@netikras 's definitions are very professional and SFW enough to be posted on LinkedIn.

My abridged version:

Junior: younger dev who gets assigned to some tasks in that messing up is not that much of a problem, and is still getting the hang of the business

Mid: After a while, a junior finds out they're too good for this crap and asks for real consequential tasks. Either the team assigns the real tasks, and the junior gets promoted, or the junior GTFOs to another company as a mid. Now that I think of it, wimpy juniors may have the skills of a senior, but if they're not willing to fight for it, they remain as juniors.

Senior: Same as a mid - or highly skilled junior, but is one that all other seniors have quit on them. So they may handle the shit themselves and get recognized as seniors, remain mids, or quit to a senior role. Solo devs are de-facto seniors, but it is meaningless if there is no one else.

Principal: bloody suits that can't tell a calculator from an elevator button pad

The other answers are sure to give you all the actionable information, so I'm gonna do it in a more entertaining and far less practical way. And definitely not very precise.

Back in the days of yore, we had this thing called "memory constraints". Processors were so primitive, you could only have a few precious bytes on them. But clients were just as whiny, so we had to get creative.

One cool thing we invented were "structs" - sets of bytes that could be composed of different elements of the regular types, like one or more integers and strings. It is just like a string - a sequence of memory positions - but each few bytes can represent different things and have different types!
Then some MANIAC put an struct inside another struct! To avoid creating a matrix inside the matrix we came up with pointers - do not copy the other struct there, just point at it in the memory, and your original struct only have to contain the bytes of the pointer.

Nowadays we hardly do that. Unless asked to.

> "why the fuck does management think it will solve all our problems"

The best answer I came up with is based on this principles:

First, think like an idiot. It is much easier than it seems at first, all you have to do is be absolutely sure that you are a secret genius and you already know everything you need to know about everything.

Second, try to see things from the perspective of idiot managers. "This computer wordy thing makes, like, computer wordy babies!" They can't really grasp the concepts much deeper than that.

Finally, put dumb and dumber together and consider this: if there was such a thing as a tool that made coders obsolete, but only real coders were capable of using it, would we tell management about the tool?
A smart person would say: "OBVIOUSLY! It would be the most important scientific discovery since the wheel!"
Idiot managers see all of us denying the effectiveness of GenAI and think: "It can ONLY mean that there is a global conspiracy against my genius!"

@hjk101 I'm still pretty sure the alphabetical layout wouldn't be much better... maybe the DVORAK layout would help more.

@Liebranca it works against people who see assertions like "2+2=5" and say shit like "let's see if the stakeholders are satisfied".
If people are stupid, and would rather have any quick answer instead of a correct one, then it is a race to the bottom to find the fastest heuristic, precision be damned.

Someday they'll use AI to plan the trajectory of a turistic rocket to Mars, it will land in a desert in Arizona and people will say "cool, a whole other plane!"

Do what @kiki says, but document EVERYTHING. Every dumb shit someone asks of you, send an email confirming it. Create a paper trail to cover your ass.
Then grab some popcorn and watch they burn

I didn't quit my old job for this type of shit, but I should have. I had someone from my team make a chart to measure how much money the company was wasting due to ignoring our ideas and PoCs. It was on the low seven figures when there were layoffs due to "market changes"

Mate, if someone calls himself "CEO" and has time enough on his hands to do this kind of shit, you better know that when they ask you to call them "Chief Executive Officer", they actually mean "His Grace the Duke of Shitshire, inc".
Pathetic. Obviously the shithead wants to be "a business influencer" or some other contemporary management fad.

@antigermanist bloody confusing time, in truth. Their teachers tell them to avoid AI like the plague and the school administration sends letters to the parents highlighting how they're demanding the use of AI in school operations. How we gotta have the bloody "AI talk" with our own wee ones. How we should be the ones to figure out how to teach them to use the fucking thing because "it's the future" without using it "in excess", whatever it means.
Fucking corporate simps

@antigermanist she takes the elevator to go up two floors. Apparently it doesn't count as "AI" if it makes noises. Seriously, I told her sister that Alexa used AI and she said "no it doesn't, it does not writes anything"

@retoor his kids were older (I think?)

@jestdotty people who detect vulnerabilities are below their standards, they (institutions) want mindless corporate drones that can consult for medical corporations and say that a 33% fatality rate on a treatment plan is actually "an absolute majority of a win!"

In that alternate reality, humanity built no enterprise proprietary frameworks and never had the internet as we know it today. It could only have happened if their reality had branched out from ours in the mid-90s.

