- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/6002282
He revealed the secrets !
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Aren’t IT people just janitors that tell you to turn it off and back on again?
I’ve been an actual janitor and a sysadmin… they’re not dissimilar. You clean up other people’s shit for a living.
It’s mind bending that there are actual humans on the planet, paid a shit tonne more than software developers, who not only believe the parody highlighted by @SwiftOnSecutity, but treat and share it as gospel, acting on it with nutjob metrics to “increase productivity” whilst salivating over the hyperbole around “AI” that is sweeping the globe, dreaming of a better world.
One without those pesky developers with their brains, thoughts and opinions.
But, what do I know, I’ve been in this profession for only 40 years…
You’re probably not the biggest asshole in the room. In my experience, the person making decisions (and the most money) is never the most qualified, most competent, most efficient, or hardest working individual. They are just the biggest asshole in the room. They’re willing to be loud and belligerently wrong, they’re willing to take credit for the accomplishments of others, they’re willing to shift blame onto someone else, they’re willing to demand everyone else work harder than they do, and they’re willing to demand far more than their fair share of the profit.
And they will be mollified by the rest because nobody is a bigger asshole. Most people just want to do their jobs, and don’t want to rock the boat. Competent people see opportunity to ride in the wake of the biggest asshole in the room.
If you ever watch Shark Tank, you’ll see they are masters of the craft.
They are just the biggest asshole in the room.
So one day the different body parts were arguing over who should be in charge.
The eyes said they should be in charge, because they were the primary source of information about the world.
The stomach said it should be in charge because digestion was the source of energy.
The brain said it should be in charge because it was in charge of information processing and decision-making.
The rectum said nothing, just closed up shop.
Before long, the vision was blurry, the stomach was queasy, and the brain was foggy.
Assholes have been in charge ever since.
Wait till they find out what software ‘architects’ really do.
They do the same thing building architects do. They draw pretty pictures of the end product that may of may not be structurally sound, then rely on engineers to build it and make sure it doesn’t collapse.
I tried to get a software architect to explain their job to me once, it was like a “lean startup”, a libertarian, and a psychic had written an elevator pitch together.
I used to joke with my niece that my programming job was just me staring at screens and meetings all day. She didn’t believe me until she got to shadow me one day and got super bored.
It’s not as easy as it sounds, sometimes the screens are all wrong!! https://xkcd.com/722/
What did she think before?
Not op but guessing she had an idea from media like TV shows and movies that make technical jobs seem much more exciting for entertainment over realism. Crises are usually more Jerry accidentally deleted a directory and we need to recover some files and establish safe guard procedures to prevent it from happening again or this thing broke that nobody even knew existed so we gotta figure it out and less type fast enough to save the mainframe from l33t hackers.
Wait until this guy finds out that Elon doesn’t actually build the cars
Or contribute to society at all really
Seriously. If Elon shut down Tesla tomorrow all these engineers would be building electric cars at other companies.
Does (or does not) he get the credit for committing the fraud that kept Tesla in business long enough to popularize* electric cars that there are other companies at which to build them?
Aforementioned fraud:
(When searching, found apparently jurors in 2023 disagreed with my assessment, so please take with grain of salt.)
*I say “popularize” given:
Tesla was incorporated in July 2003 by [not Elon! but] Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning as Tesla Motors.
He’s a piece of shit but he restarted the Space Race that was literally dying, push the industry into electric cars when none of them were willing to do it. His actual products may be garbage but it doesn’t stop that it started the movements that needed to happen in the industry.
To say that he contributed nothing at all is unfortunately false as much as I may hate the man
im convinced most developers spend more time working on making shit work, rather than actually writing code and bugfixing it.
edit: this was mostly a shitpost, and i was expecting some flack, but i got basically none. Can we have a real moment here. Are you guys doing ok? Who made you do this to yourselves?
ok, real talk over, we’re going back to suffering now.
