NYCPHP Meetup

[Kristina Anderson]

There are some on this list who've previously said that "the market" 
will take care of situations where people want to pay low wages to 
programmers.  One of the ways that "the market" might do this, 
theoretically, is to make sure that people find out the hard way, when 
they hire cheap programmers, that it takes a lot of experience and 
dedication to be good at this, and a good programmer expects (and 
needs) remuneration of a more-than-minimum-wage sort (and stands behind 
their work -- if something needs to be fixed, fixes it).

With globalization and wage pressures increasing, these issues aren't 
going away.  But from a personal standpoint, I'm at a stage in my 
career where I want to move from competence to excellence.  Dealing 
with situations where I'm being not being paid a fair fee for my work, 
or situations where clients are being unfair or unreasonable, does not 
put me in the correct mental state to move towards excellence.  Too 
many of us are caught in a tug of war between our own desire to write 
good, solid code and the stark reality of the amount of code we need to 
generate to pay the bills...the greater the amount of that code is, the 
greater likelihood that some of it just isn't going to be as good as it 
could have been.

I don't mean to say that I agree specifically with posting comments of 
a critical nature on a public board.  I am not qualified to say whether 
it's right or wrong to do so here.  Just posting some thoughts.

-- Kristina

> Donna Marie Vincent wrote:
> > That's something that should have been done privately and directly 
to 
> > the person involved.
> > 
> > How do you know Ben's criticism is accurate?  How do you know 
Sundar 
> > hasn't learned to write better code since that time?
> > 
> > This was not the appropriate place for his criticism.
> 
> Yeah, that's the concern I have about something like this.  I've read 
> Ben's posts for a while so I have no reason to doubt the criticism 
but, 
> truth is, I also have no reason to believe there might not be a 
personal 
> grudge being vented.  I'm not suggesting that's what's happening 
here, 
> just that it bothers me that we're all potentially vulnerable to 
having 
> capricious charges lobbed against us in a public forum.
> 
> Just last week, on another forum, I read someone brutalize a masonry 
> contractor I've used several times and know to be one of the best in 
the 
> city.  After speaking with him, the issue was a dispute over an 
> expensive change-work order which the client expected the contractor 
to 
> eat after the contracts had been signed and the quote locked in.
> _______________________________________________
> New York PHP Community Jobs Mailing List
> http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/jobs
> 
> NYPHPCon 2006 Presentations Online
> http://www.nyphpcon.com
> 
> Show Your Participation in New York PHP
> http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
> 
>