That’s the face I’ve made just yesterday when my friend told me she’s now eligible for a subsidized IT mortgage. That thing was one of Russia’s last ditch attempts at stopping skilled workers from fucking off to different countries. The problem is, she’s a web designer. I guess that counts as IT nowadays, so good for her. But it’s bitter to hear as sr. backend tech who never hit the criteria…
Yep, I know the face… made it a few times with colleagues that don’t know basic Windows scripting, but somehow got bonuses… but I don’t kiss upper management ass, so I never do. That’s life I guess…
I’m both, and while I do hate myself, I don’t think it’s related, so I’m not sure I get it.
(I hate computers more, though, except when they’re turned off — no bugs when they’re off —, but they’re the only thing I’m good enough at to make a living off of.)
Hating computers is normal for people who love computers
This is so true… it’s so frustrating sometimes…
This guy computers
I try to be understanding with my software brethren. We’re different sides to the whole. Ying and yang, so to speak.
That said, I’ve gotten some brain-dead requests from you developer types.
I’m not saying all of you are the problem, but there’s definitely some of you that need to learn how things work.
This is the same between many different software development disciplines, fpga devs (or hardware devs for that matter) vs. driver devs, driver devs vs. backend dev, backend devs vs frontend devs, integrators vs everyone.
Oh, Willy, calm down. Its almost Scotchtober.
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How is software not a subset of IT?
Infrastructure maintenance is management, security and day to day business, while software engineering is mostly concerned with itself. They use distinct tools and generally have nothing to do with each other (except maybe integration).
We need new terms, IT means “works with computers, but more than Word and Excel” for too many people. In Switzerland they split the apprenticeship names to ‘platform engineer’ and ‘application engineer’, which I think is fitting.
My current workplace organizes both development and infrastructure within IT which itself is a sub department of finance. I’m not saying this is the best approach because honestly it only took 1.5 layers of apathetic management to make long term planning a nonstarter
Think of it like an engine: The mechanics working on the engine aren’t the engineers designing the thing.
Honest question: what do we call who is driving the engine?
Drivers would be end users, Clients and project managers sometimes.
Think about it. Many drivers don’t know about checking the oil, maintaining proper tire pressure, tire wear, brake wear, air filters or topping off fluids.
I can do all of the above, but I’m nowhere near a mechanic. Just car savvy. So I could make suggestions to mechanics or engineers that look cool but are insane for functionality.
I’m IT and my cousin is software. I had to teach him basic computer maintenance…
I spent a weekend helping my buddy who graduated magna cum laude with an Electrical and Computer Engineering degree build a PC. Given a breadboard and some schematics, he could probably have created working prototypes of half of the components, but figuring out where to put the screw risers under the motherboard? Forget about it.
RTFM? Nowadays it’s a YouTube video away. Freaking legos.
That’s wild
the User vs Builder relationship has been a bit tense for thousands of years
“Have you tried unplugging your Pyramid and plugging it back in?”
I’m both IT and development…and I’ve caught both sides being utterly wrong because they’re only familiar with one and not the other
We have a daywalker amongst us…
Traitor.
This shit is hilarious!
I think it’s on a case by case basis but having help desk ppl help you out and opening powershell and noodling without any concept of problem solving made me make this face once.
It probably goes both ways, I’m a dev and I assembled computers at 12 yo so I believe I have a lot of experience and knowledge when it comes to hardware. I’ve also written code for embedded platforms.
IT people in my pov can really come across as enthusiast consumers when it comes to their hardware knowledge.
“did you guys hear Nvidia has the new [marketing term] wow!” . Have you ever thought about what [marketing term] actually does past just reading the marketing announcement?
At the same time I swear to God devs who use macs have no idea how computers work at all and I mean EXCLUDING their skill as a dev. I’ve had them screen share to see what I imagine is a baby’s first day on a computer.