Half the time it’s trying to figure out where to apply the next piece of duct tape to keep the entire house of cards (and duct tape) from collapsing.
In times past they got shit done, and now we see that what they’ve done is shit and we’re stuck maintaining it.
The scary thing is some people actually believe this, and NIH syndrome is unfortunately all too real lol
Turns out the people in IT don’t actually make the computers either. Who’d have thought?
As an aside, I recall the early days when @SwiftOnSecurity was purposely ambiguous about the distinction between the artist Taylor Swift and their technology tweets. It was delicious to see confused responses.
At some point it changed. Not sure what triggered that. I have a vague memory of a stroke, but I might be misremembering.
This the dangerous kind of parody, I would rather help people with excel programs than another access program and that’s a pain in the ass.
hahaha, this reminds me of certain politicians…
Where they say the quiet part out loud, while most people will ignore it and the status quo continues as is.
We don’t want the Silicon Valley bubble to imploding, right?
p.s. would burst be a better word than imploding? word of the day…
Explosion?
Yes, that one would work!
Seems, I wanted an excuse to use the word, ‘implode’, hahaha
Yes officer … right here …
Terrorism? No. Nothing to do with chemistry it’s something much more insidious…
THAT’S a PHP programmer. Look how they’re fixated on implode() vs. explode() …
The IT people! The DEV team’s worst nemesis! They must be stopped before we are destroyed!
Reboots your server
Changes your credentials
Eats your pasta
Hey dude stop it spreading it okay?
I agree with the last point tbh
At the bare minimum, if you aren’t capable of contributing to the library you use, then you don’t deserve to use it.
I disagree, if you aren’t capable of contributing to a library you should be required to use it rather than roll your own solution.
Nah you should learn
Because software devs have the weeks/months to learn vulkan every time they want to use a GUI for their job, or to learn compiler design whenever they wanna use java for their job
to learn vulkan every time they want to use a GUI for their job
Not every time, just the first time. But yes. Devs should stop being so lazy
compiler design whenever they wanna use java for their job
Every dev should at least know the basics of language design and compiler design, yes. Again, you also only have to learn it once
As someone who has written a DB handle… that shit is hard, I had to be extremely careful to protect against SQL injection. Everyone rolling their own is how we return to the Era of XSS and SQL Injection on every website. I’d prefer to have young devs use libraries and contribute as they gain knowledge.
that shit is hard, I had to be extremely careful to protect against SQL injection
People need to learn to be careful
They do… but the road to naturally learning that lesson comes with the cost of enabling botnets and destroying businesses. Maybe there should be a qualification exam to be a developer but when there isn’t we need to make sure more junior developers have the best tools they can get to fight against foot guns.
Also, on the topic of security, a lot of good senior level developers don’t have the specialized knowledge to do shit like build a password validation system that isn’t vulnerable to a timing attack or know what a timing attack is…
And timezones, fuck timezones, I’ve written code that correctly handled timezones (and subsequently threw it away when Canada decided to DST on a different weekend). Imagine how shitty it’d be if we constantly had to reinvent the wheel when it came to timezones.
Oh, and forget about databases… do you know how fucking hard it is to write an ACID compliant WAL? The reason postgres is the default open source database (and why so many databases are just layers built on top of postgres’s engine) is because it’s fucking hard. Mongo still (IIRC) has consistency issues, they were a tech darling for half a decade and can’t manage to NoSQL as well as Postgres.
Also, good luck building a GUI with anything more complicated than curses style box art characters.
I started mildly disagreeing with you but I disagree even more that I’ve thought about other tools people would need to roll on their own.
Honestly, why? We’ve got billions of people driving around in cars they don’t know how to build. Is that a problem too?
Yeah. Kinda actually
The best developers are the laziest.
I’d take a dev slowly using a library with a one liner than a noob writing 500 lines of code doing the same thing any day.
That’s how you end up with the unmaintainable state that enterprise software is currently in. “Just Works” mentality is a cancer
