RE: Diverse Tools (was HTML editors)

["Jason Deal" <jason -at- mitratech -dot- com>]

>Which leads me to ask:  has anyone on this list refused to use a tool
>required by the employer?  To put it another way, does anyone here have
such
>a huge ego as to dictate to the hand that feeds him just what he will or
>won't accept?  This is a nice horse to beat, but if we're all members of
the
>choir then there's not much life in the horse (if I might mix a few
>metaphors).

--Doug

Well, yes, actually, in exactly the instance we are speaking of.  My last
job was as both a Tech Writer and Webmaster at a small startup (part-time,
going to college, with the duties of two full-timers, it was a mistake).
They gave me Dreamweaver to make some new pages for the site, which had been
designed by a webdesign firm before I got there.  I didn't know what tool
they had used, but the site wasn't displaying properly in IE.  My bosses,
all netscape users, decided that they only had time to care about one
browser, and they needed to check my work.  They weren't checking in IE, so
they didn't care about it.
The only route I had to correct the problem was to hand correct all the
proprietary mistakes, essentially rewriting the site from scratch, which my
bosses told me NOT to do.  I did it anyway.  I was salaried, didn't charge
them, and I worked nights and weekends to get everything done in the
timeframe that I originally quoted for the pages.  I didn't do this for the
users, though our site statistics said 80% of our viewers were IE; I did
this so I could go to a potential employer and demo a working website.  The
work was worthless to me personally if I didn't do it right.
I know, this is an example of bad management, and atypical.  This happened
in the first two months with them, and thereafter the job lost its luster
and I was just waiting for college to end so I could find a real job.  But I
did flagrantly disobey my benefactors, which is what you asked for.


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