Job Update – Part 1

Introduction

OK, now I did promise you some information about my new job, so here goes. First off we need a little background information.

How It All Started

Sometime back in October of 2006, during my last semester of school, a Software company came to my school to recruit programmers. They are situated in Texas and they provide a Software Package for companies in Texas. They have about 85% of the market cornered, so business is really good. Business is so good that they got a new client in the state of Washington. For this client, however, they were doing a complete rewrite of their software from Visual C++ 6.0 (with all that MFC stuff) to a .NET product written in C#. So they were looking for programmers to work on the new stuff. So they were going from university to university looking for some programmers to handle the new contract.

I was supposed to be one of these programmers, but things didn’t really work out that way. I went to the interview at my school, took a test, got another interview for a week later, and went to that interview. I thought everything was all falling into place, except I didn’t hear from them every again. About a month and a half later I decided to call to see what’s up. I was informed that all the positions were filled. Needless to say I was disappointed. About two days after that I got a phone call asking me whether I would be interested in a Visual C++ position. I said “sure, why not”. I did a telephone interview and got the job.

Day One to Now

I started work on January 16th. I must say, it was quite an experience. Prior to that day, I’ve only ever worked on small stuff for school (apart from a simple Visual Basic program years ago). I was not prepared for the magnitude of the product. It was just huge compared to what I’ve dealt with in the past. But I’m coping with it. The department I work in simply fixes bugs. We get a list of things that aren’t working right and we’re required to get things working again. My greatest problem isn’t with the code; it’s with understand what the product is supposed to be doing at any given point. Just trying to duplicate the errors sometimes takes hours. This is even before I load up the debugger or look at one line of code.

What can I say? We’ll see what happens in the long run. Oh, by the way, Happy Valentines Day!! Enjoy.