Now an employee of Premire Global
- January 16th, 2009
- Posted in Random
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I can’t believe that it’s already been 2 months since I joined Premiere Global’s UI team for their email marketing platform. Joining Premiere is a bit of a shift for me. First, PGI is a public company, it has more employees than I can remember, and for the first time in years, I actually have a title, well two if you count Chief Spacial Officer.
The most surprising thing for me is that I don’t find the whole experience soul crushing. It has been the opposite. The folks that I’m in direct contact with want to build a better product. I find that fact to be a pre-requisite for any good workplace environment. Having a cute girl on the other team also helps a lot with the workplace environment.
On the other hand, I also now have big corporate horror stories, about IT and silly tests about computer usage. It’s only been two months. I can’t wait for the stories about messed up bureaucracies and decision makers who live on another planet.
Of course, I’m not there soley to pontificate on the quality of employment in mega corp. I’ll be utilizing my Appcelerator and general UI knowledge to help them to build a competitive application. My specific action items are to find ways to make the interface easier and more intuitive, improve the IE experience, and add compelling new features. Which is great for me, because what I enjoy the most as a software developer is building solutions that people actually use.
Of course, Premire is a java shop, which means that there will probably be more blog ranting about java and xml and the silly things people do to be “enterprise-y.” We’re probably only a few days away from a post about how dumb the idea of compiling software is.
After two months, I still like going to work in the morning. There are a lot of very interesting and important problems to be solved. There are a lot of solutions that haven’t been thought of yet. I don’t think there’s more you can ask of your work (other than more money).
(Editors note: no, this is not a positive post because my bosses read the blog. I actually do like my job)
This is my blog about programming. For random stuff, checkout my 
I’m convinced that the problems with Java are mostly social. It’s not an unreasonable language, and there’s some really great tooling for it — Eclipse can be compiling your app incrementally, as you write it, so you don’t have an edit/compile/run/okwhatwentwrong cycle. Just edit/debug/restart-occasionally.
The problem with Java is that, since developers know there’s good tooling to help you navigate their code, they have to defeat your attempts at tracing what’s going on by pushing everything into XML.
I guess this doesn’t mitigate the fact that Java (with the current Java landscape) often makes people want to stab someone. It’s just — static analysis and a fast VM!
I agree that the majority of the problems are social. I find the biggest problem that people who use Java tend to over complicate because they can. Configuration and build processes tend to be ridiculous. Case in point, for the email marketing product, there are more java projects than there are developers to work on them. That kind of segmentation in what is eventually one piece of software is crazy.
Java written by guys that know Java but aren’t Java devs tends to be more straight foward as they seem to have developed an allergy to such things.
I’m glad you’re happy there. There are a lot of great people at that office. I won’t try to name them all because inevitably forget someone.
Yup, Java’s fine — it’s all about how it’s used by people who over-engineer things.