Yeah management is totally backwards there; it’s like the building manager on a construction project going “all electrical needs to be done in X weeks”, but realistically they have no direct control over that deadline being met by declaring an arbitrary deadline. The unfortunate difference is that if you do a shitty job wiring a building, you’ll fail inspection and have to spend more time and money fixing it. Software can often hobble along; there aren’t strict enforcements for quality that the business can legally ignore, so you’ll always have sad defeated devs go “okay boss, we’ll skip the things we need to get this done faster for you (I hate this job and don’t care about the product’s long term success)”. Having a steady supply of those people will slowly kill a software company.

In the past, I’ve dealt with estimate pushback not by explaining what necessary work can be removed like tests, documentation, or refactoring, but by talking through ways to divide the project more effectively to get more people involved (up to a point, a la mythical man month). That seems to go more proactively. Then we look at nixing optional requirements. But, I’ve also usually dealt with mostly competent engineering management.

The thing that frustrates me about developers who feel powerless over technical debt is…who is actually stopping them from dealing with it? They way I see it, as a software engineer, your customer is sales/marketing/product/etc. They don’t care about the details or maintenance, they just want the thing. And that’s okay. But you have to include the cost of managing technical debt into the line items the customer wants. That is, estimate based on doing the right things, not taking shortcuts. Your customer isn’t reading your commits. If they were, they wouldn’t need you.

It would be bizarre if your quote for getting your house siding redone included line items for changing the oil on the work truck, organizing the shop, or training new crew members. But those costs of business are already factored into what you pay at the end of the day.

Ew siloing

They probably wanted to use Rust but got frustrated by its struct and impl paradigm.

He’s just refactoring it

Hated this in one past job. It gave me great joy to quit and work somewhere that wasn’t bean counting. But I can say that RescueTime with Toggl was pretty handy to track stuff. RescueTime would autotrack the time spent in different apps and tabs. Toggl allowed me to do a simple start/stop with a label for more focused work.

Sometimes I am happy about the increase in AI assisted coding specifically so junior devs won’t get as stuck without outside help. Very frustrating when they don’t reach out when they struggle, but at least they can privately copypaste into ChatGPT and get ideas. But, still requires a fine toothed comb when you’re doing the review to know if any toilet tier material sprayed out.

Which is faster, getting a squiggle instantly or discovering a silly bug at runtime later? So happy I could write code in Typescript and be confident it would do what I expected when it ran without digging out the debugger.

The language and its standard libraries lead developers towards common patterns. Javascript’s standard library is pretty sparse excluding browser-only web apis, so there are tons of external libraries to fill the gap for better or worse.

How many open source projects have 50 million lines of code like Windows, or legal agreements related to backwards compatibility and version support guarantees?

A for-profit company is going to focus on whatever generates revenue, sure. But crappy software will lose customers in a non-monopoly scenario. They’re not exactly incentivized to make broken things nobody wants.

That’s…a gross oversimplification. Super popular open source projects tend to have few bugs from the sheer number of contributors available to fix them, but active proprietary software has dedicated teams working fulltime every week to deal woth issues. Proprietary stuff is often way wider in scope than open source, so more surface for bugs to creep in. Scope and team size have a lot more to do with bug density than open vs closed source.

Use the unknown type so at least someone might have enough brain cells to validate before casting because squiggles

Your company paid you to do a specific job. I don’t imagine the job expectations were to physically apprehend thieves; that’s what security is for. You could have been stabbed or shot. Your employer’s bottom line is not worth your life. However pissed off it makes you feel that some asshole makes off with store items, you’re not the store owner. I get that it sucks, but your firing is because of liability, not because you tried to do the “right thing”

Why, were you too stupid to configure dual boot? I don’t imagine you’re having a better time with Linux. This is not hard stuff.

Linux still is not a main gaming OS yet. Stop being an asshole; you know this is true.

I’ve ordered real pet medications from there because american vet wait was two months in my area. It took a few weeks for the cat meds to arrive, but they definitely delivered. Cheaper than a vet in my area too.