[hockey97]

no2pencil, on 22 November 2011 - 02:29 AM, said:

hockey97, on 22 November 2011 - 03:14 AM, said:

take that knowledge away and look at how business men will look at you. They will think your a little kid trying to impress people with little things you know how to use. They won't hire you.

How are you basing this knowledge? How many programming jobs have you had?

none in c++, of software development. Just web programming for 2 years. got laid off.

At my University I talked to CS majors and I even talked to EA,Google software engineers. They have this in the fall every year they come and answer any questions we have for different kinds of jobs.

They have HR people there and software engineers that will discuss with you what you need to know before any interviews. They give you tips.

Me I am an accounting major. Yet, I talked to EA's and Googles Engineers.

They agreed with my statements. That a programmer is a person that knows how to program anything on a computer. They said ya in business you would use libs and tools. But that dosen't mean you don't have to know how those tools works.

They told me what if those tools had bugs Or you had to make mods to it to get a special customized effect or feature. They said at Google and EA, you need to know how everthing works so if such events occur then you need to find ways around them.

EA told us that they learned from their past. They relied on 3rd parties code / libs.

when bugs occurred they had to wait till the people that made the lib's fixed them or they had to wait till someone that uses the lib made either their own patches or found a way around the problem like a temp fix.

These top companies want you the programmers to be able to work around such issues that may occur. They don't want you to be a sitting duck.

Now, with your attitude if such issues occur you would be a sitting duck all lost don't know what to do you would tell your boss we will have to wait for the makers of this lib to fix the issues.

Now what would your boss think of you if he isn't technical oriented. He will think your a armature. A real programmer will find alternative ways and make suggestions on what they can do. yet, you guys from your comments and post would sit there and say sorry but I can't do anything we have to wait till they fix the issues. That would piss off any business person.

Because he now has a whole programming department sitting still. He would most likely fire you after finding a guy that knows programming form the inside out.

[no2pencil]

hockey97, on 22 November 2011 - 03:54 AM, said:

Now what would your boss think of you if he isn't technical oriented. He will think your a armature. A real programmer will find alternative ways and make suggestions on what they can do. yet, you guys from your comments and post would sit there and say sorry but I can't do anything we have to wait till they fix the issues. That would piss off any business person.

Because he now has a whole programming department sitting still. He would most likely fire you after finding a guy that knows programming form the inside out.

I find it impossibly difficult to believe that an entire department would come to a halt over an installer.

[hockey97]

no2pencil, on 05 September 2011 - 05:48 PM, said:

hockey97, on 05 September 2011 - 06:49 PM, said:

Microsoft and those kinds of companies look more professional since they can fix all range of issues with the software. Whereas if you use others code you will need that person to fix that code. You will have to wait for them to fix it. What if they can't fix it. Eventually you will lose your professionalism and your clients will start to think you have no clue how to program yourself. They will leave you.

Funny, I think Microsoft is a half assed company that outsources programmers from India to make a shitty product quickly, that is full of security issues, security holes, & completely misses the point of what the customer wants. If that is the type of software market you are shooting for, then by all means... have at it.

But I for one, certainly do not wait around for Microsoft & those types of companies to fix issues for me.

hockey97, on 05 September 2011 - 06:49 PM, said:

I seen many use the clickteams installer. Yet, they use the demo which at the ends says this program been installed with clickteams installer. Thank you for using it. Something like that.

The software that I sold that used used () & did not have any sort of message like that. Inno.

My issue has never been with you wanting to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes. Learn how software works, & what is required to make it work. That's great. It's your attitude that everyone else is second rate because they don't reinvent their own wheel. That's what I have a problem with.

You shouldn't (imo) tag the term professionalism on a criteria of what is capable, vs what is performed to get a process compelted.

No, I am not saying if your use a lib to create your own installers or a program or a tool to make your own installer isn't professional.

I am saying that your attitude isn't professional by saying don't learn how things work don't bother learning how things are actually program just learn how to use libs and others work to make a working set of software.

I am saying if you don't know how exactly your software works and runs then don't say your a programmer or at least don't tell a person that want's to learn that level stupid for trying to learn something like that.

