Reference update

Here's another update on my former colleague who has been looking for work in high tech. I heard from him this week. He gave me a heads up that I might be hearing from a company he has interviewed with. That was considerate and smart of him to tell me in advance who I might be hearing from.

The company is a large, well known IT firm. I haven't heard from them yet. I kind of thought I would have heard from them by now. Maybe he's dropped out of the running.

Fortunately for him, it turns out that he does currently have a job. He caught on with the startup company he'd interviewed with. He said he's still looking because the pay isn't quite what he wants and the work is a bit light on the skills he's most interested in. I'd say go for it if something better appears. There is little loyalty in high tech, it's every man and every company for himself in this industry.

But its good for him. Having a job gives him credibility with other companies that he's desirable and employable. Plus if you don't land something better then he still has something which is good enough and many times better than being out of work on the outside and worrying about how long his severance and unemployment will hold out.

Sneaky Network Magic

I was getting some weird printing errors on the Dell laptop last week. Visual C++ runtime error, followed by program termination. That's weird, it was all working OK and nothing had been changed.

I went to the printers console in the laptop, and it said stuff like spooler service not running on the main HP PC where the printer was shared from. Hmmm. I opened the printer in the HP. Indeed the share had been turned off. That's strange, I didn't turn it off.

So I clicked the Network Magic console. It showed a message indicating that the free trial had expired and I had to upgrade to enable printer sharing. Their GUI implied that there was no way around this to turn printer sharing back on. Luckily I knew better and just turned on the share manually. After that I went back to the Dell and did the printer discovery wizard again and it all worked.

That was pretty dirty and deceptive of Network Magic. First they "helpfully" set up a shared printer, then they go and turn it off without my consent. Then their GUI is extremely deceptive, acting like they were holding my shared printer hostage until I gave them some ransom money to release the shared printer lock they had put on.

I'm glad I don't work for them. This to me is very unethical, basically Network Magic is acting like a trojan. That must have sucked for the programmer who had to write that feature to turn off printer sharing and then try to dupe unsophisticated users into thinking they had to pay off the Network Magic shakedown to get their printer share back up.

Make no mistake: the printer share is not created or owned by Network Magic. It is part of Windows itself. It is owned by the PC user. The user is free to manually turn on printer sharing with no assistance at all required from Network Magic. That's true for all of the other Network Magic features too, file sharing, wireless security and access lists, all of it is part of Windows and the user can easily set up all that stuff himself using the GUI in Windows.

If you want to pay for their nice, intuitive GUI for the above features, then fine, that's your choice. But their guerilla bait and switch marketing is very bad.

Documentation

We're nearing the end of the testing cycle for a product release. There aren't any high priority bugs around so I was told to just grab some lower priority issues. Given a choice I decided to tackle some documentation that had become a little bit out of date.

I find I've enjoyed doing the documentation. There's a certain Zen to documentation that makes it satisfying. Maybe it's because, like code, it can be verified to be correct. Plus I'd been involved in this documentation in earlier releases so it was something that I'd been involved with in the past that I wanted to see maintained at a high level of quality.

Documentation, especially API documentation, unlike code, can generate feedback from external users. Nobody ever sees the code you write, especially outside the programming group. But with documentation you are presenting yourself and your department for external valuation. Do a good job and you'll look good and be praised. Do a shoddy job and probably nobody will say anything directly, but the bad vibe will come back around in some way.

Around 10 years ago my younger sister was finishing up high school and considering her options heading into university. I encouraged her then to get into technical writing. She can write, and could learn the technical jargon easily enough. There were about a million tech jobs open at that time. It's much easier to teach natural writers the technical stuff than to try to teach people how to write well. You either can or you can't write.

She ended up going to law school and has had a good career. If I wasn't programming, then maybe I would have got into technical writing. I probably would have enjoyed it enough as a vocation.