To close this rant: probably goes both ways
Interesting comment on the Mac. At my workplace we can choose between Mac or Windows (no Linux option unfortunately, my personal computer runs Debian). Pretty much all the principle and senior devs go for Mac, install vim, and live in the command line, and I do the same. All the windows people seem over reliant on VSCode, AI apps, and a bunch of other apps Unix people just have cli aliases for and vim shortcuts. I had to get a loaner laptop from work for a week and it was windows. Tried using powershell and installing some other CLI tools and after the first day just shut the laptop and didn’t work until I got back from travel and started using my Mac again.
I have to use windows for work. Installed vim through winget and set a powershell alias, allowing me to use it similarly to linux. Windows ist still just ass though.
If you don’t have access to Linux, MacOS is the closest commercially available option so it makes sense.
Also please take what I said lightly, I by no means want to bash Mac users and generalize them. It just has been my experience. I’m sure there are thousands of highly competent technical users who prefer Mac.
Why wasn’t wsl an option?
WSL is interesting because it manages to simultaneously offer everything a Linux user would want while also actually capable of none of what a Linux user would need it to do. Weird compatibility issues, annoying filesystem mappings that make file manipulation a pain, etc
In a Windows environment I’ve found it honestly works better to either ssh into a Linux machine or learn the PowerShell way of doing it than to work through WSL’s quirks
Windows is an option
Lmao, devs who insist on using VIM and the terminal over better graphical alternatives just to seem hardcore are the worst devs who write the worst code.
“Let me name all my variables with a single letter and abbreviations cause I can’t be bothered to learn how to setup a professional dev environment with intellisense and autocomplete.”
Spoken like someone who knows absolutely nothing about vim/unix.
I know it has a steep learning curve with no benefit over GUI alternatives (unless you have to operate in a GUI-less environment).
Which makes it flat out dumb for a professional developer to use. “Lets make our dev environment needlessly difficult, slowing down new hires for no reason will surely pay off in the long run”.
no benefit over GUI alternatives
Lol nice bait
This is it – the dumbest shit I’ll read today, and I was just dunking on Nazis.
I can run Neovim on my phone via Termux. I can run Neovim over SSH. I can run Neovim in tmux. That’s not possible with VSCode.
I prefer Micro via Terminus
Bruh, there’s a whole help page on that:
I have serve-web running as a service, but that only works well on desktop screen layouts — from my experience, it runs terribly on mobile. However, even then, my tab layout isn’t synced between devices. My tmux saves all of my open projects, so I could throw my phone in a woodchipper at any moment, pull out my laptop, and be exactly where I left off. Good luck doing that with vscode.
Or maybe…hear me out…different people like different things. Some people don’t like GUIs and enjoy working in the command line. For some other people, it’s the opposite.
It’s just different preferences.
You are making prejudiced, generalized, assumptions and presenting them as facts.
You are at best naive if you think people use vim and a terminal instead of “better graphical alternatives” (which there are none of if you’ve really gotten into vim/emacs/whatever). And we don’t do it to seem hardcore (maybe we are, but that’s a side effect). Software in the terminal is often more simple to use, because it allows chaining together outputs and has often simpler user interfaces.
The second paragraph is word salad. Developers should name their shit properly regardless of editor and it’s quite simple to have a professional dev setup with ‘intellisense’ and auto complete in neovim. In fact, vim/neovim and I assume emacs too have much more features and flexibility of which users of IDEs or vscode wouldn’t so much as think of.
I assume your prejudice comes from the fact that vim is not a “one size fits all no configuration needed” integrated development environment (IDE) but rather enables the user to personalize it completely to their own wishes, a Personalized Development Environment. In that regard, using one of the “better graphical tools” is like a mass produced suit while vim is like a tailor made one.
Just let people use what they like. Diversity is a strength.
I tried using VScode to play around with Golang. I had to quit coding to take care of something else. I hit save, and suddenly I have way fewer lines of code. WTF? Why did/would saving delete code? After much digging, it turns out because the all knowing VSCode thought because I had not yet referenced my variables, I never would, and since my code I wanted to save and continue later wouldn’t compile, it must be quelled. Off with its head!