I started this thread to learn how would one make their own installer. I gave refences to EA games The sims 2 and 3 installers they have mini games in them.

So I know it's possible to do something like that. what I got in response forget learning that shit just use software to make your installer. I then said I want to learn how to make my own because it dosen't look professional by using a software that most use to make installers.

Like EA games didn't look professional when they used InstallShield. Now they have their own installation program. If you look at their pc games now their installers are more customized look and feel. Now the installer looks part of the game based on the artwork and they had mini games while waiting it was pretty and shows their professional. It shows they have the talent and power to create their own shit. My respect for theme just rose.

What I mean by professional I am talking about business aspects. If your program looks like you didn't touch a single line of code even if you did code the whole thing yourself but your end result is software that looks like any ordinary software people none technical will look at you as not being the maker you either copied and pasted the work or you just stole designs from another place.

that's my argument. I never said that if you use libs and other software tools your unprofessional in the sense of programming.

I am just saying you can't say your a programmer just because you can use tools. If your a true programmer you would want to learn how those tools work. I am not saying you have to write your own tools and stuff from scratch or make your own tools. Just saying you must have an understand of it and if you don't then you must have a desire to understand it.

Yet, if you have this attitude where your saying forget learning that shit it's pointless. Then why program? if you just want to use others hard work do make a program that would look or feel like any other program then why bother even doing that?

why not hire your own team of programmers and have them make your software?

that's my argument. All I am saying how can you call yourself a programmer if your attitude is lets use others work to make our programs. Even if you do use their work you better at some point want to go back when you get time to learn it or at least always encourage others to learn how things work behind the scenes.

Yet, here what I am getting is why think that way? why build your own installer and not use already made software that is made.

My response was it dosen't look professional. I gave examples if I use a free demo version of one of these programs. They will have a nice message at the end saying thank you for using our program. they will have a link directly to their website.

So it would look unprofessional if I sent this out in the market people can click the link and look at the website and they would laugh and be like wow this guy must be a skid.

you know why because they will see the software options like for full software price is $50 to have a full installer. the free version will have that message at the end.

Even if you don't use the free version people could easily identify what software you used based on the style and function of how the installer looks and the options it offers.

you could figure this out if you use other software that has the same style or options. It would look like they copied from each other and it would look unprofessional in the sense of business not in the sense as programmers profession.

[no2pencil]

I used Inno & it doesn't leave any imprint that it isn't a full version. It doesn't point to any website, or do anything other than install the application, & leave an uninstaller off the menu to cleanly remove all traces of the application like it should.

Please re-read through the entire topic where it was pointed out by many others what different installers did & didn't do. NickDMax even suggested using the one his company uses as a catalyst. Because it offers so many custom options, & then learning how to make it your own.

[macosxnerd101]

I want to make a couple points. First- an interview is a business/economic transaction. The company is trying to find the most qualified candidate for the cheapest price. The candidate is trying to find the best paying job that suits their skill sets (in most cases). So yes- a company will tell you what to know and generally go overboard, especially when you begin putting words in their mouth. Second- most companies are not EA Games or Google, and chances are that you and I will not be working for those companies. Most companies will go with the cheapest and most effective route if provided a better alternative than committing hundreds of thousands of dollars in resources to create an installer.

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So I know it's possible to do something like that. what I got in response forget learning that shit just use software to make your installer. I then said I want to learn how to make my own because it dosen't look professional by using a software that most use to make installers.

Nobody ever discouraged you from learning how to do things. I think it's a great thing to be able to do that. However, there is a different attitude in the real world. And given that you don't have any real world programming experience, there isn't much basis to make this argument. Most business people are petrified of anything remotely technical. They are happy in many cases to let the IT people take care of it. Also, most IT consulting firms are custom-creating software for a single client. It's not like they're Microsoft releasing it to the entire world.

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why not hire your own team of programmers and have them make your software?

Because it costs a lot of resources- time, money, manpower.

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All I am saying how can you call yourself a programmer if your attitude is lets use others work to make our programs.

This is the entire attitude in the industry. There is a saying that newbies want to recreate everything, and experienced developers ask where something has been done before.

