Friday, September 09, 2005

Roll the Dice

Dice.com, a high-tech job search website has a number of banner ads floating around that use code snippets to look cute and appeal to their target demographic, presumably. I'm willing to grant them some artistic license here, but one of the ads is really abusing the concept, in my opinion.



For those not well-versed in modern programming languages, here's what's happening. The first line basically says if a variable named "salary_sucks" is set to true, execute the code inside of the {}'s. So in this case, if your salary sucks, point your web broswer over to http://www.dice.com and look for a better job. That makes sense. The problem is the else clause. If your salary does not suck, Dice is telling you to suck it up. Why would you need to suck it up if you already have a job that pays well? Perhaps this would make more sense:


if ($salary_sucks) {
  if ($has_the_initiative_to_look_for_a_new_job) {
    // Go to Dice...
  } else {
    suck_it_up();
  }
}

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