191–200 of 276 posts
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People don't want buzzwords, people want promotions, bonuses, and recognition. It turns out that producing working software is not the optimal way to obtain those things at a lot of companies.
It's also the investing/partnering side of things too though. Some VCs and the like aren't interested if your company isn't hitting those buzzwords.
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The question in my opinion is not really about specs — no matter how much you spend on your hardware, you can't, pardon my French, take the shitbox out of Windows. Device manager and registry still being a thing, reboots to install software, ads in the start menu, etc are a good example of how Windows is not a system for human users. It's amazing how much backwards compatibility they've offered over the decades, yes,…
How often do you have to touch the device manager? Registry is fine. It's not a very big fraction of software that needs a reboot. It's much more common to have an OS update need one, and that's pretty universal across desktop OSes. The ads are bad. Though interestingly those are relatively new , not baggage.
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> People underestimate the difference investing in good hardware makes. Yes, but ... > Getting mad at a "broken" computer is easier than admitting you messed up and made a terrible investment. Mid take. Windows still sucks on $1200 hardware, just faster. You still get the same crappy UI that shuffles around every couple of updates just because, dangerous legacy stuff like ActiveX, SMB1, and IE lurking just beneath th…
That's beside the point, isn't it? I don't think anybody is arguing that Windows doesn't have issues
As a devops engineer, 100% of my time is wasted on computer problems. I increase my efficiency further by following instructions to the letter: this allows me to also waste multiple 10s of %s of other people's time too. The 10x programmer is real.
As a mathematician turned software engineer, dev ops and build systems are the bane of my existence. Every time I need to do that work, I want to quit. The fact that I “can’t just X” but need to use some convoluted build system with details hidden somewhere as if it was arcane magic is beyond me.
The sign of seniority in a devops engineer is removing code, breaking down complexity, and being able to design simple, standalone services at a useful level of granularity. Sorry to hear you've not been around those people enough.
For what it is worth, even senior devops end up building convoluted crap too, but often this is because the organisation demands it. People don't recognise the hidden costs of complexity, in build or operation. Cleverness is often complexity, and promoting those kinds of solutions means creating the environment for "10x" engineers. People come to rely upon them because investing too deeply in learning about other people's complex legacies is almosy never worth it.
Finally, a chance to say what I really think about computers! I feel that the majority of time working with computers is not actually computing numbers (addition, subtraction, multiplication) but LOGISTICS. Logging into systems, Moving data around in memory and between servers, into registers for a function call, to and from a REST API, installing packages, finding dependencies, chaining together library functions.
Rich Hickey actually has spoken about this on numerous occasions! So much of what we really do in programming is move data around, why not have data as first-class citizen in your programming?
Making "startups" and "companies" the default way to "do software" is sometimes necessary, but very often not a good idea. It's absolutely fine to use software, and companies, to solve problems -- but when "software by company" is the focus, a whole lot of crap happens.
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> Sure, your banking app crashes sometimes and annoys you. How about you delete it and instead take a bus to a postal office to pay your bills this way - no annoying apps involved, it will just take 1h instead of 1m. Huh? Have ever actually paid a bill without using a computer? It doesn't work like you describe at all (unless you live in a really rural area or you're deliberately trying to make it difficult for yours…
I live in the suburbs of a large city in the US and I have to physically go to the post office whenever I mail something. My neighborhood has a weird matrix of mailboxes with no way to indicate to the postman that he needs to take something. So I have to drive to a post office every time I want to send mail. We even tried leaving a note in the box and that did not work. It doesn't take an hour but probably 20 minutes…
As dumb as it always comes across, telling people to reboot their systems after nearly 25 years in IT support is something we're still doing to this day. And we're still doing it because it works more often than not when someone is calling about performance problems. Why? It's not unusual to see uptime numbers in the 300s or longer for some people. We all have that story. One was someone I work with telling my his la…
Just my 2 anecdatacents.
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And how do you get said promotions, bonuses and recognition? By introducing change. And what change is easiest? One that relies on established ground of buzzwords.
I'm detecting a lack of synergy here.