Obviously, humanity then evolved so fast that they built a cost-effective fusion reactor before 9/11, got world peace by the time we were in the great recession, and finally they became pure energy beings right on time for the 2020 pandemic.
Now they look at us from their omnicient point of view and are fully aware that if they look too hard, they will start to devolve.

@Wisecrack good idea, but it would only work once.

I always think that there must be a feedback loop of bots - those that spam every number, and those annoying "follow request" bots that respond to every message.
Thus the metrics for both get inflated and the scam teams get the scam budget.

They expect the meetings to actually kill you, so that the PM can ask for a bereavement extension to the project.

Add some melody, and you have a LinkinPark song.

@devux-bookmark all parties move out of India. You wouldn't believe how rich are clients here on the outside.

@devux-bookmark all parties move out of India. You wouldn't believe how rich are clients here on the outside.

@darksideofyay 2020 was 5 years ago, and software ages like milk in the sun - especially consumer-facing software.
Mostly because everybody is always buying new phones, and the networks keep changing, and new regulations take place, and then you get budget cuts to backend services, or 3rd-party providers go bust and have to be replaced...
Perfectly good software is actively maintained. If another company bought your HC provider, they most likely gave the boot to all devs of the 2020 app.

There is also "enshittyfication", it's like "shrinkflation" for food products (when companies reduce portions instead if raising prices). Software companies cut backend services or maintenance cycles or fire senior devs and hire greenhorns. Thus you get shittier software for the same (or not-as-high) price.

Finally, there is bait-and-switch (A.K.A. dumping). Offer great and cheap service, corner the market, then either raise prices of fuck up service - no client is able to leave, anyway.

Have you noticed that you didn't describe any of those as "poor" or "cash-strapped"?

Insurance is in the business of taking your money and giving in return the minimum possible service.
An effective way of doing it would be deliberately filling their app with dark patterns and bugs, and then training their call center operators to keep pointing insured clients to the app.
I wonder if one checks the source code for those apps they might find bunches of compatibility layers commented out by the PO.

Use a VPN, then you can be somewhere where it's 6 AM

@kiki crap, it was in the fifties? I thought they would have standardized by the bloody WWII

Imagine that an US unit is searching some Baghdad basement in the height of the second Saddam war. They have a finding, and report 50.000 9mm rounds as freaking old-timey 9 inch naval ordinance - just because they see the 9 and the 9 inch ordinance is the first in the reporting system results.
They have about a second to report it before they have to move, it's understandable that the first result in the system might get clicked.
Then...
The coalition force might have to reallocate an entire bloody carrier battle group. A fucking billion dollars evaporate just because someone reported the wrong size of ammo.
No fucking way the US armed forces will use an entire fucking measurement system different from their coalition forces.

@Demolishun chemical engineers are effective, cheap, and easily available. They are the good-at-math kids whose mothers reeealy wanted them to be doctors and didn't let them play with computers.
That being said, ok, they are a bit... analog when evaluating exact solutions. They need a more... through review.

"In X years, LLMs will replace almost all engineers,"
Not exactly. We will basically lock management into the matrix while we work.
Imagine that LLMs in the future also have live deep fake video capabilities. They already have batch video and audio, we're not that far from it.
We need only setup some langchain guidelines to have the LLM answer stupid status updates based on observability metrics and jira tickets, have it record the meeting and add markers to the few seconds of actually relevant discussions, and say stuff like, "Hey, <marketing jerk #8>, how are <family/sports/dogs/weather/games> today?".

Done. AI can do useless meetings like a champ. And the muggles and the suits won't even notice, even if they start to book the same "engineer" in six or more simultaneous meetings. They really know nothing of tech things like "doing actual work".

The only tech we still need are holograms so that we can give the suits the open offices full of "meat" that they love so much.

@kiki may sudo have mercy on your UID

There is a whole subject named "approximation algorithms" that deals with this exact question.
Because those big fancy NP-Hard problems can not be efficiently solved by divide-and-conquer... optimally.
That is to say, you can get a "pretty close result" using some method that is not guaranteed to find the best of the best results, often by breaking the problem into subproblems.
How "close" is that result? Approximation algorithms theory answers that question as: "within log(N)/4 of the best possible result for N" or something like this.

Ex: find the *longest* path in a graph, without any cycles in the path (in other words, find the diameter of a given geaph)

So, yes, in practice, we often can break any problem into subproblems. But if we ever find yourself into a discussion with a complexity theory nerd... be careful, always put the "in practice" caveat in your comments.

Keep saying things like this and a suit will say you have management potential.