Story time! I learned this lesson a really hard way. Right after I graduated high school one of the largest companies in town was hiring for a C# developer and a Friend of mine was all ready working there. I thought I had it in the bag, the interview went great, I met with the director of the department. I just had one final piece, go home and spend less than an hour or two writing a program that did XY & Z. So I headed home, and started writing code. However I couldn't get my debugger to connect to my project. I tried all night, this was my first attempt at programming outside of a school environment, So I ended up having to write and debug a small project by double clicking the .exe and putting tons of message boxes in the code to pop up constantly with variable values to step through the entire project. The next day I emailed in an ugly buggy mess, and was turned down for the job.
The reason it was all a mess is my Windows User name had an ‘&’ in it, and it was messing up the directory to the project for Visual Studio and the debugger.
End the end, I ended up getting the same job 7 years later (2014) and the guy that interviewed me still works as a contractor around here. We have talked about it, and had a good laugh. I ended up getting staying at my old job, learned a ton and met all the people on here. It all worked out in the end.
Here is the other lesson to take away from this for the younger group on here. I never blamed my computer, Windows, God, life, or anyone else. It was my fault, I didn’t know it at the time, but I made the user name. I learned from it, I got better with my skills, and eventually another spot opened up around here, and I got it.
