Aren’t IT people just janitors that tell you to turn it off and back on again?
It's mind bending that there are actual humans on the planet, paid a shit tonne more than software developers, who not only believe the parody highlighted by @SwiftOnSecutity, but treat and share it as gospel, acting on it with nutjob metrics to "increase productivity" whilst salivating over the hyperbole around "AI" that is sweeping the globe, dreaming of a better world.
One without those pesky developers with their brains, thoughts and opinions.
But, what do I know, I've been in this profession for only 40 years..
You're probably not the biggest asshole in the room. In my experience, the person making decisions (and the most money) is never the most qualified, most competent, most efficient, or hardest working individual. They are just the biggest asshole in the room. They're willing to be loud and belligerently wrong, they're willing to take credit for the accomplishments of others, they're willing to shift blame onto someone else, they're willing to demand everyone else work harder than they do, and they're willing to demand far more than their fair share of the profit.
And they will be mollified by the rest because nobody is a bigger asshole. Most people just want to do their jobs, and don't want to rock the boat. Competent people see opportunity to ride in the wake of the biggest asshole in the room.
If you ever watch Shark Tank, you'll see they are masters of the craft.
They are just the biggest asshole in the room.
So one day the different body parts were arguing over who should be in charge.
The eyes said they should be in charge, because they were the primary source of information about the world.
The stomach said it should be in charge because digestion was the source of energy.
The brain said it should be in charge because it was in charge of information processing and decision-making.
The rectum said nothing, just closed up shop.
Before long, the vision was blurry, the stomach was queasy, and the brain was foggy.
Assholes have been in charge ever since.
The problem is that most of us have swallowed the 'competence uber alles' ideal that school fed us through exams and scoring, when the game really is mostly politics (as in interpersonal relationships). So we are understandably disappointed when the incompetent get promoted through brown nosing or luck, when we should be reevaluating the rules of the game.
They are just the biggest asshole in the room
That's always fun in sales. The vendor that brazenly promises two-and-a-half mirage for half the price will win the bid, and the sales people will move on to a different employer when the real budget for the project becomes clear.
You know what they do to old engineers don't you?
EDIT : https://youtu.be/fN-VAdAnoZ4?t=31
" you know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? they take them out and shoot them"
Wait till they find out what software 'architects' really do.
They do the same thing building architects do. They draw pretty pictures of the end product that may of may not be structurally sound, then rely on engineers to build it and make sure it doesn't collapse.
Wait, did you find out? Can you tell us?
Sorry, I don't have enough certifications to answer that question.
I always saw architects roles in modern development being the person trying to find synergies between different teams andcoordinateing them working with each other.
Like if some team makes a sick project for managing streams of data streams the architect should be promoting it for other teams to leverage.
That's one role, as a software architect I also often served as the sunk cost fallacy bad news delivery system. It's a good idea to keep some eyes from outside your team on your project just to do the occasional sensibility check.
There is also a large responsibility to make sure different teams are well coordinated and not building the system in directly opposing directions. It really fucking sucks to have your work, as a developer, invalidated by someone else's work suddenly without any warning.
I tried to get a software architect to explain their job to me once, it was like a "lean startup", a libertarian, and a psychic had written an elevator pitch together.
A good software engineer is also an architect. You don't need dedicated architects if you have good developers.
But on the other hand there are much more questionable and unnecessary jobs like product managers or managers of managers.
I disagree with not needing dedicated architects at least once you reach a certain size. If there are 50 plus developers working on a dozen or more projects there's a large communication cost to stay on top of everything.
The good ones: design and adjust software development processes, standards for cross-project functionality and reusability and in general try and improve at a high level the process of making, maintaining and improving software in a company.
The bad ones: junior/mid-level software design with a thick layer of bullshit on top to spin it as advanced stuff.
If you want to see bad software architecture, just look at most of Google's frameworks and libraries.
I used to joke with my niece that my programming job was just me staring at screens and meetings all day. She didn't believe me until she got to shadow me one day and got super bored.
It's not as easy as it sounds, sometimes the screens are all wrong!! https://xkcd.com/722/
What did she think before?
Not op but guessing she had an idea from media like TV shows and movies that make technical jobs seem much more exciting for entertainment over realism. Crises are usually more Jerry accidentally deleted a directory and we need to recover some files and establish safe guard procedures to prevent it from happening again or this thing broke that nobody even knew existed so we gotta figure it out and less type fast enough to save the mainframe from l33t hackers.
