I worked for a client where we had successfully delivered a working FOH site and booking/order system. A new head of marketing joined, and from the first meeting this guy proclaimed himself as a “tech lead” and evangelist. He wanted “full FTP access” within the first 5 minutes of our meeting. We told him we didn’t use FTP as everything was deployed via our CI pipeline, and he kicked off.
After some crisis meetings, he said he wanted to change the entire CMS to be HTML boxes, threatening to ditch us if we didn’t give him what we wanted. They were paying lots for this change, so in the end we obliged. He proceeded to delete basically everything we’d built, and tried to replicate all functionality using a A/B injection tool and a HTML field. Clients were pissed, because none of it worked, and they lost some serious money from it.
In the end, we rolled back and said “fuck it, full git access, you’re a dev now”, and at midnight he brought the site down because he decided to rewrite some db transaction logic to write data to another store. To him, transactions were “outdated tech”, and he tried to clean it up by just performing destructive changes on their own…
In the end, they ditched us, and we were glad to be gone (they bought out their own contract). Sadly, he got his way, changed his title to “lead tech director”, hired a team, and their site went from fairly slick to looking like something from Geocities. That company no longer exists, and sadly, I can’t remember his name so I can’t see where he failed upwards to.
stuff like this makes me so pissed that it’s so difficult to get into leadership positions for most people, those with connections and money are free to fail upwards and ruin things, but the average joe can be the genius of our age and be stuck working at starbucks for minimum wage their entire life…
It’s also frustrating that a lot of baffling corporate decisions aren’t even excusable as being for profit, it’s just some executive being a moron and no one stops them! If it was for profit i could at least feel nihilistic about it, but this is just corporations actively choosing to continue letting things happen that benefit no-one.
I always think about stuff like this whenever libertarians talk about how much more efficient corporations are than government. I’m like, “Have you ever worked for a corporation?” Organizations are just huge dumpster fires in general, because they’re all run by humans.
They’re not dumpster fires because they’re run by humans, but because they’re run by unaccountable hierarchies. Humans are perfectly capable of running a sustainable and efficient operation if we only stopped to consider how better to make decisions collectively.
Can you give some examples of well run organizations and the techniques they use? I legitimately want to know if it’s possible to do better than most of our current governments, companies, and societies in general. This world is a mess and I have half given up on it ever getting better.
Wikipedia - While the Wikimedia Foundation itself is hierarchical, it manages Wikipedia through a process of community-led governance. Every article is maintained by a community of volunteers who engage in open debate to decide on content moderation policies. Wikipedia remains one of the few popular websites to avoid the recent internet enshittification.
Food Not Bombs - An activist organization that serves free food. FNB has no central organizing body, instead operating as a loose-knit group of independent collectives who voluntarily cooperate and exchange information and resources with one another. One specific collective, “A Food Not Bombs Menu,” has taken to coordinating the global activities of FNB collectives and helping people start new ones, but has no power over any others.
IWW - The Industrial Workers of the World, while hierarchical, ensures a hierarchy that is accountable to its’ rank and file members by means of a robust democratic process, as well as the right of any member union or individual member to leave at anytime and go it alone.
There are many more, but it’s late and it took me a while to pick out what I think are good representative examples of different ways an organization can be run well.
Reality is a team sport, to some people. All they know is loyalty to hierarchy. If you’re below them and disagree, not only are you wrong, you are personally threatening them. Reasons do not exist.
A box that allows someone to write HTML and JS and have it appear verbatim on a web page.
A horrific idea, and one that’s surprisingly hard to implement, as any sane CMS will stop you executing random code onto a web page, and any sane framework would stop you building a form in a free text box to POST data.
Every time we tried to fight this he would say “but WordPress would let you do this”. He tried to petition his boss to rewrite an entire web site and application we’d just built and delivered to spec and on budget in WordPress because “it would be better”.
He sounds like someone who read a Wired Magazine article and figured that made him an expert.
That company no longer exists
Not surprising if they’re putting people like that dumbass in charge. It’s just unfortunate that idiots like that end up costing everyone else their jobs too.
What’s funny is that this wasn’t a small company either. I won’t name it because it’ll be very easy to find this person, but they landed a leadership position with very little experience - think a few years working as a dev, and maybe one as a manager.
In my eight years working in consultancy, I’ve seen plenty of examples of this. I could write a book on some of the mental shit I’ve seen, from workplace wellness app owners trying to bully me online for having a single bug in their app, to finding several GB of fake Katy Perry nudes stored in a production database for a major company. Tech is totally fucked.
