Fact: a vast majority of programmers in adult are entirely incompetent
 

Like, seriously.

Fact: I like poo

Fact: that is somewhat nasty :helpme

Yes... but only somewhat :)

whats the going rate for good coder?

No idea. When I still freelanced, I usually worked on a pay-per-project basis.

I'd imagine $30 an hour would be the minimum you'd pay for capable coders in western countries. Anything below that, and you'd probably end up with people who don't understand English and will thus present you with a great traffic management system - if you want them to build a cms.

Seems like you had some bad luck.
Every script I ever got from another programmer worked great.

I occasionally do some contract programming if the project interests me... I've been doing some work for someone who was desperate and a friend of a friend so I gave him a lower $30/hour rate.. I would usually charge $50/hour for small projects.. More than 8 hours then I'd consider a flat rate if I was comfortable with the estimated time to completion. Even at that rate I consider it "cheap" when compared to what I used to get paid in the "real" world. But since I don't need the work I can be more picky.

Not just in adult...

I generally don't hire other programmers. I'm looking at what programmers say on GFY, and the scripts that get released these days.

Based on those two things, I'd say at least 50% of programmers in this industry are entirely self-taught - which is a bad thing, since it generally means they are unaware of very basic principles of security, compatibility, etc.

And yes, I know that there are some self-taught programmers that deliver great work. Most never get beyond learning the basics of one or two simple languages, though.

More in adult than in other industries. In other industries, people pay a lot more attention to education, references, work experience, etc.

yup, there are way more flakes and idiots in adult than any other industry

I have hired from 3 different industries and adult is by far the worst for idiots

shit, one of them still posts on gfy and added ME to his ignore list because HE flaked on me!! haha

said he would do the job, would get back to me in a day or so, disappeared, then proclaims on gfy that I am now on his ignore list

I just don't get it..I have money...I have insane ideas...but finding a programmer that can make shit happen is impossible around these parts

YOU HAvE NO FUCKING IDEA

it took me 2 years to find ONE decent programmer

the rest were flakes & bitchs....one of which is still going to die

Shit it's gotten so bad, I only hire myself for coding jobs now, and I even flake on myself... How fucked up is it when Im trying to hunt myself down on ICQ and dodging phone calls from myself at the same time... I still can't decide whether to fire myself, or give myself a raise for dealing with myself...

Programming is hard work, and it takes a lot of time. It takes a very specific type of person to be able to do that kind of work for extended periods of time without getting annoyed, especially if people are just working one someone else's vision.

My uncle was the CEO of a big software company, and he always told me never to become a professional programmer, because they usually burn out before they hit 35.

I concurr.

I know programming is hard work, but when you advertise yourself as a programmer maybe you should BE a programmer...LOL

let's see, in the past 2 months I have had 2 programmers take on my jobs and disappear:
Ryan Steele
Levi Lewis (http://www.calmdevelopment.com/about/)

Tell me about it.

Before I went full time in Adult I used to be the Project Manager for a large foreestry company (think $1B/year). My team of up to 8 programmers was entirely responsible for the development, maintenance and impementation of the business system that managed all of the sales, inventory, production, etc.

Fortunately I was able to hire only math/comp eng graduates because we could pay between $80 and $100 an hour each. Even then, with the exception of one or two (one who is an adult wembaster now too!), they were a pain in the fucking ass to keep on track.

Programmers are like men. All the good once are either taken or gay

Let's not confuse what the adult industry calls programmers with real programmers. Self taught idiots banging out sloppy script work are not really programmers.

Yeah really... programmers suck. :winkwink:

Seriously. I've been in and out of adult for the past few years and I still haven't found more than three other coders better than me. The guys over at Too Much Media, by the way kudos, have been the only coder(s) that I've seen that surpass me in some way. Really sad too, I feel bad for all you guys relying on programmers for one reason or another. :2 cents:

Just curious, are you a self taught programmer or do you have formal schooling? Do you work mostly with script languages (php) or could you sit down and bang something off in C# if you needed to?

