521–530 of 596 posts
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Maybe I should be smugger about myself having kids, but it was really meant as nothing else as a lightheaded remark. From my own perspective of course - there is clearly my (nick)name over it.
I can relate. Sometimes they are pure abomination.
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> Especially if I might be 67 by then, which is the legal retirement age, where I live. When you say "legal retirement age", what do you mean? Is this to receive some sort of retirement benefit like Social Security in the US? Or is it something else?
The retirement system is completely broken over here. As an employee you have to pay into it. I pay > 500€/mo, which a big part of my pay check and one of my largest expenses. My employer has to pay the same amount on top. You might or might not consider this essentially an additional cost for me as well. It is intended to be the primary pension plan for most people, though by the time I will go into retirement, the…
In our company we do medical devices. It is a hard SDLC business. Once a colleague of us left and shifted over to another (much bigger) medical device company. I met him some years later and he told me, retroperspectively, our company is a high-performing, super agile group. His new employer needs a year for a two line code change without really changing but only adding something. And that despite him pushing and pus…
I've been this guy, sorta.
I've been afraid to even try personal projects since then... that job broke me.
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Naive question: is this like creating fancy tech that is helping rich people to front-run the poor and middle-class? Because that's what a lot of people think online. Maybe it's more nuanced. I'm curious how someone from that carreer sees it?
Unfortunately, yes. It never sat well with me. Colocated systems saw latencies no mom-and-pop investor could ever dream to achieve. That is one of the reasons why the second company I joined was a non-profit that built systems to help track human rights violations, enforce labor rights, monitor democratic elections etc. Third job was in the food industry and the last one, in housing / property management. So I'd like…
I swear this guy exists at every company I've ever worked. He's the guy you go to when you find some legacy code which you have no idea how the hell it works and end up getting a 2 hour history lesson into a decade of company politics and failed replatforming projects. They're hard not to love.
> They're hard not to love. I often search for a clearcut answer to a technical question and I'm met with a 2 hour history lesson into a decade of company politics and failed replatforming projects. Yeah, thanks for telling me why John from accounting was a dick 10 years ago and you had to code this module in a certain way. I really don't care. I'm new to the codebase and I just want to know how it (the codebase) wor…
Howdy, that's almost me! AMA! I've spent 10 years as the lone dev at a small medical facility, writing database software and dealing with lab hardware etc. I guess I've touched 100% of the codebase because I wrote it all, but I always wonder if my skillset is so niche that I'll always be at small companies. Here's the deal though, work isn't everything and I'm at a job that recognises that.
You wrote it all? By yourself? That sounds ideal to me. The horrible part of this to me is that he inherited a mess and left without having done much to it, evidently being unable to do so for whatever reason. The headline says he "mastered" it, so clearly other forces were at work than his skill. That's the depressing part to me, pulling my hair out to try and understand someone else's antediluvian code base which w…
I swear this guy exists at every company I've ever worked. He's the guy you go to when you find some legacy code which you have no idea how the hell it works and end up getting a 2 hour history lesson into a decade of company politics and failed replatforming projects. They're hard not to love.
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"I had to go and install the RAM by hand" When the Sun 4/330 I used to have needed a RAM upgrade someone flew up from London to Edinburgh with the RAM and installed it. Fortunately we were in the Grassmarket about 10 minutes from the Castle so he had plenty of things for him to do to keep him amused until his return flight. Edit: I checked and the max the 4/330 could take was 96MB so I suspect the upgrade was an awes…
Yeah crazy money. My father used to import RAM when it was really really expensive in the 1980s. He used to take it on planes from Taiwan as hand luggage handcuffed to himself because it was that valuable.
I would sit there and wait for RAM hungry customers that would call me on my 3 lb cellphone lol. Each one has to buy at least a $0.39 taco so I wouldn’t get kicked out by the manager. They had armed security, who I tipped 20 dollars a day. I hung fliers all over town with tear-off tabs.
Then I went to COMDEX, it changed my life. Within 2 years I was in my early 20s and moving 2-3 million in hardware a year. It was a heady time.
Then, the business dried up overnight with online sales.
Fortunately I saw that coming and had moved into technical services and contracting, and sold the parts wholesale business to one of my competitors lol. The local wholesale distribution biz was dead within 8 months.
Man spends entire career convincing himself the reason he keeps job hopping is because everyone else is writing crappy code. Karl Hackerman shows up to each meeting complaining. He seems sour that he hasn’t been given the go ahead to rewrite the system in Rust. He knows a lot about bleeding edge frameworks and best practices and always seems annoyed that he can’t use them at work. He thinks it’s because everyone else…