Perhaps you should look into an IT internship to gain a little more real world experience as well. A lot of your arguments are based off of what you perceive the real world to be like. Go out and see for yourself firsthand rather than just by everyone else's arguments. I highly doubt you will touch installers beyond installing software on a workstation you are using.

[JackOfAllTrades]

Here's the biggest hint I can give you:

If you want to be successful in ANY industry, you're going to have to learn to use the English language at a level beyond that of my 12-year-old grandson.

"You are" in its contracted form is "you're", NOT "your"! Makes my head spin that someone in college -- in the US, apparently -- does not know this.

[Curtis Rutland]

Quote

I don't understand why everyone is aruging with me.

Well, there are two types of people.

• The type who says "Hmm, everyone is disagreeing with me. Maybe what I'm saying is wrong."
  
• The type who says "Hmm, everyone is disagreeing with me. Maybe they're all wrong and I'm still right."

Perhaps you should accept that trusted professionals and experts know better than you. But if you can't accept that, accept that you aren't going to change anyone's mind. So this is entirely pointless, one way or another.

Quote

that's my argument. All I am saying how can you call yourself a programmer if your attitude is lets use others work to make our programs. Even if you do use their work you better at some point want to go back when you get time to learn it or at least always encourage others to learn how things work behind the scenes.

Your attitude is already like this, in ways you don't realize. You aren't manually setting bits on a hard drive with a magnetized needle. You aren't writing your own bootloaders and operating systems. You aren't writing your software in assembly. You aren't compiling your C++ code with a compiler you wrote. You aren't writing your own stdio library, or any of the other standard includes.

You're standing on the backs of tens of thousands of other people's work. And you can still call yourself a programmer, because being a programmer isn't about doing everything from scratch. It's about programming.

Also, just because you don't know how to write an installer doesn't mean that you can't look at the code presented to you and figure out what it's doing.

[RudiVisser]

Your posts are too long.

To be completely honest, in the time it's taken you to write these posts you could have written your own installer thus have an understanding of how it works and make everything in this thread obsolete.

BTW - Your example about Unreal Engine is farfetched. Unless you're taking a job interview with Unreal themselves, a company has no right to say "You must know this!" simply because they use it and may want it changing in the future. If you can do the main part of the job (which would NOT be modifying Unreal's engine as you know you can't do that so wouldn't apply in the first place, right?), then they would hire somebody else, or retrain you (perhaps give you learning time) to actually learn the engine and make changes to it.

[Lemur]

Well to answer the original post then.

To make an installer for a C source you need to have a package of all your source code, have a script to decompress, compile, make, install from scripts you make that expand the code and resources into required directories.

I don't get how that's such a hard concept to get.

Oh, and if we're going to get into the hardline elitist mode on all of this....

Write your own OS, write your own Web Browser, if you touch a single line of code from someone else you're not a true programmer. You'll spin your head into an ad infinitum of juvenile ignorance before you realize it.

Fact of the matter is this: You have no real experience, and an elitist viewpoint is a sloppily constructed facade to cover your own inadequacies. Don't put them off on the rest of us. You'll be sitting in front of a computer 5 to 10 years from now, and you'll realize something: they were right.

You have a fiduciary responsibility to your manager, them to their employer, the CEO, and the CEO eventually to stakeholders. It is your job to make things as fast as possible to maximize profits, not to go on idealistic sprees on petty beliefs. I'll make this clearer: Your job is to make your company more money faster

Ask yourself that question: Does this earn more money for my employer? If the answer is no then it's a personal quandary you need to drop that instant.

[ccubed]

hockey97, on 22 November 2011 - 02:16 AM, said:

I am saying that your attitude isn't professional by saying don't learn how things work don't bother learning how things are actually program just learn how to use libs and others work to make a working set of software.

News flash, We're programmers. We're not necessarily required to know how or why the deepest, darkest parts of a computer's memory works. Is it fun to know? Totally. Should you lose sleep over it? No.

What isn't professional is your attitude so far. Professionalism means that you understand where your skill set begins and where it ends. You on the other hand believe that you have to know everything. You will get fired faster proclaiming a knowledge of everything than you will proclaiming an idiocy concerning one topic.

