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Templated YAML - and all YAML eventually becomes templated - is so bad it makes me yearn for XML. We had it bad and we made it worse.
Haphazard schema is the quickest way to develop terrible performance, loss of referential integrity, and insane queries. Well, outside of sticking everything into a JSON column.
I want to name names - I could cross-reference some of these with specific company names that you've heard of, but I shan't.
I'll definitely keep this website in my hip pocket to privately throw at teams going forward, as needed.
The manager doing the exit interview started getting defensive and blaming my "attitude problems" [1], and eventually I started explaining that it felt like the entirety of the culture at BigCo, particularly amongst management but even with engineers, came down to "try and justify your existence in the company". Instead of doing things ways that are easy and straightforward, you instead were incentivized to make your code complicated so you can brag about how complicated it is, and then drop constant references to your management about how hard what you're doing is.
The manager didn't like this response, and got more defensive, we ended up going back and forth, and eventually the interview ended and despite taking a pretty considerable paycut I was ok with my decision.
I didn't know the term "Resume Driven Development" until after I left, but that was a pretty accurate description.
[1] Not completely wrong, but that doesn't absolve them of their sins.
During my exit interview at a BigCo, when they asked why I was leaving I said "I just don't think it was a very good fit", which I believe is the most polite way of saying "I just didn't like the job". The manager doing the exit interview started getting defensive and blaming my "attitude problems" [1], and eventually I started explaining that it felt like the entirety of the culture at BigCo, particularly amongst ma…
During my exit interview at a BigCo, when they asked why I was leaving I said "I just don't think it was a very good fit", which I believe is the most polite way of saying "I just didn't like the job". The manager doing the exit interview started getting defensive and blaming my "attitude problems" [1], and eventually I started explaining that it felt like the entirety of the culture at BigCo, particularly amongst ma…
Yeah I've worked at enough places that could generate vastly more software feature ideas than they could ever implement, to find the "justify your own existence"-type places utterly insufferable. And I absolutely refuse to suffer them and everyone else should too.
(Sorry, you struck a nerve with your BigCo depiction. :-)
During my exit interview at a BigCo, when they asked why I was leaving I said "I just don't think it was a very good fit", which I believe is the most polite way of saying "I just didn't like the job". The manager doing the exit interview started getting defensive and blaming my "attitude problems" [1], and eventually I started explaining that it felt like the entirety of the culture at BigCo, particularly amongst ma…
Yeah I've worked at enough places that could generate vastly more software feature ideas than they could ever implement, to find the "justify your own existence"-type places utterly insufferable. And I absolutely refuse to suffer them and everyone else should too.
It's not as simple as "BigCo" vs startup; I've worked at startups where layoffs were frequent enough that it devolved into existence justification, and I've worked at BigCos that actually did give a fair bit of leeway in how you do things (within some degree of reason).
The closest thing to a "rule" that I've come to is if they use a less-mainstream language; if they're routinely using Haskell or something, they're probably a bit more onboard with experimentation, but that's still not a hard and fast rule.
Templated YAML - and all YAML eventually becomes templated - is so bad it makes me yearn for XML. We had it bad and we made it worse.
I dunno why nobody used things like external includes in XML, but the worst parts of YAML were there too. (But at least, I think XML doesn't have macro expansions, so that's a win.)
In practice they led to fairly severe security vulnerabilities. "XXE" used to be an OWASP Web Top 10 issue, and the reason it dropped off the list was because XML mostly went away, not because it stopped being a thing.
> But at least, I think XML doesn't have macro expansions, so that's a win.
XML, like HTML, has entities that can be expanded. Unlike HTML you can define them in XML and this led to the "Billion laughs attack": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs_attack
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I've worked at enough places that could generate vastly more software feature ideas than they could ever implement, to find the "justify your own existence"-type places utterly insufferable. And I absolutely refuse to suffer them and everyone else should too.
"How about YOU justify my existence BEFORE making the decision to hire me in the first place?" - I've never quite said but have come close. (Sorry, you struck a nerve with your BigCo depiction. :-)
When I said that the job boiled down to a lot of people trying to justify their existence, Steven said "do you really think that people are doing things to justify their existence in the company, Tom? Really?"
I responded back with "Yes. I think some managers, STEVEN, really like to schedule meetings to make it look like they're doing important work, STEVEN, despite the fact that most of these meetings are useless and could have been handled over slack STEVEN. I don't want to name names STEVEN, but I have observed it on the management side. I suppose you'll need to figure out who I am talking about STEVEN".
This was several years ago so I'm paraphrasing, but barely. I really disliked that job and when he wouldn't just let me answer with "it wasn't a good fit" I got (maybe irrationally) angry and it ended up being an excuse to air all my grievances. I could tell that he was getting upset when I started basically resorting to thinly-veiled insults. Not my proudest moment, to be 100% honest, but I also can't really say that I'm sorry either because I meant everything I said.
Templated YAML - and all YAML eventually becomes templated - is so bad it makes me yearn for XML. We had it bad and we made it worse.
I dunno why nobody used things like external includes in XML, but the worst parts of YAML were there too. (But at least, I think XML doesn't have macro expansions, so that's a win.)