Birth control pills meant to control fish population ???

1. Model M keyboard
2. Lenovo ThinkPad X-series laptop
3. Microsoft Ergo series

I completed my PhD in EE/CS 4 years ago. Right after submission, I was unemployed for 6 months and during which time, I applied for 1000+ positions. Only on my 3rd interview, I was offered a junior dev position with minimum compensation in a SME.

Initially, things were good. I paid my bills and was doing many things I couldn't do as as a grad student i.e. going on holiday, fine dining, drinking binges. Work wise, I enjoyed the first year or so learning and coding new languages/platforms.

After a while, I woke up to the fact that my firm has deep problems in terms of work flow and project management. Almost 90% of the web projects we completed in last 3 years were failures. Perhaps I was too naive, I fed them back to the management and highlighted that the problem is with our SDLC and some incompetencies in mid-layer management and tech people. This did not rhyme well, I was kicked out from dev team and transferred to a different department; and my promotion was denied while every other fresh grad was promoted before me.

Overall my experience is, PhD can work against you. For a start, bosses are always intimidated with your superior intellectual brain and over the top communication skills (and don't forget, most bosses will be at your age too). Other aspect is, rest of your co-workers been there or has cut-teeth in corporate politics, so in an event of political power-struggle, quite literally you don't know what to do. Also most firms has no idea what to do with a PhD qualified human resource, let alone having a boss who can manage one. Lastly, not being mastered in some technologies (like Java) can be a disadvantage.

As of today, I'm feeling quite dejected and unappreciated at my firm. Lately I am looking for a new job (preferably something outside IT). I don't know what the future holds for me. As much as I regret taking up above position, on the hindsight, I landed on that position during recession years and helped me to sail through those critical years.

Please don't !

Short answer:
I made a similar horrible mistake... and only now I'm regretting.

Long answer:
After my graduate studies, I joined to a SME, which was supposed to be in between start up and IPO (this is in far east in Asia). Though the company rolls financially, human resources are what I called "Sub-par" quality. Simply because they don't have any real competition, they think they are the best and ignores all other good ideas coming both internally or externally. In addition, there are no standard workflows to handle situations. So working in such environments is analogous to running around with your head on fire. Lately we have done few projects that are, by all means, text-book quality death marches. Finally, as everyone is pretty young (& not to forget, dumb!), it is pretty hard to get them on the same team spirit and work ethic... which is a major problem when it comes to running projects. And one final thought, it is highly unlikely you will learn anything much from peers... and most likely you will not have time to improve yourself because of above reasons.

Good luck !

Web developer here and used git for last 2 years on a daily basis.

Gitsh looks promising, but I will hold my verdict until I use it for an extended period, and see how it can improve my work life.

Currently I use a combination of SmartGit and Git Bash. SmartGit is mainly used in visualizing branch history, resolve conflicts, tagging and do some odd jobs here and there e.g. edit message of the last commit. Git Bash is used for checking out branches, merging, pulling, pushing sort of stuff i.e. any operation that is more straight forward on the command line, which I happened to feel "clunky" on SmartGit.

Overall, my underline philosophy is, developers should not spend lot of time in version control related tasks, rather should resort to many tools if necessary to expedite it and move on with tackling big problems i.e. features, bug smashing, optimising.

FYI, I work in far east in a country where total population is about 5 million (40% are immigrants).

Recently I have worked for the top news broadcaster in the country to revamp their website. As part of the support duties, I had the pleasure of sitting in their news room. I met a guy there, whose 9-5 duty is to 1) update news organization's official FaceBook account with up to date news updates, 2) Remove any comment with obscene words; sexist or racist remarks; and other comments alike them. He was telling me, he has to act ASAP for any comment that is beyond acceptable levels. Also he was telling me, he received 500+ emails a day questioning or criticising the moderation policy.

On the same work floor, there was another girl doing exactly same work for the Twitter account. And they have to hire 3 people per account to cover the 24 hours a day (this is not including other expenses like travel, F&B etc.). So, it ain't an easy nor cheap operation.

