In light of a previous post of mine, entitled ‘Stupid Bosses’ – a rant about how my boss was forcing me to invalidate all HTML by removing the required encoding from all ampersands in URIs – for a reason that I believe is invalid (and a task that I had not yet done). This morning, I found my boss had actually read it, and I have been terminated. Out of respect for the company, and my boss, the article is now 410 Gone.
In a way, although this is devastating to my career, it does provide me with the opportunity for a fresh start. This job was very much a learning experience for me and I will take a lot from it. I hope that in the future, I find work with a company that can utilise my skills as a web developer, and allows me to do what I do best – advocate and conform to all applicable standards and recomendations to produce the best possible results.
So, in conclusion, I would like to publicly apologise for any offense caused. I would also like to say that my boss was not as bad as I made him out to be in the deleted posting. He does have many good qualities, and is quite experienced with what he does. There just appear to be irreconcilable differences between us. So, in a way, this is best for both of us. It is a time to move on to bigger and better things.
For me, web standards is more about personal pride and politic advacacy than anything else. It seems like, in industry, it’s more about money than anything else.
Often web standards can actually save you time, but quite often it also takes more time just to get the “smaller details” right. And of course, time is money, so taking more time over something is a definite no-no in industry.
There are of course some design companies like Cinnamon Interactive in the Netherlands that insist on only employing developers than design according to web standards. So there is hope.
Anyway, I’m sure you’ll find something better soon. 🙂
I absolutely agree. My personal pride is exactly what stopped me from going through the entire site and removing all the encoded ampersands, I could not handle intentionally making a site invalid. In this case, since about 99% of the entire site was valid, it would have, infact, taken more time to invalidate the pages. I do hope my boss actually learned something from what I wrote, and decides not to do it himself anyway.
It’s good to hear that there are actually some standards compliant companies out there, it gives me a little hope. I just wish I could find a company like that here in Australia.
I think we have the same problem here in South Africa as in Australia. The only thing you can do is to round up a few developers that design according to standards staying in the same area as you and get them to start a company together.
The obvious problem with the above is that you first need to find them (which would unluckily be the case in most areas of the world), and then you actually need to get them to leave their current jobs and go into a business together. Not easy at all.
I don’t know of any other developers in my area that specifically focus on standards. However, if I ever start my own company I would insist that all of my employees design strictly according to the standards. Period.
Anyway, I think the biggest issue is that for most websites these days, many web development companies simply use pre-written Content Management Systems. There’s nothing wrong with that in principle; some of them are very good. However, I didn’t find any sophisticated one yet that properly supports standards. The biggest issue is of course unencoded ampersands.
I would really like to start working on something like that next year. A super-secure, super-standards-compliant open source CMS. It doesn’t have to be so much work; simply download another one and get hacking! I know of some people that started personal projects, but you cannot write a CMS on your own that can compete with the other ones on the market when it comes to functionality. These individuals should rather get together and start a team effort. If anybody wants to join me, send me mail and I’ll register a new project with SourceForge.
Oh yes, and sorry for going a little off-topic here. 🙂