Open Dental Software

2,0

15 lug 2020

Consiglia

Gradimento del CEO

Pronostico commerciale

Vantaggi

Summary: Overall, this job gave me valuable experience working with angry product owners. I walked away with a thicker skin and the ability to sit calmly as I'm berated, insulted, and embarrassed in front of my peers by company leadership. Owner: -Is an actual Dentist and has valuable insight into the industry. CEO: - Tries very hard to be fair. - Very open and honest about the company. - Frequent company announcements. - Fun guy to talk to so long as it isn't about work. - Highly intelligent Engineering Manager: - A genuinely nice guy. - Very passionate about Dota and DnD. Senior Engineers: - Probably the best thing about Open Dental. They fight for young engineers a lot behind the scenes and do a great job of passing on knowledge. - Incredibly helpful and always willing to capitalize on teaching moments. - Very knowledgeable in Winforms and other legacy Microsoft technologies. - Deep MySQL experience - The fact that Open Dental is still running and delivering features is largely due to the seniors.

Svantaggi

Summary: The Open Dental application is 15+ years old and has little to no abstraction. The persistence layer, business layer, and UI logic are all slammed into the same files. The database schema is an absolute nightmare. There are multiple tables reaching the MySQL column limit. All refactoring and improvements that could be made are deemed impossible by management given the size and age of this decrepit code base. Working in Open Dental proper (the main application) is comparable to the punishment of Sisyphus. Technology stack: Winforms, MySQL, Subversion. That's it. You won't learn anything remotely close to the industry standard technologies here. THIS IS THE MOST DANGEROUS PART OF THE JOB. If you do not program outside of work your skills will wane and you will find alternative employment difficult due to your lack of relevant experience. Owner: - The owner/founder is a hobby programmer who uses 15 year old books to back up his opinions. He does not stay engaged with industry standards and is an absolute nightmare to program around. He is a liability and actively degrades the code base. - Before modifying any section of code with his name on it you must first call him and tell him exactly what you are doing. These conversations are awkward and uncomfortable as he is difficult to communicate with. - He strictly enforces programming patterns that all engineers must abide by or you will get a call, a lecture, and your code will be commented out by him personally. Here are a few examples: *He has declared 3 of the pillars of object oriented programming (inheritance, abstraction, encapsulation) anti-patterns. *Extension methods are not allowed *Data binding is not allowed *Foreach loops are not allowed *Dictionaries are not allowed *Threading is not allowed (unless he does it) CEO: - The CEO is the little brother of the founder/owner. He has 0 programming experience but thinks he's an engineer. He can speak engineering jargon but often uses the terms incorrectly leading to confusion. - He berates employees for mistakes and asking questions often causes more problems than it solves. Here is a list of some of my favorites. "If you weren't *senior engineer's name* I would be walking you to HR for remedial education" "I'm extra mean to people so that when I'm nice people think I'm in a good mood" "I'M BAFFLED. You can't be serious. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. SHOW ME THE CODE. That can't be true. You're wrong." "Stop shaking your leg. I can't think when you do that." "You're wrong. Nope. Stop talking. I said STOP talking. You're wrong and I'll tell you why." Engineering Manager: - His sole responsibility is to act as a buffer between the engineers and the CEO. Outside of that he offers little to no value. - He doesn't seem to realize that everyone's internet history is accessible via the network. He works about 3 hours each day and the majority of that is walking around and doing check-ins with engineers. The rest is spent designing DnD campaigns, watching Dota WTF videos, surfing the web, checking Facebook, watching Anime and playing idle games in an incognito browser. Most of the department is aware of how little he does. However, he runs interference on the CEO so people look the other way. - I personally reported him to HR due to a pornographic GIF I saw on his monitor when I went to ask him a question. HR independently verified what I saw in his history and reported it to the CEO. Absolutely nothing came of it. Senior Engineers: - They have been programming the Open Dental way for 10+ years. New technology is often dismissed too quickly or flat out ignored. - The synchronous review style is inefficient. It may seem like a good idea for new engineers, but once they gain experience and get comfortable with the code base (1-2 years) it becomes a waste of time.

Risposta di Open Dental Software

From the Open Dental CEO: I have met with some of my team and decided to comment on this post on behalf of Open Dental and our employees. The accusation of pornography viewing at work needs to be addressed, I feel terrible that this incorrect information was posted about a member of our staff. This simply is not true. Fortunately, more than one person was able to see this event as it happened from the aisle (two employees and myself), and there was evidence left on the computer of what was being viewed that exonerated the accused. It was not even PG-13, I would let my two ten-year-old children watch this content. The engineering manager’s computer screen was visible from the aisle, but at the angle it may have appeared that a woman was undressed, when that was not the case. After review, it was a woman in a tan tank top playing ‘League of Legends’ on a video feed, and there is just nothing wrong with that. This person making the report could not provide any additional details that would suggest our investigation was incorrect. It was a stream of a ‘professional’ video gamer playing a video game, and the employee was clocked out on lunch watching it. It was thoroughly investigated, but perhaps the details did not make it back to this employee in the right way. I will work with Human Resources to change our policy to provide a clearer response. We do not normally provide details of resolution of these types of issues, but the reputation of the accused is important in this case. We would have promptly terminated the employee if the accusation had been true. I also assure you the Engineering Manager is a solid worker and works significantly more than ‘3 hour days’. An important part of his job is walking around to talk to each engineer. Without going into detail, here we have a smart, hardworking engineer coming out of school and not having the perspective to see the work we are doing here in a larger sense. Stability is more important than following the latest trend, and what is taught at the local university is not always what works best in practice for every business. Open Dental has seen greater that 25% year over year growth for 17 years straight, and it is not because we are selling a bad product. I have worked in other engineering groups writing code and this is just a great team, the best I have seen. The experience software engineers get here is valuable and I for one appreciate every employee we have working here. Nathan

Apathetic Software Development - Recensione dipendente - Software Engineer presso Open Dental Software

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