 | from David Bolton
IT staff in particular do not usually get whopping bonuses on a par with senior directors or traders! Nor do the cleaning, restaurant, admin staff etc. Because of Tarp etc, banks have not been the most popular and in many cases deservedly so but please don't tar us all with the same brush! That said, IT staff in banks, particularly development staff are amongst the best paid in IT especially compared with defense industries. So I'll say no more! Have a great week!
| ![]() |
In the Spotlight | Getting Better Pay in IT
In my 28 year career, 6 of the companies I have worked for have gone bust. No I'm not really a jinx, it's just that the IT industry has changed a lot during that time. That means new companies come along and old ones fold in a Darwinian survival of the fittest battle. Names like Digital who grew massively in the 70s but failed to adapt to the PC and were bought by Compaq who were then bought by Hewlett Packard, now known as HP. Until I reached the age of 40, the longest I stayed in a job was 3 years. In the last ten years I worked at three companies, one of them for 7 years. Unfortunately it's the way of the world that changing jobs is the best way to get bigger pay than promotion within a job. I was never driven by money and so chose to stay in programming jobs rather than move up into management apart from a couple of Team Leader/Senior developer roles that were still mostly development. Two of the firms had career paths for techy people such as developers but most companies were small and didn't. Big company culture is different to small and you usually have less freedom and responsibility than in a small company but are more likely to get benefits such as training courses, health care etc.
| | Coding By Numbers
You might remember Painting By Numbers. It's a painting set with pictures built up of areas each with a number that indexed into a color palette.You filled in the area with the paint of that color. My manager at British Aerospace used to talk about the aviation software development there as Coding By Numbers. Luckily him and I worked on the software that tested aviation software so that was real programming! But the developers on the aviation software were given enormous printouts - several feet thick of specifications generated from an object oriented design tool. All the classes and interfaces were generated and they coded the implementation details. Back then in the 90s, Ada was the only game in town, being prescribed for both the US DOD and UK MOD military projects. Since then they relaxed things a little and allowed C++ and other languages. You might find the PDF of Lockheed Martin Corporation's C++ Coding Standards for the System development and Demonstration Program for the Joint Strike Fighter Air Vehicle of interest. I'm not breaking any secrets by linking to this: it's approved for public release! The standards are largely common sense though definitely restricting individual freedom in layout style e.g. AV Rule 59 (MISRA Rule 59, Revised) The statements forming the body of an if, else if, else, while, do...while or for statement shall always be enclosed in braces, even if the braces form an empty block. So it's not the most freedom you'll ever enjoy in a job but working in defense industries (no one ever calls it attack!) is not the worst sort of job you can do. I enjoyed my time working in the Industrial-military complex but the lure of games design pulled me away after two years.
| How Long is a Piece of String?
C strings are easy to use but they equally easy to misuse with Buffer overflows a consequence of not doing full boundary checking. Companies like Microsoft having been disallowing the use of functions like strcpy as part of their SDL (Security Development Lifecycle) for the past five years. I can't stress the importance of this, just take a look at this page to see what can happen. But applications need string handling and there are a huge variety of replacement string libraries. James Antill is the author of one such library vstr and has compiled a comprehensive list of other libraries that he has compared it against. Whichever library you use, just ask yourself if a user of your applications could be compromised through insecure calls.
|
Sponsored Links | ![]() |  | | C / C++ / C# Ads
Advertisement
 |  |
No comments:
Post a Comment