@stalinkay why would you ask them to forget what they learned at Uni?

I'm a university graduate and I'd like to think I'm a fairly decent programmer, as well as a team and technical lead. I've been a developer for over 10 years now and university was absolutely crucial to me being where I am now.

University is an important part of someone's development and it should not be knocked. Instead you should be encouraging them to "apply" what they have learned at university to solve real world computing problems. You don't dismiss what they have learned at university in my opinion. Programming is a very academic skill which improves with experience. To me university, apprenticeships, personal learning and experience all go hand-in-hand and none of these should be dismissed, only encouraged.

And just for the record, absolutely everything I learned at university is relevant and I use it all almost daily, if not weekly in my job.

@divil I wish PHP was a little more strict, maybe not as strict as Swift.

@itsmill3rtime as the saying goes: A bad workman blames his tools ;-)

PHP is fine! And only getting better in my opinion.

"Well it was like that when I tested it on my machine"

@lig1 but what if the project I have been assigned is already written in PHP and I have to develop a new feature?

What happens if the project is regulated and I have limited scope in terms of languages to use due to regulations which I have I follow?

What happens if the server Architecture does not support the language I would prefer to use? Am I going to tell clients I need to rebuild their entire app to support this other infrastructure just because "I" want to develop in another language?

Yes I am a developer, and therefore my role is to "develop" solutions. It is also my role to follow rules and guidelines and to give appropriate advice as often as possible. Maybe if I had the luxury of writing every project from scratch I would choose a different language for each. However clients have budgets, companies have employees to pay, and businesses need to make a profit to keep people like us in jobs.

Think of the big picture before saying "oh just do it in whatever language"

@lig1 there is not a choice if the company you work for has all of its projects in one given language and you have to work with it.

@heyheni says who?

@mpotratz hmm that sounds frustrating. It also sounds like the database has been cobbled together without any proper design put in place

@Christine he's obviously pulled a few times ;-)

@mpotratz so not quite out the box?

@tomabolt I totally see your point in your two replies to me.

I suppose if budgets are limited our hands are tied a bit.

My point was more at where there is enough budget but estimation, timelines and communication becomes an issue, rather than the PM being a nag.

The scrum idea sounds good. It's not something I've implemented or been a part of yet, but is certainly an area I have been exploring.

However, developers can be a nightmare.

A developer will know a feature they have been tasked will take 6 weeks to build and properly test. But they know the PM wants it in 4 weeks, so they tell the PM 4 weeks and then the developer is screwed! Hence the PM looks like they are nagging at the start of week 4 about progress and delivery.

Also, developers have a major problem communicating with PMs. So even if the developer sticks to their guns of 6 weeks, if they realise after 4 weeks, they need an additional 2 weeks, they won't speak up. And when the client gets the feature at 6 weeks as promised, it breaks and then the developer goes into a hole and starts saying things like "well it worked on my machine", or "it worked in the dev environment".

Developers need to learn to speak to humans and communicate frequently, then we won't have this "oh the PM is nagging, and they're on double the salary I am", blah-de-blah!

PS. I am a developer myself!