Yes.

It is inconsiderate to go into an office when you got the flu, and all companies should have the policy that they would rather have sick people work from home than risk more people getting sick.

Thank god we can work from home.

I recently watched the old UK Show "Million Dollar Traders" and found it INSANE to see the boss arguing that people who were vomiting should still show up at the office even if they had to have a trash-can by their desk. Cause I guess at that time (2008-ish?) they still didn't allow working from home with their specific stock trader software.

I agree.

But I can also kind of see how it happens.

There's a segment of the population who seem to only use apps, and you kinda lose them entirely if you don't have one.

But as soon as someone demands a fully native app - some the companies might postpone it for years as they fear it's too much work.

Sometimes it may be ok to make a kinda shitty web-app if it at least has one extra feature (like maybe more persistent data-storage) and that may reach some users ...even if you and me find it sub-par

Kinda don't mind this. I don't know about their turn signals but if they wanna experiment and be weird and dumb - there are tons of other normal cars I can buy instead. Just like with their weird door handles, I kinda get "Yep, that's not for me" and accept that if I'd want something else from a Tesla that may be a costly addon.

Sometimes I get annoyed when people are outraged that every company doesn't include basics. To some extent it's good that you can choose to pay less.

Like when an airline charges extra for carry-on. As long as it's clear on the booking website - let them.

That being said...subscription-services for seat heating is madness, at least if it starts spreading to more than one company.

When it comes to extra physical controls I can at least understand that is a cost, but if it's already installed I can't respect charging a subscription fee.

Only been at good companies but there's been some funny instances where one individual suggested something silly (but usually that was a one-off)

Like that time a marketer found out our website was copied by scammers and asked "I heard about encryption - so can you just encrypt the website so that no one can copy the html?"

I figure sometimes these kinds of questions are not intended to be solved to 100% completion but kinda intended as a way to see what the candidate will prioritise when given a tough task.

Could be that an acceptable response is to spend a few minutes asking for clarifications about what they expect, and the deliver a rough idea. 🤷

(Not saying this is necessarily a gotcha-question, it may well be that the interviewer didn't really consider they gave someone a task that takes 3 hours and just gave em 40 min..but still - they may accept that a candidate reframes the question as "Yeah given the insane time limit I'm just gonna answer this in a different way" and they will respect that)

@jestdotty bash is super useful but I'd argue it's just a bit too hard to write really really simple intuitive code in Bash for some of the most basic things like creating objects, handling errors, string manipulation without regex, math beyond integers, heck even just if-statements.

Nah.

Plenty of great companies right now are comfortable with their quality but they just hedging their bets.

The reasoning is "AI does not seem all that great. We produce quality stuff. Buuuut maybe we are too short sighted. We don't wanna end up like Kodak when they thought film was superior to digital photos. So let's hop on the AI-train just to be safe that we are not missing out."

And then it may often end up seeming desperate cause you have someone saying "Let's just see if we can get ahead of this AI-shit, let's put an AI-feature on the front page just to get stakeholders to stop yapping about how we lack AI"

This is a good motto IF people trust you.

If a colleague that I did not quite trust said this I would be kinda worried and asking what kinda problems they are keeping from us.

(I once had a product-owner that took it upon themselves to help users who submitted bug reports ...without telling the dev team. Cause they assumed it would just be a bother. Kind-hearted but misguided)

Hello 👋

Welcome. But I have to warn you - we (atleast I) can be quite specific ... for example I kinda don't like that you added a Django-tag about a post wiht 0% Django.

AI-coding is a bit of a journey - a mix of impressive results and utter crap.

I have been using CoPilot in VsCode for a while, mainly for minor function rewrites, and what I have found is (currently, my views may change next year) is that it will often need to ask it twice. First you ask it to give you roughly what you want. Then you take a glance, and ask if there's some specific thing that couldn't be improved. Then it will figure out that yep - the first iteration was not perfect.

In one way that is kinda like a human developer. Ask me to write some code on the spot I will give you a decent solution. Ask me to review my own code I might optimise it. Ask me to review it again with an edge-case in mind I might change it again. 😆

This makes me happy.

Last time I checked StackOverflow it felt like the majority of questions were from rookie indian devs who really needed some guidance in multiple steps, but the StackOverflow-admins just instantly locked their threads when it became clear the question was confusing and needed a rewrite.

Curious: Was this senior dev working solo?

In the cases I've seen where senior devs suck at git it has been where they've been solo so they rarely deal with merge conflicts.

