Honestly probably got the project to more maintainable state. Probably didn’t need the rewrite to do it in a new lang to do it (the real killer hear it sounds like).
Those monoliths suck on the operations side, and even worse when it’s a corpse holding up the foundation to other projects that actually need it to change. Need to scale? good luck that decades old pizza box we call a server isn’t supported anymore. Oh of course we can spend millions virtualizing dead hardware to keep it running the same.
Yeah, longterm wise - Go is far easier than Java to maintain. This is still a win, albeit with a slight initial disadvantage
Yeah this was my experience when I worked there. Driving goals and doing good work isn’t enough. You need a fancy project to demonstrate “expanded scope” otherwise your promo would get rejected.
Sometimes things worked the way you wanted and people got promoted doing their normal job. A lot of times though there were a lot of fancy projects built to get people promos that suckers got stuck with the bill on.
This ain’t a case of one dude scamming the system as much as it is institutional rot from red tape.
Its pretty well known that “lines of code” is a horrible metric to judge programmers with. It seems “number of new projects” is pretty similar, though at a higher level of abstraction.
Unfortunately that metric is applied to a lot more than just programmers; and I think getting rid of it would involve completely restructuring the type of activity our society is oriented around, and would run up against the life philosophy of the people in charge.
Of course I’m not against progress, but I’m talking about executives that don’t plan beyond the next quarter, politicians that don’t plan beyond the next election cycle, the endless pursuit of growth, and the inability of market economies to cope with the fact that sometimes inaction is more advantagous than action. All of this encourages endlessly churning out ‘new’ things, without designing those things to last or putting in the effort to maintain them.
Ok, now fire him.
The fact they had to do this to earn a promotion is an institutional problem. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
hate the game.
Game rules: You want a promotion? Make something cool, improve something while using approaches that will show that you deserve a higher position and, therefore, a bigger salary.
Player: (Lies and creates shit that is even worse than the initial situation.)
Lemmy: Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
But that isn’t the game rule, now is it?
The rule is more: convince the c-suite that you deserve a promotion by any means necessary. Even if you have to make things up.
This is the difference between RAW and RAI.
More like game rules: manager needs shiny buzzwords and big number go up. Having something that works fine for 5 years is considered stale and corporate culture is all about useless innovation.
You are contradicting yourself. If writing bullshit and making things worse gets you a better career position
You want a promotion? Make something cool, improve something while using approaches that will show that you deserve a higher position and, therefore, a bigger salary
Is not the rule of the game. Sell your story to your superiors is the rule of the game, that’s the real metric, the the thing that really matters.
deleted by creator
The scumbag behavior is from the employer. He’s only fighting fire with fire.
deleted by creator
You are contradicting yourself.
Do you want me to present you with a definition of “lie”? I believe you don’t understand the phrase “Lies and creates shit”.
They built something worse and we’re still promoted for it despite it being demonstrably worse. Where’s the lie? They described something complex and techy sounding, did it, and got the promotion anyway regardless of the actual results, proving the results didn’t matter.
So you want the manager to be cleverer than the engineer in engineering, so the manager would be able to detect a deliberate lie from the engineer?
Yes, but more competent, not cleverer. Some managers aren’t fit to be in IT.
I’d expect a manager to be able to determine that testing data for the new process is showing it is worse than the previous system it replaced, and NOT promote that person, at the very least …
I can do both, tbh. Though I do generally hate the game more than the player.
the player can always choose not to play, though
It’s a big company. Someone’s going to play.
deleted by creator
No. That putting the onus of change on individuals is a losing proposition. The incentives have to change or no number of good people will fix it. I hear the French have had very effective solutions in the past.
deleted by creator
You seem to believe that I think it a justification for evil. I do not, people should not do such things and they are shitty people for doing them.
I’m saying that the idea of some good people doing the right thing fixing the problem is naive and doomed to failure and a real solution to the problem has to be bigger than the lazy “just no one be evil” proposition you seem into to champion.
Fire the manager too.
