The Big Time

I was reading this techical magazine on the weekend. There was an advertisement in the back for a Goldman Sachs associate. The pay was between $225k and $400k a year. And this was for a 9 to 5 job. What the heck? Who makes $225k a year in development? Nobody I know.

The position required experience with derrivatives software. Perhaps this is the niche you need to enter to make the big bucks. Now I do know that living expenses in New York are high. But $225k a year should cover that and then some.

How does one get any experience in this field? Maybe you need to start off as a junior associate making minimal cash. Or you could write some hot code in your free time and try to impress someone at Goldman. There is one other explanation for this job. It might be a fake.

There were many abbreviations in this long article. Almost every sentence had multiple abbriviations. That does not sound like Goldman Sachs recruiting. It could have been put together by a recruiter. However the address to send applications/resumes was Goldman Sachs. I tell you what. I would like to make $225k a year for a 40 hour a week job. But if something sounds too good to be true, then you know what that means.

Visual Studio 2010 Aborts

I have been working on a new project using Visual Studio 2010 Professional. And I wanted to see how I could deploy the finished product. In the past, I had used an old copy of Installshield. My Visual Studio has an InstallShield plugin that is free.

I downloaded Installshield LE and set it up to deploy my project. The resulting self-extracting executable worked pretty good. There were some features disabled in the free Installshield. But that did not hold me back.

All of a sudden, Visual Studio kept crashing when I tried to edit the C++ header files in my project. I removed and readded the files. It still crashed. After a while I realized that the addition of an Installshield LE project in my solution caused Visual Studio to crash.

What a fail. The work around is to create a separate solution to prevent the abort. This does not bode well for me to purchase Installshield.

Coordination

Last year I helped out a struggling team on my project. I volunteered for a piece the team knew nothing about. As usual, I did a good job delivering and supporting the product. It was a bit tough because I had my normal duties to do in addition to the new work. But I made it happen.

This year I got loaded up on all kinds of work for my team. But I looked ahead and knew the other team was hurting again. I did not hear anything about the piece I had done for them before. So I asked whether I was still on the hook to do the work. The answer was yes. My team is not happy to lose some of my time. They were most upset that nobody took this into account when setting up our schedule.

So far I have not worked on this additional piece of the system. Today I found the time to work on testing some bug fixes that are going out in the next release. However at the end of testing, I found my tests deopended on some other fixes being made. Doh! Nobody determined there would be a dependency. I tell you. We are one uncoordinated team.

Java to the Rescue

The customer has been encountering performance problems with our system. Some screens are so slow they don't even come up. The customer has since reverted to doing some work manually. Now they need to get the system updated with their work.

All of the customer data has been collected into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Essentially each row in the spreadsheet is going to be an update in the database. The updates will be controlled by a stand alone script. How should developer go about creating this script?

In the old days, I would write a C/C++ program to read in the data and generate the script. However the security team is cracking down on "rogue" programs such as this. I think I figured out the solution. Write the script generator in Java. That way the security people think we are running "java.exe", which is on the list of approved apps.

Some other people are looking into the script generation. However I think I will develop and have my Java program ready to roll.