Allow me to rant.

I feel there is a lack of intellectual stimulation in my current environment. I’m not going to lie, software development is an interesting field to work in - there are so many new things to learn, and no one person can keep up with all the advances being brought forth in the field today. With all this exciting new stuff, how can there be a lack of growth?

The company’s attitude to the development process is another matter altogether. Higher management in our company seem to think that, as long as they’re receiving a steady stream of customers, there’s no reason to improve on the skills of their employees.

Our team of Filipino engineers here are probably the most skilled at Java (the programming language) in our office. Management, however, decided not to include us in the design process for the new version of the software. The result is that the current design is highly inefficient and the code is so bloated it takes one about a week just to get it running.

For those of you who know the difference between functional and object-oriented programming the differences between C and C++ (or Turbo Pascal and Java), it would be like programming in Java using C-style coding practices. You’d just be doing it the hard (and wrong) way.

Another gripe I have is their refusal to improve on their quality assurance process. I’ve been working here for years, but I have yet to see a single usage of unit or regression tests (read about the motivations for unit testing). It can’t be all that hard. In fact, it is now common design practice today to develop test cases and scenarios during the design phase, so you know exactly what input your system needs to receive and you are sure that it returns the expected output. This approach is known as Test Driven Development.

For sure, change has its costs. Evaluating the use cases and scenarios ahead of time will take more resources at the beginning, and management probably consider this an unnecessary expense. But is it so unnecessary that someone would be willing to hand over a product full of bugs that they’d have to fix anyway? Not to mention the time and resources already spent, as well as the disappointment a customer must feel after he he realizes that his prize purchase is actually full of holes.