25+ yr Java/JS dev
Linux novice - running Ubuntu (no windows/mac)

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  • 78 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: October 14th, 2024

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  • I appreciate your perspective. I’m cautiously hopeful that the culture is good, but it’s a big enough company (major auto manufacturer) that it likely depends on what part of the company you’re in. I’m angling for a perm hire after a year in this department because I’d like to foster a longer term relationship both ways.

    I don’t know the structure well enough. My own manager seems… fine. He listened a couple of times when I was trying to solve some problems and my tech lead wasn’t. But he’s not the person to make waves and get shit done. He’s very much go along to get along, but he’s easy to work with. As a contractor, I don’t think I can go around him, politically, but maybe once I have some real time in and a permanent position.

    Thanks again!


  • I block people who are assholes regardless of whether I believe in their points or not. The behavior is stressful and frankly encourages a way of interacting that makes me into a person I don’t want to be. Yeah, it makes the small Lemmy community slightly smaller but that’s okay because it makes for a better social environment for me. I don’t want to dwell on hate and anger.


  • Well I do what I can in my positions to improve that. That is within my reach, and that’s my goal.

    I can’t always succeed. It’s not like I ever get to talk to end users to ask what would make their lives easier. But that’s my goal. I just had to fight for some UI changes that I think make the UI easier to understand and interact with and reduce code maintenance burden / fragility by relying on default control behaviors instead of custom code. Time will tell if I’m right.

    I also fight back against the acceptability of 10 second response times when you click a button. Customers would never accept that, but you’re going to foist that bullshit on users? Not on my watch.

    And in code reviews I push back on every mutable or public field and public method that don’t have to be. Don’t give other code the ability to interact with your code outside of clearly defined interfaces. Build everything with concurrency in mind and to fail fast. Because a year from now, some other developer is going to abuse every interaction point they possibly can because tight coupling saves them an hour.

    Even though so much is out of my hands in a cooperate environment, I take pride in the things I can control, and eventually I think that pays off. I’m 51. I’m not going to continue getting new contracts forever. I need a place to ride out the waning years of my career and I don’t want to do it working on shitty software that I allowed to be shit.

    What I really want is a way to push that philosophy beyond a single team, but I don’t want to be in management, and I don’t know how to make that happen. I did get offered a training position, but it paid half what I earn slinging code, and I’d be creating more value, not less.


  • Something amazing happens when there are more than 3 levels of management. Even if you want to “create value for the shareholders” you won’t be allowed to.

    Isn’t that a fucking fact? I have to say, though, fuck shareholders. They are investors, hoping to make money. They are taking their chances. My efforts are beholden to users and my fellow developers. I want to software I write to make the lives of the people using it easier.

    Every business I’ve ever walked into, the frontline people are complaining about shitty software because no one ever thinks about them or what would make their lives easier. Convoluted workflows, unnecessary clicks, poor performance, and instability.

    I presume if I make the lives of workers and customers slightly less horrible that will drive business, but if not the shareholder’s concerns are out of my hands. I wasn’t put on this earth to make other people money.



  • Oh I was way shittier than that when I was younger. I mean I assumed they got it right almost every time and the couple of exceptions would be caught by appeals and such and it was such a vanishingly small number of actually innocent people that would be killed that it was an acceptable number.

    That was before I saw stuff like proof people were innocent and DAs still fighting against them being released. It never occurred to me that expecting everyone in the justice system to seek real justice was completely naive of me. Of course police wouldn’t try to arrest someone they knew was innocent, and of course the DA wouldn’t prosecute and if they were ever made aware of a mistake, of course they would correct that immediately.

    Turns out the world is largely made up of folks who genuinely don’t care if other people live or die or whether it’s right or wrong, as long as it doesn’t inconvenience them at all.



  • I was wrong about capital punishment up into my twenties. It took someone sitting me down and explaining it’s more expensive to kill people than just jail them for life (along with why). These days I’m a bit ashamed that that was the argument that convinced me but that was among a few key watershed moments that pulled back the veil and got me thinking and noticing that fiscal conservatives somehow didn’t ever seem to pick the most sensible option to achieve their goals—clearly their goals aren’t what they claim. They want to reduce abortion, but not in ways that actually work. They want to reduce crime, but not in ways that actually work. Fuck, they want to balance budgets, but not in ways that actually work.

    We’re all on a journey, friend. And sometimes that’s especially hard online because the strides we take are often attacked for being insufficient. People demand total, instant realignment, and you’re still attacked for not believing it all along. I’m glad most of my journey was not made on social media because I’ve certainly held some regrettable positions.

    Good luck!




  • I found out about this about a year ago while I was laid off. It coincided with when the massive layoffs began. Seems pretty likely to me. Developer salaries aren’t low and to lose another 80% on top is a big hit.

    Also a lot of my coworkers are really nervous about immigration right now. This is a bad time to be an Indian tech worker in the US. My team of about 10 could wind up reduced to me and one other guy. We’d even lose our manager and every PM. And this team is responsible for critical software at a major company.




  • It’s a massive new disruptive technology and people are scared of what changes it will bring. AI companies are putting out tons of propaganda both claiming AI can do anything and fear mongering that AI is going to surpass and subjugate us to back up that same narrative.

    Also, there is so much focus on democratizing content creation, which is at best a very mixed bag, and little attention is given to collaborative uses (which I think is where AI shines) because it’s so much harder to demonstrate, and it demands critical thinking skills and underlying knowledge.

    In short, everything AI is hyped as is a lie, and that’s all most people see. When you’re poking around with it, you’re most likely to just ask it to do something for you: write a paper, create a picture, whatever, and the results won’t impress anyone actually good at those things, and impress the fuck out of people who don’t know any better.

    This simultaneously reinforces two things to two different groups: AI is utter garbage and AI is smarter than half the people you know and is going to take all the jobs.