You will not be doing everything, nor does anyone else. There is an entire subset of the computer science community that ONLY writes compilers. Does that mean myself and the rest don't know anything about them? No. What it does mean is that I'm not the best person to be asking about the inner workings of a compiler and i'm also not likely to be making one anytime soon. Could I? Yes. Is it worth the time it would take? No, because there are people who have invested far more time in the subject than I have.

hockey97, on 22 November 2011 - 02:16 AM, said:

I am saying if you don't know how exactly your software works and runs then don't say your a programmer or at least don't tell a person that want's to learn that level stupid for trying to learn something like that.

So I know it's possible to do something like that. what I got in response forget learning that shit just use software to make your installer. I then said I want to learn how to make my own because it dosen't look professional by using a software that most use to make installers.

You seem to base this fact on the deluded perception that you can only truly know how your code works by writing it yourself. This is ridiculous and far off from the truth. Using Inno, you can know just as much about what your program does as if you coded your own. If you can't know exactly how your program works when using a tool or library, then you have a problem and need to learn more about that tool and library.

Additionally, EVERYONE uses tools and libraries that are already made. Those EA installers you keep bringing up? Surprise, they're not entirely self coded by EA. Why? Because there isn't any reason to do it that way. At the least, they're going to use the Windows 32 API functions to write to the registry and probably to draw the windows. Most likely, they've just repurposed another tool or library into their own with a few modifications.

Now, nobody here is telling you you're stupid for wanting to learn how it works in the background. What everyone is saying, however, is that if your only reason for doing this is to look professional, knowing how to use a tool like Wix or Inno looks better. Why? Because as everyone else, with more years of experience in programming than you, has told you, and I'm telling you this too, employers want people who adapt to new environments quickly. Knowing how to use a tool shows that you value productivity and that you know how to learn and read technical writings.

hockey97, on 22 November 2011 - 02:16 AM, said:

Like EA games didn't look professional when they used InstallShield.

EA Games was plenty professional when they used InstallShield. They made a decision as a company to stop using it and repurpose some library into their own personal install system. This may have never happened and they wouldn't have looked any less professional for it.

hockey97, on 22 November 2011 - 02:16 AM, said:

What I mean by professional I am talking about business aspects. If your program looks like you didn't touch a single line of code even if you did code the whole thing yourself but your end result is software that looks like any ordinary software people none technical will look at you as not being the maker you either copied and pasted the work or you just stole designs from another place.

Speaking as a software developer, a non-technical person doesn't care what the hell your program looks like unless it's a game. They only care that they can use it, it does what they want it to do and it's at least semi-intuitive or has really, really good help documents - but they never read those, so tooltips are better. They don't know the difference in look between Inno and Wix. They don't know the difference in look between Win32 API and Gnome. Additionally, they couldn't care less.

So this is a flat out untruth. Where did you even get this?

hockey97, on 22 November 2011 - 02:16 AM, said:

I am just saying you can't say your a programmer just because you can use tools. If your a true programmer you would want to learn how those tools work. I am not saying you have to write your own tools and stuff from scratch or make your own tools. Just saying you must have an understand of it and if you don't then you must have a desire to understand it.

A programmer is not what you think it is. You're talking about a very specific use of the word programmer - system architects. Programming is a broad term for a group of people that all do varying things of different levels of difficulty and involvement.

hockey97, on 22 November 2011 - 02:16 AM, said:

Yet, if you have this attitude where your saying forget learning that shit it's pointless. Then why program? if you just want to use others hard work do make a program that would look or feel like any other program then why bother even doing that?

You've never used a library like Wix or Inno have you?

hockey97, on 22 November 2011 - 02:16 AM, said:

All I am saying how can you call yourself a programmer if your attitude is lets use others work to make our programs.

Because there's only so many ways you can code things before you're coding the exact same thing as everyone else. You don't need to reinvent 1 + 1. It works the same way in Programming.

hockey97, on 22 November 2011 - 02:16 AM, said:

*more stuff about how customers care about individuality*

Again, no. Just no. They don't. They don't understand it, they don't care to and they don't give a flying leap if it does use a free installer. As long as it does what they need it to do, it could feature a picture of my little pony or a unicorn on the box or the installer and they STILL wouldn't care.

This post has been edited by ccubed: 26 November 2011 - 11:58 AM