"how is it that there's new frameworks and libraries coming out all the time ,but front end development hasn't been solved to be retard proof"

This is an interesting question. I would say that maybe +10 years ago there was some projects that maybe hoped to replace CSS with some other approach and potentially this could evolve into a brand new future of the web (maybe ...like Silverlight) but since then it feels like most have concluded that was not the way to go and as both CSS and DevTools have improved - most frameworks and libs have chosen to go closer to the standard and just argue for things like "regardless of how many layers we put on top of CSS you still gotta learn what display: inline-block means if you wanna debug the size of an element 🤷"

A favourite quote from a former co-worker ”In one way it is more engaging to work in a shitty workplace cause I don’t have to be a genius to improve things - I can just make really simple improvements and make a huge difference” 🤩

(but this was the type of senior dev who had a lot of sway with managers and everyone would listen to...much harder for a junior to make suggestions if nobody cares)

I realise this is wayy off the OP but I hope you guys don't mind

@Lensflare "large functions are almost always the result of spaghetti" - I kinda agree but at the same time, after reading the horrendous code examples in the book 'Clean Code' I gotta say if I would be forced to pick between two bad codebases: one with tons of small functions and one with a few large functions I might pick the one with large functions, cause it is kinda easy to debug a few mega functions. But it can be hellish to debug a huge call stack of 30 similarly named functions, and to find out if any of them is actually re-used elsewhere or not and if their arguments matter.

EDIT: Of course these are insane examples. The ideal is a mix of tiny reusable functions and maybe mid-sized one-off-functions but ..still

When I studied I asked myself this alll the time

But as I got good and started making money it got a lot more fun

I’m about to set one up as a selfhosted alternative to GooglePhotos/Icloud

Buuut if I told you there are websites and apps that have this functionality would you actually use them? Or would it be a ”nah the vibe can’t be recreated”

Yeah, I hate it

But I figure these devs are not exactly following any best-practices

Cause fortunately most directives (like EU accessibility directives, Google recommendations) etc are strongly advocating for accessible html and most frameworks also have that in mind even if they are SPA-oriented

Transitioning.

Perhaps you should try something less grindy - a slightly different role.

(It's very easy to get opportunities like that within a large company if you mention it to your manager)

Just to cheer you up I can say that short retros can feel kinda useless.

We always keep a strict time limit, 1h, and the goal of the retro is to avoid fixing things during it - we just create actions for later.

But this can be annoying. After everyone has presented their issues and ideas we find ourselves rushing towards the end where we're supposed to vote on the top 3 things to discuss a bit further and create action-points for. But we end up having to cut the interesting discussions short and it feels like we just got to vent but not really get to the heart of the matter.

To some extent I feel like over a years time our retros just end up being 90% venting and we never get to go in depth.

So once in a while I would kinda prefer a long discussion.

@donkulator I wish. There's lots of general posts about topics like Ukraine war and dead celebrities.

PS: sorry to everyone for hijacking this thread.

Damn, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/...

"triennial" = once every three years

"triannual" = three times in one year

They even suggest there's such a risk of confusion it's best to avoid the word and just say "3 times per year" or "once every 3 years"

Bi kinda means "2 of" - not half. For example Bilungual is 2 languages. Not just halves.

Bipedal is 2 legs. Even if you could argue you spend half the time on each leg 🤣

@Demolishun True. I've even suggested to DevRant people that adding some distinction between dev-categories and non-dev-categories, but there's no interest in changing anything.

"rant" is totally open to interpretation.

Just a thought:

There's a lot of hate towards biased media.

But I don't see many people recommending unbiased media (for example, there are sites that explicitly show 2 sides to a story - like allsides.com and ground.news) or even selecting good journalists, even if you're not a fan of their org.

To me - not making suggestions is like saying "music these days suck" without commenting on the types of bands you DO like.

Which browser? This is NOT a problem on a default Chrome desktop setup.

Tested it

1. clicked the + button to write a new post, wrote "hello"

2. closed the modal by clicking outside the text input.

3. clicked the + button again to open the modal once more. My text "hello" persists and I can resume writing.

With the risk of being hyper annoying: could you please tag posts like this with "random" in the future. The "rant" category is mainly for dev related rants, while "random" is for stuff like this which is entirely non dev.

I wanna filter my devRant feed to prevent it from turning into a general forum, but usually I just remove the "random" category as I still wanna read dev related rants.

Yeah. Since the start of my dev career I've met so many successful freelancers I always figured that would be something to explore as I became more senior and got more connections.

But now I just feel like the hassle and anxiety around getting and keeping clients would make me lose focus.

@HighTurtleDev

> Company is technically UK but it was only myself and the founder in the UK, the rest are india & south africa and all contractors

Ah, figures. Seems to me the crazy boss requests are often from small companies or at least small offices where bosses feel they depend on a few individuals that don't have the backing of a large in-house tech org.