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.
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.
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.
The problem is that most of us have swallowed the ‘competence uber alles’ ideal that school fed us through exams and scoring, when the game really is mostly politics (as in interpersonal relationships). So we are understandably disappointed when the incompetent get promoted through brown nosing or luck, when we should be reevaluating the rules of the game.
That’s always fun in sales. The vendor that brazenly promises two-and-a-half mirage for half the price will win the bid, and the sales people will move on to a different employer when the real budget for the project becomes clear.
Any day you/your company could potentially be contacted by a 3 letter agency and/or the police to pull the data from a specific user for an investigation. “ESI request” is a term I hear on occasion.
It’s a good idea to be on good terms with your employers lawyers.
My homeoffice setup is right next to a window, so it’s too bright for dark mode during the summer. So I work in light mode from about April-September and in dark mode for the rest of the year
In my first month at my current employer, I added some temporary code with a TODO to fix it properly. That was 11 years ago in 2013, and the same TODO is still there today, and these days it’d be significantly harder to do it. 😂
In my experience it doesn’t matter. You have to regularly refactor your code to keep up with new features. The more often you can make time to do it the easier it is.
Unit test to help catch regressions. If you are confident in your test catching a good portion of bugs from refactoring, at least you feel confident refactoring. Worst case, at least you ensured your code is testable. There is nothing worse than refactoring untestable code.
Self-documenting code and when it fails to self-document, comments or refer to a wiki page.
I watch too many videos on expensive guitar pedals I can’t afford.
I’m “on the bench” at the outsourcing company I work for and I am starting to seriously consider going into DSP programming just so I can work on doing this to effects controls.
I want to make knobs available for this this this and this parameter.
For anyone wondering what a document should look like, the DoD publishes that for anyone to read. Just search Derivative Classifier Training. Spoiler alert: this ain’t what a top secret document looks like.
Absolutely the latter. This is similar to how Snowden had access to all the stuff he leaked. He worked at a place that did contract work with the government and was mortified at all he had access to that he should have never been able to see.
There’s a shit ton of articles in the tech space about how companies keep fucking up with stuff like this. No reasonable expectation that the government and their contractors would do any better.
I mean, Amazon isn’t necessarily in the wrong for providing the service. It’s governments trusting a private company, with a history of collecting more data than they should, with sensitive data. It’s just stupid, really really, mind numbingly, stupid
Yea, that’s why I mentioned these companies are just doing it wrong. Governments have the same problems as private companies, in that they don’t really want to maintain their own cloud infrastructure, so they’ll use something like AWS
But for example they could host their own On-premises HSM and encrypt their GovCloud to a degree that it’s inaccessible to AWS
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