| It depends on how tech savvy the managers are. Part of doing the job as a programmer is research and design. You don't just sit down all day and write code, you have to write documentation, you have to do research to find ways around bugs, you have to design the UI and data structures. For example I would write Pseudo code on paper to work out design flaws before I entered it into the computer. I would write Flow Charts and other things. I even developed my own method of developing data structures and database tables on paper as well. When I got stuck I'd research things in a book, or I'd search for the answer on the Internet. Companies paid for a MSDN subscription and have to make it pay off by searching the knowledge base esp when dealing with API calls that change with each service pack. In using Visual BASIC 6.0 sometimes I'd have to ask a developer at Microsoft via MSDN when I found a bug in Windows or Visual BASIC itself that killed my project and find a way around it. Crystal Reports we used and talking to Seagate Software at the time was the only way to fix CR issues. We had an issue where if the user wasn't an Admin on a Windows PC it would show duplicate rows, and Seagate got a service pack out to fix that issue. Everything I did on the Internet, on the phone, or reading books was job related and going towards solving problems and using resources. But my managers didn't always see that as work because they wanted me to solve the problems by myself, which would have taken a lot longer and impossible without a service pack to fix bugs. I never read a book, used the Internet, or made phone calls for personal things, they were all work related. Yet a service pack is like the size of a CD-ROM and takes five hours to download, so they noticed I was using 5 hours of Internet when that happened. (This was in the late 1990s when the Corporate Internet was slow). Other programmers who didn't do the same things I did to solve problems, could not solve them and the projects got reassigned to me to fix them, because I was able to fix problems. No matter how good you are, you will get stuck on some problem and need someone else's help to solve it. If it is a bug in the language or OS, you'll need a service pack or a way to get around it. You managers might not always understand that you need to seek help by reading a book, looking in a knowdlgebase, or talking to a developer on the phone to solve things. Your programs work on the old OS with the old service pack, but as soon as new ones come out they break compatibility and trying to figure out what changed without contacting the company that made the updates is really really hard to do. |