- 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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Wait till they find out what software ‘architects’ really do.
A good software engineer is also an architect. You don’t need dedicated architects if you have good developers.
But on the other hand there are much more questionable and unnecessary jobs like product managers or managers of managers.
I disagree with not needing dedicated architects at least once you reach a certain size. If there are 50 plus developers working on a dozen or more projects there’s a large communication cost to stay on top of everything.
The good ones: design and adjust software development processes, standards for cross-project functionality and reusability and in general try and improve at a high level the process of making, maintaining and improving software in a company.
The bad ones: junior/mid-level software design with a thick layer of bullshit on top to spin it as advanced stuff.
If you want to see bad software architecture, just look at most of Google’s frameworks and libraries.
I always saw architects roles in modern development being the person trying to find synergies between different teams andcoordinateing them working with each other.
Like if some team makes a sick project for managing streams of data streams the architect should be promoting it for other teams to leverage.
That’s one role, as a software architect I also often served as the sunk cost fallacy bad news delivery system. It’s a good idea to keep some eyes from outside your team on your project just to do the occasional sensibility check.
There is also a large responsibility to make sure different teams are well coordinated and not building the system in directly opposing directions. It really fucking sucks to have your work, as a developer, invalidated by someone else’s work suddenly without any warning.
Wait, did you find out? Can you tell us?
Sorry, I don’t have enough certifications to answer that question.
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.
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.
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.
damn.
In times past they got shit done, and now we see that what they’ve done is shit and we’re stuck maintaining it.
Yup. Thats just enterprise software for you. Something was made requiremnts changed, and then changed again and then ypu have duct tape on top of a duct tape with a duct tape holding those duct tapes and a touch of super glu here and there. Also ducttapes are microscopic in size but the sheer quantity of them is unimaginable.
this part is pretty much expected i think. But i’m starting to see it cropping up into the more meta aspects of programming now. For instance, apps being shipped with existing deprecated packages. Seems like it’s also creeping a little further into the more UI aspects of it as well.
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
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 know what they do to old engineers don’t you?
EDIT : https://youtu.be/fN-VAdAnoZ4?t=31
" you know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? they take them out and shoot them"
That movie was… … …something!
Does it involve quicklime?
I think I botched the Office space quote, I thought tom said something at some point about
“you know what they do to old engineers don’t you? They take them out back and *gun noise*”
EDIT : https://youtu.be/fN-VAdAnoZ4?t=31
" you know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? they take them out and shoot them"
You’re good, I was making an unrelated BOFH reference, even more obscure. 🤣
I fixed it, it’s from Primer.
EDIT : https://youtu.be/fN-VAdAnoZ4?t=31
" you know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? they take them out and shoot them"
I’ll take it over QuickTime
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.
They are just the biggest asshole in the room
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.
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 a lie that assholes tell you in order to exploit your competence and effort.
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.
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.
But when your brain is fascinated by all that has to happen for those screens and meetings to happen, it can still be an interesting job.
It’s not as easy as it sounds, sometimes the screens are all wrong!! https://xkcd.com/722/
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.
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…
Explode
That would work!
I seem to prefer the pronunciation of the prefix of ‘implode’ vs ‘explode’, a bit too much, hahaha
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() …
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
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
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
Where’d you buy this brand of bait?
If you just knew how many libraries we use…
deleted by creator
No, that’s several abstraction layers down … there’s libraries for that.
No, just base-256 numbers that for some reason people call “binary”
Ok bud, yeah right, Delete that. Delete that RIGHT NOW.
The only problem you can’t solve with Access is too much Access.
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.
I draw the line at CSV ingestion.
If your seriously into Access you might be a SQL dev…
I prefer my databases in Excel. /s
The scary thing is some people actually believe this, and NIH syndrome is unfortunately all too real lol
We’ve been spending decades curating our perception by management in order to make sure we all have jobs. He’s gonna ruin the whole industry if we don’t shut him the hell up