Anyway, I decided to use vim instead. When I did :wq, the file was saved exactly as I had typed it.
This is either false, or you didn’t understand the environment you were working in.
You have to explicitly turn on the setting to have VSCode reformat on save, it’s not on by default, and when it is on, it’s there for a reason, because having software developers that do not all follow the same standard for code formatting creates unpredictable needless chaos on git merge. This is literally ‘working as a software developer on a team 101’.
Agreed. I have colleagues that I write scripts for (I don’t do that any more, I stopped and shit stopped working, so they solve things manually now), they don’t know shit about scripting… and still don’t.
On the other hand, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a dev that was just this very positive, very friendly person and was also very knowledgeable when it came to hardware, so we were on the same page most of the time. He also accepted most of my code changes and the ones that he didn’t, gave him an idea of how to solve it more efficiently. We were a great team to be honest. We’re still friends. Don’t see him as frequently, but we keep in touch.
devs who use macs
Do they exist? Are you sure they are devs?
Our entire .NET shop swapped to MacBook Pros from Dell Precisions for like 2-3 years because our head of development liked them more. Then went back to having a choice after that. So now we have a mix. In all honesty it’s not much different for me but I use everything…Windows, Mac, Linux. Whatever works best for me for the task at hand. DotNet runs on all three so we kind of mix and match. Deploying to Azure allows a mix of windows/linux and utilizing GitHub Actions allows a mix of windows/linux in the same workflows as well. So it’s best to just learn them all. None of them are perfect and have pros/cons.
I dabble in hardware and networking too. I built my first computer when I was 11 by myself. My parents are kind of tech illiterate. I have fiber switches and dual Xeon servers and the such in my house. My NAS is a 36 hot swap bay 4U server. That knowledge definitely helps when deploying to the cloud where you’re responsible for basically everything.
Also, yes. I can do more than .Net languages…that’s where my job currently falls though.
MacOS is literally certified UNIX though.
I’m not a Mac user at all, and I’m lucky enough to be able to run Linux full time at work, but it seems like macs should be alright in many cases.
I’m writing python in PyCharm on my M2 right now.
They do exist and some of them swear Mac has better workflows (than windows because most of the time your options are Windows or Mac). I would call them loonies but I’ve seen some smart people use Macs.
Containerise everything!
Yes! Containerize, containerize, containerize until every perfectly good machine built before 2020 is rotting away in a landfill!
No we put those in a cluster or take them home for fun projects :D
Exactly what a dev would say… you guys don’t have to deal with that 3rd gen i3 Jenny from accounting is running.
Ticket opened I need soda intalled high importance!!! get up there companies paying for Adobe suite it’s there on the desktop…
“IT people” here, operations guy who keeps the lights on for that software.
It’s been my experience developers have no idea how the hardware works, but STRONGLY believe they know more then me.
Devops is also usually more dev than ops, and it shows in the availability numbers.
Yup. Programmers who have only ever been programmers tend to act like god’s gift to this world.
As a QA person I despise those programmers.
“Sure buddy it works on your machine, but your machine isn’t going to be put into the production environment. It’s not working on mine, fix it!”
As a developer I can freely admit that without the operations people the software I develop would not run anywhere but on my laptop.
I know as much about hardware as a cook knows about his stove and the plates the food is served on – more than the average person but waaaay less than the people producing and maintaining them.
As a devops manager that’s been both, it depends on the group. Ideally a devops group has a few former devs and a few former systems guys.
Honestly, the best devops teams have at least one guy that’s a liaison with IT who is primarily a systems guy but reports to both systems and devops. Why?
It gets you priority IT tickets and access while systems trusts him to do it right. He’s like the crux of every good devops team. He’s an IT hire paid for by the devops team budget as an offering in exchange for priority tickets.
But in general, you’re absolutely right.
Am I the only guy that likes doing devops that has both dev and ops experience and insight? What’s with silosing oneself?
