This is more programmer humour than a Linux meme, but I’ll bite.
Over a decade ago I worked for a company where I was in customer support, and very much not on the dev team. A customer suggested a feature be added to one of the online tools the company provided. I figured it could be done with a simple bit of HTML and JavaScript, and mocked something up to send to the dev team as an example of what such a feature might look like and how it might work.
My crappy code was copy-pasted wholesale into the site. I have no idea if it’s still there as, for obvious reasons, I don’t have access to that system, but at least one of their other interfaces - one where I retain an account - hasn’t changed visibly since I worked there, so it’s definitely possible.
Here’s a rough template of an input questionaire in MSFT Forms, its not actually ready yet as we haven’t set up the actual place the inputs will be recorded, nor set up a way to mirror it into our actual database that our entire intranet uses.
Come back after the weekend, dummy questionaire has replaced the front end of our old system, meaning we’ve just functionally not logged about 72 hours of requests for assistance from the homeless, during a blizzard, and COVID.
After this, our webmaster / marketing director, this woman who earns a quarter mil a year… straight up told me, in an email, she does not actually read anything I write in my emails to her that requires scrolling.
She’s very busy, you see.
When she asked me, unprompted, in an in person meeting, if I could ‘implement the blockchain’ in our (PostGres, not that she knows what that is) database, for ‘security benefits’, I wanted to strangle her to death, but settled on collapsing my head into my hands, then looking up and saying no, that would make everything extremely inefficient and make it much more insecure.
She says, oh really, are you sure about that?
Yes.
Ok then well I guess that wraps up this meeting (shit eating grin) keep up the good work!
Arguably, that’s for the best. If somebody with domain knowledge knows enough to make a basic form that’s needed with HTML and Javascript (ignoring keeping the Javascript part), it makes it very easy for the devs to take that, run with it, and turn it into an actual product.
Somebody with business knowledge with just enough technical Excel knowledge to cobble together a 5000 lines monstrosity of unreadable, unmaintainable python+pandas workbook that needs 2 painful hours of single-threaded processing time each run, with zero understanding of general development best practices, technical or organizational constraints, who asks us tu put their shitstain straight in production today because our fucking moron of a manager told them so.
Said shitstain could have been replaced by a 2h workshop and a couple of sql queries.
Said shitstain crashed almost daily in production. The running costs alone would have been offset in a month by a 1 week refacto.
Fuck this place. I’m glad I left before becoming insane.
who asks us tu put their shitstain straight in production today because our fucking moron of a manager told them so.
That right there is the problem. It’s one thing to take a shitty piece of work from a non dev and use that to get an understanding of what the product should do, and it’s another thing to just copy/paste it into prod.
My most popular library fixes a limitation to a fairly popular MVP framework born out of the need to make sure it won’t touch an old COBOL system.
It started out because a coworker ran an update that did the equivalent of a DELETE * onto the flat file…over a weekend because everyone wanted to go home for Christmas.
This is more programmer humour than a Linux meme, but I’ll bite.
Over a decade ago I worked for a company where I was in customer support, and very much not on the dev team. A customer suggested a feature be added to one of the online tools the company provided. I figured it could be done with a simple bit of HTML and JavaScript, and mocked something up to send to the dev team as an example of what such a feature might look like and how it might work.
My crappy code was copy-pasted wholesale into the site. I have no idea if it’s still there as, for obvious reasons, I don’t have access to that system, but at least one of their other interfaces - one where I retain an account - hasn’t changed visibly since I worked there, so it’s definitely possible.
Similar stuff has happened to me.
Here’s a rough template of an input questionaire in MSFT Forms, its not actually ready yet as we haven’t set up the actual place the inputs will be recorded, nor set up a way to mirror it into our actual database that our entire intranet uses.
Come back after the weekend, dummy questionaire has replaced the front end of our old system, meaning we’ve just functionally not logged about 72 hours of requests for assistance from the homeless, during a blizzard, and COVID.
After this, our webmaster / marketing director, this woman who earns a quarter mil a year… straight up told me, in an email, she does not actually read anything I write in my emails to her that requires scrolling.
She’s very busy, you see.
When she asked me, unprompted, in an in person meeting, if I could ‘implement the blockchain’ in our (PostGres, not that she knows what that is) database, for ‘security benefits’, I wanted to strangle her to death, but settled on collapsing my head into my hands, then looking up and saying no, that would make everything extremely inefficient and make it much more insecure.
She says, oh really, are you sure about that?
Yes.
Ok then well I guess that wraps up this meeting (shit eating grin) keep up the good work!
… I no longer work in the tech industry.
Arguably, that’s for the best. If somebody with domain knowledge knows enough to make a basic form that’s needed with HTML and Javascript (ignoring keeping the Javascript part), it makes it very easy for the devs to take that, run with it, and turn it into an actual product.
Ok, opposite take.
Somebody with business knowledge with just enough
technicalExcel knowledge to cobble together a 5000 lines monstrosity of unreadable, unmaintainable python+pandas workbook that needs 2 painful hours of single-threaded processing time each run, with zero understanding of general development best practices, technical or organizational constraints, who asks us tu put their shitstain straight in production today because our fucking moron of a manager told them so.Said shitstain could have been replaced by a 2h workshop and a couple of sql queries.
Said shitstain crashed almost daily in production. The running costs alone would have been offset in a month by a 1 week refacto.
Fuck this place. I’m glad I left before becoming insane.
That right there is the problem. It’s one thing to take a shitty piece of work from a non dev and use that to get an understanding of what the product should do, and it’s another thing to just copy/paste it into prod.
My most popular library fixes a limitation to a fairly popular MVP framework born out of the need to make sure it won’t touch an old COBOL system.
It started out because a coworker ran an update that did the equivalent of a DELETE * onto the flat file…over a weekend because everyone wanted to go home for Christmas.
Did they even realize they’d hired the Grinch?