You have probably seen a lot of buzz surrounding software engineering jobs that offer amazing benefits just to attract and keep "rock star" talent. The first ones that come to mind for me are from Hedgehog Labs and perhaps What else do companies have to do to keep Software Engineers?. You probably know (dream?) about Google 20% time. I was just talking with a friend about how great his benefits were over mine yadda yadda yadda… It has become a big bragging point in our industry.

What I’m wondering

The thing I’m wondering here is: How far does it go? I am trying to consider in what other jobs benefits like work-from-home programs, free conferences, multiple monitors, and flex time are almost standard. I know that we don’t all have these nice things but doesn’t it seem like this profession goes further than most? I know that I’m already at the point where I would have a really hard time adjusting to a job without these benefits. Are you?
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1. Don’t create prototypes

Clients do not know what they want. Managers do not know what they want. When you prototype, you learn about the constraints you are going to face and your audience learns what they can have and what is impossible. NOTE: Try not to use your prototypes for production code, they are meant to be prototypes. Learn from them and don’t just….

2. Copy the code

When you copy code one of these scenarios is likely to occur: either you don’t fully understand what it does or you may know but don’t think about refactoring it to be better because you expect it to just work. I know many of you out there see this all day long: someone copies code because they are lazy and don’t correctly create an abstraction, and they end up violating the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle. Now when rules change, you have multiple pieces of code to change. Unfortunately, it seems that people who copy code also tend to believe that they should…
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