I’ve done both, it’s just a rarity to have someone experienced enough in both to be able to cross the lines.
Those are your gems and they’ll stick around as long as you pay them decently.
Hard to find.
Because the problem is that you need
- A developer
- A systems guy
- A social and great personality
The job is hard to hire for because those 3 in combo is rare. Many developers and systems guys have prickly personalities or specialise in their favourite part of it.
Devops spent have the option of prickly personalities because you have to deal with so many people outside your team that are prickly and that you have to sometimes give bad news to….
Eventually they’ll all be mad at you for SOMETHING…… and you have to let it slide. You have to take their anger and not take it personally…. That’s hard for most people, let alone tech workers that grew up idolising Linus torvalds, or Sheldon cooper and their “I’m so smart that I don’t need to be nice” attitudes.
Fantastic summary. For anyone wondering how to get really really valuable in IT, this is a great write-up of why my top paid people are my top paid people.
Sorry, this comment is causing me mental whiplash so I am either ignorant, am subject to non-standard circumstances, or both.
My personal experience is that developers (the decent ones at least) know hardware better than IT people. But maybe we mean different things by “hardware”?
You see, I work as a game dev so a good chunk of the technical part of my job is thinking about things like memory layout, cache locality, memory access patterns, branch predictor behavior, cache lines, false sharing, and so on and so forth. I know very little about hardware, and yet all of the above are things I need to keep in mind and consider and know to at least some usable extent to do my job.
While IT are mostly concerned on how to keep the idiots from shooting the company in the foot, by having to roll out software that allows them to diagnose, reset, install or uninstall things on, etc, to entire fleets of computers at once. It also just so happens that this software is often buggy and uses 99% of your cpu taking it for spin loops (they had to roll that back of course) or the antivirus rules don’t apply on your system for whatever reason causing the antivirus to scan all the object files generated by the compiler even if they are generated in a whitelisted directory, causing a rebuild to take an hour rather than 10 minutes.
They are also the ones that force me to change my (already unique and internal) password every few months for “security”.
So yeah, when you say that developers often have no idea how the hardware works, the chief questions that come to mind are
- What kinda dev doesn’t know how hardware works to at least an usable extent?
- What kinda hardware are we talking about?
- What kinda hardware would an IT person need to know about? Network gear?
When IT folks say devs don’t know about hardware, they’re usually talking about the forest-level overview in my experience. Stuff like how the software being developed integrates into an existing environment and how to optimize code to fit within the bounds of reality–it may be practical to dump a database directly into memory when it’s a 500 MB testing dataset on your local workstation, but it’s insane to do that with a 500+ GB database in production environment. Similarly, a program may run fine when it’s using a NVMe SSD, but lots of environments even today still depend on arrays of traditional electromechanical hard drives because they offer the most capacity per dollar, and aren’t as prone to suddenly tombstoning when it dies like flash media. Suddenly, once the program is in production, it turns out that same program’s making a bunch of random I/O calls that could be optimized into a more sequential request or batched together into a single transaction, and now it runs like dogshit and drags down every other VM, container, or service sharing that array with it. That’s not accounting for the real dumb shit I’ve read about, like “dev hard coded their local IP address and it breaks in production because of NAT” or “program crashes because it doesn’t account for network latency.”
Game dev is unique because you’re explicitly targeting a single known platform (for consoles) or targeting for an extremely wide range of performance specs (for PC), and hitting an acceptable level of performance pre-release is (somewhat) mandatory, so this kind of mindfulness is drilled into devs much more heavily than business software dev is, especially in-house dev. Business development is almost entirely focused on “does it run without failing catastrophically” and almost everything else–performance, security, cleanliness, resource optimization–is given bare lip service at best.
Thank you for the explanation, now I understand the context on the original message. It’s definitely an entirely different environment, especially the kind of software that runs on a bunch of servers.
