Updates
Latest Tweet
What's New?
Check out for latest innovation, a computer based training video collection
Like this Page
The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World Review by Bill Myers (Author of Design, Code, Test, Repeat)
Good Read for the Corporate Programmer
Let me start by saying that I was torn between 3 and 4 stars - call it 3.5. There's some very good content in here, but in my opinion, it gets lost in all of the words. I would have preferred if this had simply been a bit shorter and to the point. This is definitely geared toward people in similar situations to the author, i.e. a programmer working inside of a large company, maybe as a contractor, probably in the IT department. Since my career has been drastically different, I've had some similar issues, but many different ones.
What's good:
- The sooner you realize who runs the show, the sooner you can come to grips with what to do with the information. Is your company run by the programmers? Then you won't have some of the problems that Christopher describes, but you will have others.
- The range of the book is fairly good, from QA, requirements, marketing, and management.
- There are good pointers in here about diplomacy and working with the other powers in your company.
What's not so good:
- The chihuahua jokes. They're just not funny and repeating them as a running gag makes them simply tiresome. If there's a third edition, I'd cut them out.
- It gets repetitive. There's constant talk about the fact that you love to write code and that's all you really want to do. You must also fight, fight, and fight for QA.
All in all a good read, just not a great one.