The one thing which COULD justify it, is technical debt. A programming language not supported anymore or in short-term/mid-term, bus factor, too much knowledge transfer, etc. But yeah, lots of times it’s “business as usual” just for “progress” and fancy buzzwords.
Golang is technical debt in language form. A language that gained limited and now sagging popularity, for good reason. I hate to work in Java but hate golang more. It’s the lightsaber of programming languages. I’ve got shit to do give me blasters and all the rest and I don’t want to wank myelf off about how I did it all with channels.
Java is still supported… Or did I miss the memo?
What’s Java???
This almost makes me appreciate my current job, where most stuff has been in place for years and any changes take forever.
It’s kind of a bummer that it’s going to take like six months to add a linter, and they only started using git like last year.
I worked in a heavily regulated industry. Everything required a manual test. Let’s say you have an employee ID that is 10 digits long which they use to log in. You had to have some else (couldn’t be the developer) to write a series of tests, get those tests approved by 5 people(with specific titles) then a third person to execute the test, then the second person had to write a report saying it all passed, then that report had to be approved by the same 5 people.
That typically wasn’t the delay. The delay was to execute the tests we needed to stop production. That typically was a 6 week wait(unless urgent for “reasons”) and changes like “I will drop scrap by 83%” was typically told wait till July 4th or Christmas breaks. Why? Because production would be down for 3-4 days typically. Someone had to start the system, ok no entry produces error, executor and developer have to sign a physical paper, restart the whole system, now an entry of 1 digit produces an error, sign the form, repeat for all digit quantities up to 9, repeat for all digit quantities up to the choosen value(based on severity if an issue occurred), 2 people sign for each one, system restarted between each. If you had say an enter button and a cancel button each had to be checked for each quantities of digits. Oh but wait what if someone just types there name… Now repeat everything for alphabet values… What if someone does combination, more tests, more restarts, more signing.
Reports easily surpassed 1000 pages, no one really had time to check all that so I saw so many missed signatures and missed tests. I asked the “senior validation expert” can I just automate a lot of these tests using unit tests and attach a computer generated report of all tests passing and the source code of the tests? " the response I got was" what’s a unit test? "they still don’t use any of them to my knowledge.
Similar boat, it’s kinda frustrating that it takes 6 months to approve 30 minutes of work, but at least the job is boring.
Which VCS did they use before git?
SCP to prod, or ssh in and copy paste. Devops only removed write access to prod machines this month, and people complained. (No, we don’t have docker)
I think they used Amazon CodeCommit for a while, but I don’t know what that’s like.
I’d ask if you’re at my work, but this is an amount of organizational improvement that they haven’t yet been able to begin
Wow, I imagine that caused a lot of problems.
You would be surprised how far that type of thing can get you when the team is small and experienced.
It tends to explode when you hit a certain number of people or you replace a senior with a junior who promptly explodes the thing.
we dealt with similar stuff at our company as the design team grew. amazing how far simple systems can get you with basic practices and common sense.
now with triple the team size and a few less than extremely competent people, we have tons of file management issues, even though there are more processes in place to avoid them. I hate it.
[ In lieu of a comment, please see “Bullshit Jobs”, by David Graeber, which is incorporated here by reference. ]
Something I find cool about this book is that it’s so well known that people who haven’t even read it will often gesture towards it to make a point. It reminds me of how “enshittification” caught on because so many people were glad to have a word for what they’d been experiencing.
It’s a useful phrase to have. Recently a friend was lamenting that they’d had a string of bad jobs, and they were struggling to articulate what it was that they wanted from a job. They were at risk of blaming themselves for the fact that they’d struggled to find anything that wasn’t soul sucking, because they were beginning to doubt whether finding a fulfilling job was even possible.
