience re: testing that you had, I did encounter the same kind of arbitrary, on the spot, ridiculous statements as "we hired you to code, not to test..." These kinds of statements were always delivered with such conviction and confidence that they almost made sense. This was my first "real" job out of college, so I thought this was the way all companies operated. I actually posted my resume because I had seen one too many lay offs and I thought the company was financially unstable. There was just constant talk of "cash flow" problems. All the senior management was just matter of fact that the company did not have any money.

    There are problems with my new company, but nowhere near what I experienced at Softscape. I'm actually expected to make reasoned decisions regarding architecture and to not kludge the product just to get it out the door. I do have to defend my code, and that can be intimidating when you're dealing with the more senior developers. This is usually pretty positive, though, and I find that I learn more when they suggest changes.

    Perhaps the other developer who posted doesn't know that there are other ways of doing things. Three years there seems like a sentence in that environment, not a job.

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scores in this rating

development process

clear requirements 2.0
design and planning 1.0
quality assurance 1.0
automated testing 1.0
peer review 1.0
development environment 1.0
development hardware 1.0
physical workspace 1.0
infrastructure and support 1.0
issue tracking 2.0
source control 2.0
product quality 1.0

culture

cultivation of creativity 1.0
mitigation of risk 1.0
reasonable workload 2.0
prevention of crunch time 1.0
hitting deadlines 2.0
taking responsibility 1.0
development autonomy 1.0
keeping ego in check 2.0

compensation

salary 1.0
health coverage 2.0
paid time off 2.0
snacks 1.0
other perks 1.0

organization

advancement opportunities 1.0
employee retention 1.0
hiring process 3.0
quality of development management 1.0
quality of upper management 1.0
quality of developers 2.0
team-to-team communication 1.0
internal team communication 2.0
management-developer communication 2.0

general

location 2.0
nearby food 2.0
business model 2.0
cool technology 1.0
vision and strategy 1.0
warm fuzzy feeling 1.0
overall 1.0

preferences

casual dress code 1.0
use of Free Software 1.0
development of Free Software 1.0
use of GNU/Linux 1.0
use of Mac OS 1.0
use of Solaris 1.0
use of Windows 4.0
use of BSD 1.0
use of Python 1.0
use of Perl 1.0
use of Ruby 1.0
use of Lisp 1.0
use of Java 1.0
use of C# 1.0
use of Objective-C 1.0
use of C 3.0
use of C++ 3.0
use of PHP 1.0
use of ASP 1.0
use of legacy languages 4.0