I have built business programs before being a game dev, still the kinds that runs on device rather than on a server. Even then, I always strived to write the most correct and performant code. Of course, I still wrote bugs like that time that a release broke the app for a subset of users because one of the database migrations didn’t apply to some real-world use case. Unfortunately, that one was due to us not having access to real world databases pr good enough surrogates due to customer policy (we were writing an unification software of sorts, up until this project every customer could give different meanings to each database column as they were just freeform text fields. Some customers even changed the schema). The migrations ran perfectly on each one of the test databases that we did have access to, but even then I did the obvious: roll the release back, add another test database that replicated the failing real world use case, fixed the failing migrations, and re released.
So yeah, from your post it sounds that either the company is bad at hiring, bad at teaching new hires, or simply has the culture of “lol who cares someone else will fix it”. You should probably talk to management. It probably won’t do anything in the majority of cases, but it’s the only way change can actually happen.
Try to schedule one on one session with your manager every 2 to 3 weeks to assess which systematic errors in the company are causing issues. 30 minutes sessions, just to make them aware of which parts of the company need fixing.
I’ve always found this weird. I think to be a good software developer it helps to know what’s happening under the hood when you take an action. It certainly helps when you want to optimize memory access for speed etc.
I genuinely do know both sides of the coin. But I do know that the majority of my fellow developers at work most certainly have no clue about how computers work under the hood, or networking for example.
I find it weird because, to be good at software development (and I don’t mean, following what the computer science methodology tells you, I mean having an idea of the best way to translate an idea into a logical solution that can be applied in any programming language, and most importantly how to optimize your solution, for example in terms of memory access etc) requires an understanding of the underlying systems. That if you write software that is sending or receiving network packets it certainly helps to understand how that works, at least to consider the best protocols to use.
But, it is definitely true.
and I don’t mean, following what the computer science methodology tells you, I mean having an idea of the best way to translate an idea into a logical solution that can be applied in any programming language,
But that IS computer science.
. I think to be a good software developer it helps to know what’s happening under the hood when you take an action.
There’s so many layers of abstractions that it becomes impossible to know everything.
Years ago, I dedicated a lot of time understanding how bytes travel from a server into your router into your computer. Very low-level mastery.
That education is now trivia, because cloud servers, cloudflare, region points, edge-servers, company firewalls… All other barriers that add more and more layers of complexity that I don’t have direct access to but can affect the applications I build. And it continues to grow.
Add this to the pile of updates to computer languages, new design patterns to learn, operating system and environment updates…
This is why engineers live alone on a farm after they burn out.
It’s not feasible to understand everything under the hood anymore. What’s under the hood grows faster than you can pick it up.
I’d agree that there’s a lot more abstraction involved today. But, my main point isn’t that people should know everything. But knowing the base understanding of how perhaps even a basic microcontroller works would be helpful.
Where I work, people often come to me with weird problems, and the way I solve them is usually based in low level understanding of what’s really happening when the code runs.
One may also end up developing in the areas that the above post considers inaccessible where their knowledge is likely still required.
I think software was a lot easier to visualise in the past when we had fewer resources.
Stuff like memory becomes almost meaningless when you never really have to worry about it. 64,000 bytes was an amount that made sense to people. You could imagine chunks of it. 64 billion bytes is a nonsense number that people can’t even imagine.
When I was talking about memory, I was more thinking about how it is accessed. For example, exactly what actions are atomic, and what are not on a given architecture, these can cause unexpected interactions during multi-core work depending on byte alignment for example. Also considering how to make the most of your CPU cache. These kind of things.
yeah i wish it was a requirement that you’re nerdy enough to build your own computer or at least be able to install an OS before joining SWE industry. the non-nerds are too political and can’t figure out basic shit.
This is like saying before you can be a writer, you need to understand latin and the history of language.
You should if you want to be a science writer or academic, which lets be honest is a better comparison here. If your job involves latin for names and descriptions then you probably should take at least a year or two of latin if you don’t want to make mistakes here and there out of ignorance.
Before you can be a writer, you need to sharpen your own pencil.
I like informing yourself about the note taking app you’re writing with a little more. It makes it a bit more obvious that it’s kind of obvious but can have many advantages.
