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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • Previous company handled everything over email. No Kanban, no Git, no organization - everything was still handled as it was in a random accounting office back in the 90’s. I spend half of my worktime searching for who-said-what-and-when emails to code feature x, and then had to email it back to another dev.

    There was also zero drive to improve anything. I was yelled at for 5 mins straight for suggesting to add a placeholder to a dateinput (which was declared as ‘<input type=“text”>’, instead of ‘<input type=“date”>’), because the correct format ‘YYYYMMDD’ was never mentioned anywhere on the form or in error mesages, and people keept having issues.






  • AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.detoProgrammer Humor@programming.devInfinite Loop
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    8 months ago

    No wonder COBOL programmers are paid a lot, because what would be a 1-liner for “hello world” in other languages looks like this in Cobol:

    IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
    PROGRAM-ID. IDSAMPLE.
    ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
    PROCEDURE DIVISION.
        DISPLAY 'HELLO WORLD'.
        STOP RUN.
    

    This is already $6000 worth of code right there!


  • The Lead Dev/team Lead was quite arrogant and in his own mind the worlds best developer who had all the answers. If some technology or software was not written by him or already existed in the 90s it was “useless” and not fit for the company (without him having looked at it or the docs). If asked why we would not use X which was out for years, well maintained, had no critical bugs would solve problem Z we where having, he would reply “because i said so” and insist in writing out own variant - which ended up having 10% of the features, 10 times the bugs, terrible UI and would take months to develop.

    When support repeatetly told him that users had issues with feature X because the only error message on a 10 fields forms page was “Error”, he would respond that this is a user problem, the end user is clearly stupid (despide used in a field where you need to study for years) and that support must hold training sessions so the users can “learn” how to use his product.

    As such, the company would reject git and instead email each other files and changes.

    Each meeting felt like living inside a Dilbert cartoon.


  • You only hurt yourself down the line. My last job had not improved their own product, processes, tools or frameworks, so everything was still stuck in the 90s. Their product was build on an discontinued an proprietary database and server system you never heard about, jQuery UI from 10 years ago and other BS.

    However if you don’t upskill yourself in this situation you will be unemployable in the future, because all other employers demand modern technologies, git, docker, unit testing etc., which I was yelled at in meetings for suggesting it.




  • I see you never worked in a developer team. My current boss once in 1995 opened a geocities page about someones poodle and favorite girl-band. After 3 minutes on that page he proudly declared “I now know everything there is to know about HTML and user interface design, and never have to see another website ever again!”

    Since then, he is making designs, and the tiniest amout of criticism or improvements (“maybe we should have a placeholder telling users what format we expect here.”, “Can we use a date-input instead of a textfield here?”) is shot down with a 5 minute yelling how “the users just have to learn this” and “we always have done it this way!” or “if the user is too stupid, he should read the manual” (which is incomplete and still features windows XP+IE6 screenshots). There is an option in the bug tracking system which says “user error/user training required”, but if you read it it’s really all huge usabillity issues because people cannot figure it out, and the system has no helpfull error messages…






  • Windows as a software package would have never been affordable to individuals or local-level orgs in countries like India and Bangladesh (especially in the 2000’s) that are now powerhouses of IT. … Had the OS been too difficult to pirate, educators and local institutions in these countries would have certainly shifted to Linux and the like.

    While i somewhat agree with your overall statement, this part is just wrong. Linux in the late 1990s and 2000s was very different from today, where you just plug in a CD/USB and select your region. Linux back then was very nerdy, you had to choose your hardware first to make sure there was a linux driver and the installation process was very difficult, especially before plug&play where you had to know which IRQs and slots you had to use for network, sound and videocard to avoid conflicts. I remember trying to install Linux from a CD, only to work my war from one error message to the next because it did not like my videocard, soundcard or both.

    Also, what would you do with a linux pc at home or at work if it could not run word, excel, duke nukem 3D, TTD, programs you knew from work/school or software you could pirate from your friends?


  • downvotes come at a “cost”, whereby if you want to downvote someone you have to reply directly to them with some justification, say minimum number of characters, words, etc.

    I would choose a different solution. Instead of always up or down voting by 1 point, everyone gets a fixed points budget per day, that is then distributed between each post you vote on. So if you only up vote one post, this vote counts more than the vote from someone who votes on 100 posts per day.

    This would solve the mass down voting of legit content on YouTube or Facebook, where quite often conspiracy dipshits in their telegram channels post videos or Channels that should be down voted, while their own right wing propaganda gets upvoted. So the most active accounts who spent all day on the social would be muted, while average User would have a more important voice.