I wrote a web app circa 2001 (Visual Basic 6 and Classic ASP) that is still in use. Unremarkable except that this app was a graphical UI front end atop a clunky mainframe app from the 1970s. The fact that my app is still running means this mainframe app is still running.
I had a gig lined up 20 years ago to write control software for steel-cutting robots at a gulf coast shipyard. I was super-excited about this and had visions of getting them all to dance in unison to The Blue Danube (after hours, of course). Then hurricanes Rita and Katrina hit and buried the robots under ten feet of mud, and that was the end of my robotics career. :(
I used to work for a major cable company whose name rhymes with “bombast”. Although working for them was kind of like working for Darth Vader, I did take some pride in the fact that our app had millions of daily users. Eventually I learned that essentially all of those daily users were faked and that nobody actually used the shit (and they only installed the app in the first place to get a discount on their cable bills). Then I was only able to take pride in the fact that we were essentially scamming the c-suite and the shareholders out of millions of dollars a year.
I worked from home for a few years. The Pornhub sessions would need to be edited out.
I always thought those old scratch-n-sniff books were a better analogy. Scratch my code and smell the shit.
That’s what’s always amused me about the “code re-use” imperative. I started my career with Visual Basic 3 – what good could anything I wrote back then possibly do me today?
I always liked “my body is a machine that turns childhood trauma into profits for the pharmaceutical industry.”
Talk about improving our synergies!
driving public transport vehicles
I retired (aka was laid off) from my job as a programmer, spent a few years converting a used school bus into a motorhome, and now I drive a real school bus. It’s insane how much happier I am, even though I make about a sixth of what I used to make and even though middle-schoolers really do suck as human beings. Money is certainly not everything.
Remote work just makes it crystal clear that competent people can do their jobs with nearly no management. It’s perfectly natural for management to be opposed to it.
I agree with what you say (and that is exactly what I meant by “good comments”), but that is not what this fellow’s philosophy was. His philosophy was that all comments are bad no matter what, with no exceptions. In his code reviews, he simply excised all comments, regardless of why they were there and what purpose they served.
I went through this at my last job. I am a firm advocate of good comments in code, and my work was being reviewed by a guy 25 years younger than me who was a firm advocate of the idea that comments in code are not only undesirable but also an actual “code smell” - evidence of the professional incompetence of the developer that put them there.
I’m a school bus driver now.
I cahn’t believe you’ve done this.
It’s nice to see academia adapting (somewhat) to the work environment, even if it took a few decades.
For me, developing applications was a joy … but only when I was left completely alone to do everything by myself. Such opportunities were just becoming rarer and rarer.
Most of my career was spent working for small shops that provided custom software for small-ish clients. The absolute number one skillset required was the ability to talk to clients, understand their business and figure out what they needed the software to actually do. Not only are these skills not taught in Computer Science programs, it’s never even suggested that you might possibly need them at some point in your career. In my opinion, this is why CS types cling so tenaciously to a rigid division of labor in software development: they want somebody else to do this and then hand them a well-written requirements document.
I spent a big chunk of my career going through mountains of incomprehensible human-generated code. I eventually learned that it was generally easier to just start over from scratch. At the same time I learned that nothing makes corporate bosses’ heads explode faster than telling them that their codebase sucks and needs to be rewritten from scratch. My solution to this fundamental dilemma was to become a school bus driver.
i was about to say exactly that
*I
My body is a machine that transforms absurd requests from technically illiterate managers into overpriced bloatware.
Bombast retired this app three years ago, so they at least realized they weren’t making any money off of it. It was always understood to be a loss leader of sorts, but I don’t think they were ever really fully aware that even its utility as a loss leader was being greatly exaggerated.
Bombast is strangely competent in a weird way. During my time there, I frequently worked under vice presidents (they have hundreds of these in their corporate structure) who ranged from grossly incompetent to clinically insane, but they were always disappeared within weeks of my being assigned to them. I assume they were fired and escorted out of the building immediately, but I wouldn’t entirely rule out murder.
Also strangely incompetent in weird ways. The founding Roberts died in 2015 and many people wore his signature bowtie to the corporate memorial service to honor him. The scuttlebutt was that everybody who wore a bowtie was fired shortly afterwards. I know for sure that this was the case with my own boss. I could never hope to explain why this was done.