Personally though I don’t really see upside of building a computer as you could also just research things and not build it or vice versa. (Maybe it’s good for looking at bug reports?)
A 30 minute explanation on how CPUs work that I recently got to listen in on was likely more impactful on my C/assembly programming than building my own computer was.
Absolutely agree, as a developer.
The devops team set up a pretty effective setup for our devops pipeline that allows us to scale infinity. Which would be great if we had infinite resources.
We’re hitting situations where the solution is to throw more hardware at it.
And IT cannot provision tech fast enough within budget for any of this. So devs are absolutely suffering right now.
Maybe you should consider a bigger budget?
It very much depends on how close to hardware they are.
If someone is working with C# or JavaScript, they are about as knowledgeable with hardware as someone working in Excel(I know this statement is tantamount to treason but as far as hardware is concerned it’s true
But if you are working with C or rust or god forbid drivers. You probably know more than the average IT professional you might even have helped correct hardware issues.
Long story short it depends.
I know this is not everyone and there’re some unicorns out there but after working with hiring managers for decades i can’t help but see cheap programmers when I see Devops. It’s ether Ops people that think they are programmers or programmers that are not good enough to get hired as Software Engineers outright at higher pay. It’s like when one person is both they can do both but not great at ether one. Devops works best when it’s a team of both dev and Ops working together. IMO
20 year IT guy and I second this. Developers tend to be more troublesome than the manager wanting a shared folder for their team.
Rough and that sucks for your organization.
Our IT team would rather sit in a room with developers and solve those problems, than deal with hundreds of non-techs who struggle to add a chrome extension or make their printer icon show up.
I would love to work through issues but the stock of developers we currently have seem to either the rejects or have as someone else stated “a god complex”. They remind me of pilots in the military. All in all it is a loss for my organization.
As a developer I like to mess with everything. Currently we are doing an infrastructure migration and I had to do a lot of non-development stuff to make it happen.
Honesly I find it really usefull (but not necessary) to have some understanding of the underying processes of the code I’m working with.
Could you give an example of something related to hardware that most developers don’t know about?
Simple example, our NASes are EMC2. The devs over at the company that does the software say they’re garbage, we should change them.
Mind you, these things have been running for 10 years straight 24/7, under load most of the time, and we’ve only swapped like 2 drives, total… but no, they’re garbage 🤦…
Accurate!
Developers are frequently excited by the next hot thing or how some billionaire tech companies operate.
I’m guilty of seeing something that was last updated in 2019 and having a look of disgust.
If it’s publicly accessible it likely has a bunch of vulnerabilities so I too understand that look.
Well, at least you admit it, not everyone does.
I do agree that they’re out of date, but that wasn’t their point, their software somehow doesn’t like the NASes, so they had to look into where the problem was. But, their first thought was “let’s tell them they’re no good and tell them which ones to buy so we wouldn’t have to look at the code”.
That sounds extremely lazy. I’d expect more from a dev team.
Me too, but apparently, that wasn’t the case.
My reasoning was, they’d have to send someone over to do tests and build the project on site, install and test, since we couldn’t give any of those NASes to them for them to work on the problem, and they’d rather not do that, since it’s a lot more work and it’s time consuming.
I work on a team with mainly infrastructure and operations. As one of the only people writing code on the team. I have to appreciate what IT support does to keep everything moving. I don’t know why so many programmers have to get a chip on their shoulder.
In my experience a lot of IT people are unaware of anything outside of their bubble. It’s a big problem in a lot of technical industries with people who went to school to learn a trade.
The biggest problem with the bubble that IT insulates themselves into is that if you don’t users will never submit tickets and will keep coming to you personally, then get mad when their high priority concern sits for a few days because you were out of office but the rest of the team got no tickets because the user decided they were better than a ticket.