Later on, when we proposed to implement a commenting system to their new website, they were rather reluctant due to the man power need to maintain it. So they opted out with FaceBook commenting within web pages. such that they are not liable for any comments as it is a 3rd party application. (Note: However, we ended up implementing out-of-the-box comment moderating with the FaceBook, such that they could remove comments when necessary)

perhaps Shakespeare is the pioneer of this... with his comedy, history & tragedy plays.. e.g. Romeo Juliet

If you watch any Bollywood film today (or last 20-30 years for that matter), it follows similar plot like Romeo Juliet

Here is my story... I work as a web developer at a SME somewhere in far east. So far I have worked in couple of small to large scale Agile projects. And yes, I had company of college interns, developers, senior developers, consultants and architects alike. To be brutally honest, I abhorred my senior's work with a passion. I always pondered how this kind of incompetent, useless people end up handling multi-million dollar worth mission-critical projects.

Based on my so far analysis, this is how I see it:

1. Most of these seniors have survived simply because of a historical reason you might not know.

In my case, most my seniors survived during the 2008-2009 retrench season. Some survived totally through political clout; some by sacrificing their salary and other benefits. So in management's point of view, these are really valuable employees, and they should retain them at every cost.

2. They were there at the right time.

Around the time they were promoted, may be there weren't anybody to around to challenge them. After all the good crop leaves a firm, there is a window for all the sloppy bafoons to inflate their ego, convince management and climb the promotion ladder without much external challenge.

3. They know how to find scapegoats efficiently and effectively pass the buck.

How do I know about this ? I was a victim ! My firm practiced this 'Russian roulette' style of assigning task, such that everyone ends up get to work in every module of a project; or, bugs get assigned to you, even though you never worked on that module before. Most often, these experienced developer's work break down spectacularly, and I am the one brought in to clear their mess; and when I fail to fix, I end up in prison-cell meeting rooms to receive the brunt of senior management. Over the time, these seniors painted this nice picture of me as a lazy, unreliable, incompetent developer. And the funny thing is, most of these code bases, I didn't write a single line of code and I have absolutely no idea what's going inside. And these code bases are poorly documented/commented, making troubleshooting is a mini-IT project it self (call it "reverse engineering feature XYZ")

Sadly for most of us in junior positions, it is an arduous task to challenge the existing establishment. But at least you can dampen or insulate your self from the shocks from these stupidos. Here's what I do:

1. Don't volunteer to amend their codes.

I made this mistake many times as mentioned. Find who originally developed it in your team. If he/she is there, get him/her to work on it. If he is in a different team, ask project manager to bring him/her back. And importantly, if you are taking up these kind of responsibility, have a written understanding with your project manager that "You are doing your best effort to fix the issue, and if it fails, it is not your fault, it is due to poor implementation of the original developer". Stand up for your self ! in corporate world, nobody is there to stand up for you after all.

Trust me on this, "it is good a senior doing a bad patch that temporarily fix the problem and eventually breaks in future, than you failing to do a perfect job in fixing it for posterity"

2. Give seniors a chance !

Don't bother helping them out of your kindness. Let them shoot their own foot. You entering the picture is the biggest disservice you can do to your self, by becoming the dummy they can shoot.

In my current team, I have a tech lead, who was doing an important module. I had plenty of time to help him, as I finished my module early. Instead, I sat down and watched him failing brilliantly and had a silent laugh. Maybe I could have helped him in many ways, but I digressed and let him eat his own dog food.

3. Promote yourself often

I am not very good in this either. But in this world, hardly people pay attention to other individuals. So if there is an opportunity to shine, or talk about your work... just do it! And if management is still deaf and doesn't acknowledge/appreciate your contributions, move to another firm !

I have two points to back up my answer.....

1. We are living in the most peaceful period in the entire history. As much as I hate to say this... I am in the opinion "War accelerates innovation". Let's face it, without wars such as WW2 and cold war, most technologies would've either never evolve into the sophisticated stage there right now, or never would've thought of. Until another major war dawns upon us, where contemporary weapons are inadequate for one party to dominate... most technologies will evolve at a slower pace. (at least that's my prediction).

2. Academic research now rewards people who write more papers, not people do genuinely innovative work. I've been in academic research, and I have first hand experience on "publish-or-perish". Most academics I see today, they do research with the mindset "Save my career, family and future first", rather with the noble intention of serving the knowledge sphere. Most research now-a-days geared towards "publication generating exercise"... rather true down-to-earth investigations. I don't think we will return to golden age of research, where funding doesn't demand things like "X number of publications", "Y number of patents" and "business plan to sell million units".