Had this happen but I wasn’t the only one; one lonely soul before me had the same issue and never got a solution. In the end it stayed unsolved and I just used a workaround.
To my marketing industry colleagues, I’m so sorry you have to live like this. Join us in product development and rid yourself of the scourge that is clients.
Nowadays it’s less of an issue with docker and whatnot.
Just set the image to refresh every night at midnight and if they tried to make manual changes it’ll just revert back to its original state at midnight.
Customers don’t really get direct access to deployed cpde now, it’s buried under like 4 layers of abstraction on most CDNs now.
Simply deploying to azure already smears multiple layers of access control and RBAC overtop that it’s hard enough for me, the dev, to answer the question if “what is actually deployed atm?”, let alone for the customer to get in their and meddle.
I had video of the computer registering a button press but Rocket League not registering the button press in game DM’d directly to a dev on Reddit after they asked. They couldn’t replicate the problem and it was never fixed. Just, for some reason, every once in a while I try to jump and it doesn’t jump even though using an overlay showing button inputs will register the button click.
This is why we do nightly automatic backups on all sites. Whatever happens we can just restore to the previous night and you never lose more than a day of work. Backup plans and redundancy is a waste of money to management, accounting, and customers until they need it.
and with systems like Borgbackup, storing months worth of daily backups doesn’t take up an excessive amount of disk space, especially if the files rarely change.
Like some other user said, if nobody ever had this problem, it was never answered and AI would have never got the data to train in the first place unless ofcourse it pulls something totally made up out of its ass.
Gotta disagree. Sometimes you’re working with something old, where there is documentation, but very little actual conversation online. Or a topic that no longer has an active community online, but you just need some basic questions answered.
knowing how to get the right info by using the right prompts is a skill that not everyone has, which is why so many people get inaccurate answers.
I’ve tried. And usually the questions I ask are too specific. I mean I can answer the basic questions myself and often I get several result when it’s just that. The AI just mumbles general advice and is always wrong if it’s too specific. Like for example: Why does the graphics driver crap out on any OpenGL ES instruction on the old single board computer I have lying around, despite the SoC being supported?
… is that your prompt?! No wonder you’re getting crap. It’s a computer program, you have to feed it valid data. There is a huge misconception that you can CHAT with it… which was introduced by calling it “ChatGPT,” a horrible name.
You need model numbers, OS versions, driver versions, and any other relevant information like error messages, screenshots, and code if you are developing.
No? I left out the detailed info here as I thought it’s of no concern. I provided it with pretty much the same info I’d write to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. With computer bugs that’s usually steps to reproduce the issue, exact versions of everything, exact error messages and my findings from googling and looking at the code…
That was one of the issues I had that only gave me one or two search results and it’s unlikely that someone comes up with a solution since the hardware is outdated and not many people have that specific board lying around and also the expertise to understand the low level hardware coding involved.
I mean it kind of fits the rest of the picture I have from using ChatGPT and similar stuff. It can do easy stuff. And write boilerplate code pretty alright. With the Arduino code I’m tinkering around as a hobby… not so much. I once asked it to do the inverse kinematics for a small robotics project. And the AI can tell me about what I just read on the Wikipedia article about that topic. But that’s it. Not an idea how to apply that info. And that the complicated part is to come up with the specific Jacobian matrix. And not just tell me that using one is one of the few approaches to that problem. That’s obvious from reading the Wikipedia article or reading any textbook. And it did silly things like write code like equation.solve(parameter1, parameter2, parameter3) … Sure. I mean if I already had a framework that did that and was available on an embedded platform, I wouldn’t have had that problem in the first place…
So my attempts at using AI for the issues I have with computers regularly fail. I can see how that’s not the experience everyone has, but still… It doesn’t really help me with specific problems or rare issues.
And I still have a few I can try to question some AI about… An slow Wireguard VPN tunnel inside if another tunnel that I already fixed the MTU and it’s still unbearably slow… A few obscure webframeworks that don’t tie into things… But I’m pretty sure I’ll get the same results.
Have you ever been lucky with AI and issues that didn’t get you any search results because no one ever did it before? I mean I’d be happy to learn how to use AI properly as a tool. It’s just I’ve tried and I don’t think I’m too stupid to prompt it. It’s just that I’ve given up since it doesn’t seem nowhere near intelligent enough to tackle the real issues I have. I’m not opposed to AI. I use it and it helps me get small stuff done easier/faster.
programmer_humor
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.