But when your brain is fascinated by all that has to happen for those screens and meetings to happen, it can still be an interesting job.
Wait until this guy finds out that Elon doesn't actually build the cars
Or contribute to society at all really
He's a piece of shit but he restarted the Space Race that was literally dying, push the industry into electric cars when none of them were willing to do it. His actual products may be garbage but it doesn't stop that it started the movements that needed to happen in the industry.
To say that he contributed nothing at all is unfortunately false as much as I may hate the man
im convinced most developers spend more time working on making shit work, rather than actually writing code and bugfixing it.
edit: this was mostly a shitpost, and i was expecting some flack, but i got basically none. Can we have a real moment here. Are you guys doing ok? Who made you do this to yourselves?
ok, real talk over, we're going back to suffering now.
Half the time it's trying to figure out where to apply the next piece of duct tape to keep the entire house of cards (and duct tape) from collapsing.
damn.
In times past they got shit done, and now we see that what they've done is shit and we're stuck maintaining it.
Yup. Thats just enterprise software for you. Something was made requiremnts changed, and then changed again and then ypu have duct tape on top of a duct tape with a duct tape holding those duct tapes and a touch of super glu here and there. Also ducttapes are microscopic in size but the sheer quantity of them is unimaginable.
this part is pretty much expected i think. But i'm starting to see it cropping up into the more meta aspects of programming now. For instance, apps being shipped with existing deprecated packages. Seems like it's also creeping a little further into the more UI aspects of it as well.
This the dangerous kind of parody, I would rather help people with excel programs than another access program and that's a pain in the ass.
I draw the line at CSV ingestion.
Turns out the people in IT don't actually make the computers either. Who'd have thought?
The only problem you can't solve with Access is too much Access.
The IT people! The DEV team’s worst nemesis! They must be stopped before we are destroyed!
Reboots your server
Changes your credentials
Eats your pasta
As an aside, I recall the early days when @SwiftOnSecurity was purposely ambiguous about the distinction between the artist Taylor Swift and their technology tweets. It was delicious to see confused responses.
At some point it changed. Not sure what triggered that. I have a vague memory of a stroke, but I might be misremembering.
Hey dude stop it spreading it okay?
The scary thing is some people actually believe this, and NIH syndrome is unfortunately all too real lol
Ok bud, yeah right, Delete that. Delete that RIGHT NOW.
Is Microsoft Access what they call Microsoft Excel nowadays?
No its microsofts database GUI program that's part of Microsoft Office . imagine software made for users who have a vague understanding of SQL and visual basic but then an exec. forced the designers and devs to make it accessible to everyone while giving them barely any teamembers causing a fuckton of technical debt and unintuitive quirks , making anyone who opens the software feel like they have just been placed in a highly equipped tank , in front of a wall of unlabeled levers and told to drive the tank , or at least that's how I view it.
(reposting from another account sorry if you see both comments)
No its another program, I've seen people make weird stuff with it like ticketing systems and notes apps. I've never seen it be a robust program though
No Microsoft Access is/was a GUI software actually meant to have databases instead of how everyone uses Excel/spreadsheets as databases. It is a part of the office suite. It works pretty much like traditional databases but has an easier to access GUI for non programmers I guess. I don't think it's used a ton nowadays except for legacy processes that haven't been updated.
It’s the actual database app by Microsoft
I assume it hasn’t existed for a number of years
We use it at work for it's actual intended purpose: as a small database that isn't customer facing. It's used and maintained by nontechnical staff to keep data about equipment (slot machines).
It would be too much info for excel, but it's not enough to really need anything more.
We've been spending decades curating our perception by management in order to make sure we all have jobs. He's gonna ruin the whole industry if we don't shut him the hell up
Ok, the jig is up. We are exposed. Better pack our bags and get out while we can.
If your seriously into Access you might be a SQL dev...
I prefer my databases in Excel. /s
hahaha, this reminds me of certain politicians...
Where they say the quiet part out loud, while most people will ignore it and the status quo continues as is.
We don't want the Silicon Valley bubble to imploding, right?
p.s. would burst be a better word than imploding? word of the day...
I agree with the last point tbh
At the bare minimum, if you aren't capable of contributing to the library you use, then you don't deserve to use it.