If people only know how to summon you through the ancient ritual of ticket opening with sufficient information they’ll follow that ritual religiously to summon you when needed. If they know “oh just hit up Rob on teams, he’ll get you sorted” the mysticism is ruined and order is lost
Honestly I say this all partially jokingly. We do try to insulate ourselves because we know some users will try to bypass tickets if given any opportunity to do so, but there is very much value in balancing that need with accessability and visibility. So the safe option is to hide in your basement office and avoid mingling, but thats also the option that limits your ability to improve yourself and your organization
I meant knowledge wise. Many people in technical industries lack the ability to diagnose issues because they don’t have a true understanding of what they actually do. They follow diagnostic trees or subscribe to what I call “the rain dance” method where they know something fixes a problem but they didn’t really know why. If you mention anything outside of their small reality they will refuse to acknowledge it’s existence.
More like:
“IT people when software people talk about their requirements”No, we won’t whitelist your entire program folder in Endpoint Protection.
Ouch yeah that windows endpoint stuff is really rattling though. I get you just can’t whitelist some folder without compromising security, but when the “eNdPoInt pRoTeCtIon” just removes dlls and exes you are compiling (and makes your PC crawl) you really hate that shit.
Right click? 40 seconds plz (maybe any of the possible contextual right clicks might be on a virus so lets just check them all once again).
At home I have an old linux pc, and it blows those corpo super pcs out the window.
Rant off :-D
Ah yeah, IT people are chill, always be cool with them is also a good idea, not their fault all this crap exists.
No, we can’t get gigabit fiber everywhere. No, I don’t care if your program needs it. Yes, the laws of physics are laws for a reason. Write more robust code.
Write more robust code.
Sure, I could read a book about best practices and Big O…but…What if we just table the idea for a few iterations of Moore’s Law instead?
and Big O
It’s asymptotic. Slower O doesn’t mean faster program.
When I say Big O, I’m talking about the slick jazzy anime about rejecting true love and living with heartbreak because we believe a lie about our own superiority. This is always true, no matter what the discussion context. If I happen to say anything remotely relevant to mathematical Big O, that is just a deeply weird coincidence.
Oh! You meant Moore’s Law is asymptotic!?
Yes! That is key to the joke I was making.
Gigabit fiber? You’re in some posh spot but needs to downgrade for some reason, right?
Hahaha! We’ve an “architect” who insists he needs to be the owner on the gitlab. My colleague has been telling him to fuck off for the entire week. It reached the point that fool actually complained to our common boss… The guy is so used to working as a start-up and has no fucking clue about proper procedures. It’s terrifying that he could be in charge of anything, really.
As a software person i have to protest at being called out like this. It’s the fucking weekend man…stop picking on me for just one damn day.
Yep, unrealistic expectations.
Or “you need a 12th gen i7 to run this thing”… the thing is a glorified Avidemux.
Christ, if you could see the abysmal efficiency of business tier SQL code being churned out in the Lowest Bidder mines overseas…
Using a few terrabytes of memory and a stack of processors as high as my knee so they can recreate Excel in a badly rendered .aspx page built in 2003.
As a dev, I had to fix an O( n! ) algorithm once because the outsourced developer that wrote it had no clue about anything. This algorithm was making database queries. To an on-device database, granted, so no network requests, but jesus christ man. I questioned the sanity of the world that time, and haven’t stopped since.
Oh yeah, I love people who stick SQL lookups in a For Loop. Even better, the coder who puts conditional if (but no then/else) clauses around a dozen raw text execution commands that fire in sequence. So you’re making six distinct lookups per iteration rather than answering your question in a single query and referencing the results from memory.
Internal screaming
We have a table with literally three columns. One is an id, another a filename and a third a path. Guess which one was picked as the primary key?
Never seen something so stupid in 28 years of computing. Including my studies.
Well, you don’t want to waste space by adding the same file path twice
In a rapidly churning startup phase, where new releases can and do come out constantly to meet production requirements, this one size fits all mentality is impractical.
If you refuse to whitelist the deployment directory, you will be taking 2am calls to whitelist the emergency releases.