They were grasping at straws trying to explain what would make them feel fulfilled, and I cut in to say “all of this is basically just saying you don’t care what job you have, as long as it’s a non-bullshit job”. They pondered it for a moment before emphatically agreeing with me. It was entertaining to see their entire demeanour change so quickly: from being demoralised and shrinking to being defiant and righteously angry at the fucked up world that turns good jobs into bullshit. Having vocabulary to describe your experiences can be pretty magical sometimes
IMO if your survival depends on doing a ‘job’ (especially if you’re employed by someone else), then it’s better to look for fulfilment in your personal life and realize the job is a means to survive and hopefully also fund what you really want to do for yourself and your loved ones.
Work to live, not live to work.
Indeed, that is the healthier way to go about things.
Personally, I struggle with that kind of compartmentalisation, but I would probably be healthier if I could do that. I have never lasted long when doing work that I’m not passionate about, and when I am passionate about work, it’s hard to not bring it home (even if that’s just working on stuff adjacent to the task).
I know a lot of people who work in academia, and it’s simultaneously inspiring and depressing to see how people’s research interests end up bleeding into basically all elements of their regular life. I think some people are just wired that way. I wish that they had the freedom to engage in that in a more healthy way, free from the additional bullshit that Capitalism heaps onto them, making the dynamic so toxic.
However, given that we do live under such oppressive economic conditions, “work to live, not live to work” is an essential mantra to aspire towards, especially the people who put their whole heart into their work. It’s not ideal, but it is necessary to learn if we want to survive without burning out.
So that’s why we suffer enshitification.
Those who succumb to the Socio-Economic and climb it so.
“Upwards mobility”.
You write clean code and you get replaced in 2 months, because everyone can work on that code.
You write an unreadable mess that no raise will convince other employees to work on and suddenly your holiday requests don’t get declined anymore.
It’s almost like the “meritocracy” under capitalism is a bald faced lie.
These days it’s also because you want the AI to get confused by your code too. If it’s too clean you’ll have a PM with cursor making PRs wondering why your salary is justified.
Reminds me of the time when we wrote an internal tool with strict SOLID principles. As new programmers came on, they had no idea what was going on cause no one in college told them about design patterns. Most of the OG’s quit soon after and the new guys remained.
Or you get fired because everyone else says your code is an unreadable mess.
In my experience, nope. Assuming it works as promised, the situation (usually) gets viewed as a skill gap. You think their code is bad, because you don’t understand it well enough. Unless you are personally willing to redevelop it, of course.
Depends on the company. You wouldn’t last very long at mine putting out garbage.
In my experience… nope. Never seen it happen. Even when there are clear coding guidelines, and stacks of code smell violations.
Flawless victory.
Yep, this is the culture I keep running head first into as I try to level up my career.
Man, it’s so frustrating. I just can’t turn off my own qualms with shitty corporate culture and it means I will be less successful by the metrics we’ve set ourselves.
It’s ironic how so many of us find ourselves being extremely valuable for the exact reasons they can’t stand us. As IT, I’m used to being seen as nothing more than red marks on a budget to the folks making decisions. The only thing they hate more than listening to us, is when they have to.
Kinda got a chip on my shoulder today it seems.
Same. Generally speaking our company is pretty healthy, but we’re still stuck in this really stupid leveling system where advancement is tied to greenfield development and I’ve been doing maintenance and compliance work for the last five years.
I say this is only ok because he did that in amazon. Fuck amazon
If ge did that in a medium-or-less sized company that would be a really shitty move.
The problem is the large companies like Amazon buy all the small ones and put these people in charge lol
In a small company noone would try to label you “l5” or “l6” and probably an actual human would make your comp decision. You take the byzantine incentive structure away and people just try to do a good job.
I am so tired of worse products in the name of upgraded products that are literally worse in every way but a bunch of buzzwords and in groups bragging at the top while not knowing anything at all about programs or even the product at all but just seem to be there because they drink with the CTO.
Ugh. The twiddling thumb era of trying to look busy by dismantling the old machines for parts.
somebody please hack into amazon’s services so that they can tell amazon shoppers the truth about jeff bezos. seriously!
You get the behavior your incentives encourage, whether you realize what those behaviors are or not.
