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Worst of breed software

worstofbreed.net

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Re: Worst of breed software

#31

Post by twosdai »

tombert wrote: post #29
arwhatever wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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. :-)

Genuinely not the guy's real name, but let's say that this manager's name was "Steven". 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 d…

As an outsider of Big co's. I always felt that if youre not on one of the 10-20 awesome product teams. Eg, Google maps, aws lambda, windows core os. Something along those lines. It seems like a territory for justification Olympics.

Just my view as a dev who's largest co was like 500 people. ~100 engineers.

Re: Worst of breed software

#32

Post by esseph »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #8

I have personally seen well meaning older devs saying that building on Microsoft Access with VBA is absolutely a viable greenfield stack in 2026 for small business. And we wonder why ageism exists in our industry. Not saying that’s fair or all of it by any stretch, but ouch. It goes to show many of these worst practices are alive, well, and employable.

If you can spin up a working prototype with Microsoft Access and VBA then you can get investors and others to help build your market release.

I'm _not staying you should_, but if it works and makes money, it may not be that dumb.

Re: Worst of breed software

#33

Post by esseph »

sgarland wrote: post #22

I am personally offended by [0]. Maybe you should spend some time doing proper data modeling when you design your app, and maybe adding a new column should be a painful exercise. 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. 0: https://worstofbreed.net/patterns/schema-bureaucracy/

stands up I'll admit one of my sins

I have occasionally stuffed json into proprietary software data fields to get that data accessible/usable by another system.

(High performance not required)

Re: Worst of breed software

#35

Post by neilv »

esseph wrote: post #33
sgarland wrote: post #22

I am personally offended by [0]. Maybe you should spend some time doing proper data modeling when you design your app, and maybe adding a new column should be a painful exercise. 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. 0: https://worstofbreed.net/patterns/schema-bureaucracy/

stands up I'll admit one of my sins I have occasionally stuffed json into proprietary software data fields to get that data accessible/usable by another system. (High performance not required)

That could be a virtue.

And some closed proprietary software does things like adds a few additional fields for pragmatic end user extensibility like this.

The practice predates JSON, but sometimes your bespoke string or ID or whatever in field "Custom 1" is all compromise you need to make things work well.

Re: Worst of breed software

#36

Post by netbioserror »

esseph wrote: post #33
sgarland wrote: post #22

I am personally offended by [0]. Maybe you should spend some time doing proper data modeling when you design your app, and maybe adding a new column should be a painful exercise. 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. 0: https://worstofbreed.net/patterns/schema-bureaucracy/

stands up I'll admit one of my sins I have occasionally stuffed json into proprietary software data fields to get that data accessible/usable by another system. (High performance not required)

I've used JSON as an additional options input to a native-compiled CLI program's various commands because 1) the schema of each option is radically different, 2) they need to be passed most of the way down the call stack easily for each stage of our calculation and report generation.

It works fantastically well, and don't let anyone tell you that you MUST bloat the CLI interface of your program with every possible dial or lever it contains. We should all be cogent of the fact that, in this very young and rapidly evolving profession, textbook and real-world best practice often do not overlap, and are converging and diverging all the time.

Re: Worst of breed software

#37

Post by marcosdumay »

mpyne wrote: post #28
marcosdumay wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

> I dunno why nobody used things like external includes in XML 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…

> In practice they led to fairly severe security vulnerabilities.

Well, that seems to not matter for the people writing YAML.

> XML, like HTML, has entities that can be expanded.

Lol! Of course I'd be wrong about that.

Expecting XML not to have a well known security vulnerability is a losing proposition.

Re: Worst of breed software

#38

Post by nunez »

I felt some of these personally.

> "We are doing DevOps now! The developers write Dockerfiles and the Ops team operates Jenkins, which cannot build the Dockerfiles."

I have DEFINITELY seen this done in production back when containers were en vogue! This and Dockerfiles passed around by email.

Re: Worst of breed software

#39

Post by nunez »

twosdai wrote: post #31
tombert wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely not the guy's real name, but let's say that this manager's name was "Steven". 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 d…

As an outsider of Big co's. I always felt that if youre not on one of the 10-20 awesome product teams. Eg, Google maps, aws lambda, windows core os. Something along those lines. It seems like a territory for justification Olympics. Just my view as a dev who's largest co was like 500 people. ~100 engineers.

Couldn't be more on the nose.

Big companies are significantly better to work in when you're either (a) in sales with a clear path to hitting/exceeding quota, (b) a strategic revenue generator, or (c) a super hot and extremely well funded corporate initiative (basically all AI projects right now).

The money tap is always on, you get all the cool toys, travel perks are great, and you get to work on amazing stuff without as much red tape.

Re: Worst of breed software

#40

Post by tombert »

nunez wrote: post #39
twosdai wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outsider of Big co's. I always felt that if youre not on one of the 10-20 awesome product teams. Eg, Google maps, aws lambda, windows core os. Something along those lines. It seems like a territory for justification Olympics. Just my view as a dev who's largest co was like 500 people. ~100 engineers.

Couldn't be more on the nose. Big companies are significantly better to work in when you're either (a) in sales with a clear path to hitting/exceeding quota, (b) a strategic revenue generator, or (c) a super hot and extremely well funded corporate initiative (basically all AI projects right now). The money tap is always on, you get all the cool toys, travel perks are great, and you get to work on amazing stuff withou…

Yeah, I was working on more of an infra thing (involving caching and indexing). Certainly important given the size of the company, but not something that gets lots of hype or sexiness.

There were occasional bits of ambition to occasionally work on interesting stuff, but it was mostly a “keep the lights on and then figure out how to make yourself seem important”.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when engineers say that we can’t do something because we would have to learn something new. I got into several arguments because I wanted to rewrite some buggy mutex-heavy code (that kept getting me paged in the middle of the night) with ZeroMQ, and people acted like learning it was some insurmountable challenge. My response would usually be something to the effect of “I’m sorry, I was under the impression that we were engineers, and that we had the ability to learn new things”.

As I said, complaints about my attitude weren’t completely unfounded, but it’s just immensely frustrating for people using their unwillingness to learn new things as an excuse to keep some code in a broken state.

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