No it can’t wait until Monday at 9am, no there will not be a staged roll out and multiple rounds of testing.
I am more than willing to have a chat; you, me and the CEO.
No it can’t wait until Monday at 9am, no there will not be a staged roll out and multiple rounds of testing.
I hope you’re doing internal product development. Otherwise, name and shame so I can stay the hell away from your product. This is a post-Crowdstrike world.
It IS bespoke internal development, not for deployment outside of the facility.
The computers running the software exist only to run this software and have no business talking to the internet at all.
IT is provided by an external third party vendor who operate on an inflexible “best practices dogma”.Sounds like you’re stuck in a worst practices mindset.
Sign your damn releases and have the whitelisting done by cert.
Sounds like you’re stuck in a worst practices mindset.
Worst/Pragmatic.
If I get a timeline for a feature request, then everything can be scheduled, tested, whitelisted, delivered at a reasonable time.
That’s the rarer event - normally it’s more like “the scale head has died and a technician is on the way to replace it” and whilst I modify the program in question to handle this new input, hundreds of staff are standing around and delivery quotas won’t be met.
Is my position arrogant? This is the job.Sign your damn releases and have the whitelisting done by cert.
I’ll see if this is possible at the site in question, thank you.
This entire thread is giving me impostor syndrome
It just makes me realize how much I hate what I do for a living.
I definitely have moments like this too. I have been reflecting more lately and trying to decide if the feeling is temporary or permanent. I have been pondering what else I would do. Are you considering a career change, and if so, what would you do instead? I don’t know if I could transition to something else without going back to school, and it would kill me a bit inside to take out more student loans.
That’s the conversation I was having with my therapist this week. I don’t know. I’ve always massively struggled with this. Thinking about it sends me into a spiral.
As of now the plan is to look for other opportunities in industry. Some training is fine but I would like to avoid loans. I don’t have anything specific yet, but public sector is likely part of it. I’m less motivated to help people as I am to make certain people miserable. Countries have started to track job quality (“job quality”), it’s data worth looking at.
Depending on how that goes I have other thoughts but nothing that is sucking me in. Maybe I’ll give up entirely and become a vagrant. I also have a viable non-expiring business idea that would de-employ a certain group of people I don’t like. I’m not ready for either of those yet.
In the meantime I have a bucket list of things that I’m working through. It helps me feel like my life has forward momentum despite what’s happening with my career (it’s also opening up new doors I didn’t see before, eg acting). Between that and therapy my job feels often feels like something I’ll deal with later.
All devs turn 40 and quit their job, buy a cottage near the forest and start growing their own vegetables anyway, so you just need to stick to it for a few more years.
What has been working for me is not trying to make software my life or my identity. I don’t get home from work just to work on my side project, or my app, or my Arch install, or even watch videos about coding and shit. I hang out at my pond, play with my pets, play with my son, chill with my wife, work on the yard, or just watch/play something that catches my interest.
It’s like we all have a unique user’s manual for our unique bodies and minds, but we don’t get a copy of it and have to do some reverse engineering to figure out what works. Then you have to have the compassion and empathy for yourself to do the things that increase your happiness instead of doing the things that you’re “supposed” to do.
That’s solid advice. I think I have my identity wrapped up too much in my career, so when I dislike my job, I feel unsatisfied in life. I will try to see it as means to an end more than who I am.
Awesome to hear! It’s easier said than done (like always) because I think sometimes we don’t even realize when we’re doing it.
In the first year of COVID my position got eliminated at the company I’d worked at for 16 years. I’d had different positions within the company, but that place was basically my entire career until then.
That shock to the system, coupled with the fact that several months later I realized I was the same person with the same loved ones, finally flipped some switch in my brain that I didn’t even realize was there. Then the next job I got was fucking horrible and served to weld that switch in its new position, lol.
So now I have a good job with good coworkers, and I appreciate that fact every day, but that’s not going to erode the healthy boundaries and mental compartmentalization.
Bruh I’m a software architect but I don’t know how to code competently in any language.