Quoted for the brutal truth. Unless someone's learned how to program, and has some direction, you'll end up with haphazard, ugly shit that's unmaintainable and likely suboptimal.

It's amazing how many people come to me to say they need an upgrade for me to turn around and say, "No, you need your software rewritten. There's no point to try to select an entire table of xGB into RAM."

Circle gets the square!

When I took over the project at the forestry company I mentioned before, it was a distributed ap written in Visual Basic over a custom database layer called Pivotal Relationship that used exchange server to replicate via email messages to local MS SQL servers at each location. Yes, you read that correctly. This system was running 15 manufacturing locations, all sales, all inventory, all shipments etc. :1orglaugh

Well, the one good thing about this is that forestry services are used to the "thrash and burn" methodology. :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

I know you didn't ask me that but Here's a comment.

I have a degree in computer science and math, so I'm not self taught.
But I promise you that a true hardcore self taught programmer who did his homework can write good code. No doubt about it.

But I agree with you that some people learn a couple of "tricks" in php and javascript and start calling themselves programmers and they are nothing more than incompetent.

Yes, there is for the odd guy that can be a great coder who is self taught, but it's not the normal. Especially when you get in to very advanced code, they most often don't have the math skills.

Hell, I'm a good programmer, but I don't have the math background to be a very technical head programmer. I do have the "sort out the bullshit" skills to be a good project manager.

The thing about the formal education is that it teaches you how to program as opposed to a specific language. A good programmer can pick up any language no problem because they already know how to "speak".

For higher level languages, yes.

However,

to save a byte or a cycle doesn't do much these days. :1orglaugh

No doubt. I still look back fondly at learning Pascal and Prolog though. Those were good times :)

I haven't taken on any projects of yours since you and Brian were working together that was probably late 05' early 06'. I didn't code single a fucking statement for you in the past 2 months.

How much did I quote you for the job? Oh wait, that's right - I never did quote you anything. You came to me about the work. I didn't contact you. I never even entered the project into quick books for my own records. I said I'd get back with you, but I never did. That should have been a clue to move the fuck on. I don't owe you an explanation for my actions.

I'm never even going to consider another project from an individual with 32,000+ posts on a forum ever again. You spend 32x more time here then I do. You keep fuckin' around with me like this and I'll give you some real problems to cry about.


http://calmdev.com/gfy/jace.gif

I think he's referring to more useful concepts like knowing how to manipulate data without relying on a particular type of database and writing effecient code so your scripts deliver content to screen faster.

Yes, of course, which has absolutely nothing to do with knowledge of optimization for the specific platform you are utilizing.

Look all I know is it's not a good idea to get drunk and high and try to optimize indexes on a production database at 2AM Monday morning.

Well, so I've been told, anyway.

Juicy likes pie. I prefer coffee.

Let me guess: Drop primary index, recreate primary index with a numeric automatic increment?

I've seen that, before. The best part was that these ids were being utilized rather than a UUID or even name based key, so rebuilding the indeces to use the numerics (since the software was not to be rewritten) ended up being one hell of a task of data entry.

I thought the goal of good internet programming was to make platform independent code. If a client moves his script to a new server and they don't work without you re-writing them will the client think that you are a shit programmer for optimizing all the script for a specific server and locking them forever onto that box?

"specific platform" is a curse word.

Actually, that particular instance was because we had just finished building a custom reporting modual for sales that allowed them to search, sort and display their order file, which is actually a very complex set of data spanning most of the larger DB tables, in any manner they wanted to. So people would be running sales reports that would take an hour to generate almost. This is on an MS SQL server which of course doesn't create a "lock" when data is being read, but simply delays writes during the process without a formal lock.

What was required was by looking at a week's worth of SQL logs, figuring out and building up to 10 field indeces. In short, a fucking disaster. In the end I ended up getting another giant quad Xeon server and one way replicating data to it making it a dedicated reporting DB. Of course that brings up the problem of different indeces on different servers for the same DB, but that's another story. :)

When someone's making a joke using pseudo-assembly code, and you state that software should be written to be independent, you're missing the entire point of the joke.

Ugggh. Sounds like another story for LTF.