Dream jobs that you're glad you didn't pursue: computer programmer

At my last job, I worked on their new e-commerce site (it was really just custom additions added to oscommerce).

The boss decided to make every design decision by committee. One week one person would want it one way..and the next..another. The boss would even change his mind on things every few days. I beat my head against the wall trying to explain to them that our project would never get finished this way, but nobody would listen to me.

Something that should have taken 2 months ended up taking over a year. In the end, management started trying to figure out why things took so long...and would not attribute it to starting a project, stopping a few days, weeks, X amount of time into it, and starting over.

The company is now almost out of business (they let me go a couple of weeks ago), which doesn't surprise me in the least.

I am surprised at all of the incompetent business owners that manage to make money going against good business practices when there are so many people that do everything right and still can't succeed. I think they are either lucky or they have good people working for them that can compensate.

As an aside to my story, if you are thinking about using Oscommerce, Zen cart, or Oscmax in any e-commerce project...think again. In addition to the nightmare of code that you will need to maintain, it's difficult to keep secure. This is because template code is not separated from main application code. If you need to make any custom changes (which you will if you are changing anything about the default design), all security updates will have to be made by hand...which isn't impossible..but tedious.

The code itself is atrocious. It's a hacked together, spaghetti mess. If you look at the history of Oscommerce, the foundation (which hasn't changed that much) was built by inexperienced developers (and it shows).

I would recommend the Interspire shopping cart. Even though it costs money, you get support for a year and the code is very well organized and the plugin system makes it really easy to make changes. I've also heard some good things about Magento (which is free)..but I've also heard it has a scaling problem.