Lad, if one could just stop time at the perfect moment... life is gonna throw you some curve balls, you gotta stay ready to dodge or throw some back. Your current summit is not meant to last, so you can either look for some more things to go up, or fate will eventually pull you down. The kids previously suggested are a good option, but maybe you want to learn to play the cello or get a six-pack. Never stop.
This is not fatalism, that is reality. A mortal cannot stop the tides of karma from ebb and flow. Unless you somehow can, and in that case you cease to be and become one with nothing and everything. Yoga blabber aside, seriously, go find something. Dont stop wandering "what else" nor pursuing your wants, too much stability its bad for your mental health.

@BordedDev it was even worse to say it. I felt so much like punching myself.

@AlgoRythm the fuck we didn't. We just got lucky we invented tools and high fructose corn syrup before the crustaceans did. Every living creature on earth is the product of some stupidly random variation on the initial parameters and the rest is natural selection mixed with sheer lucky mutations.

Evolutionary algorithms are quite the black box. Their inner workings are simple, their structures are regular.
No, the hard part here is to fine tune the parameters, and to run it all fast enough so you can make many, many experiments. Non deterministic randomized approaches are a bitch, you can have very different results from the same data set. So you need to try a billion dofferent parameters.
You might want to try parallelism and grid search.

Ask her. Do it. Just do it. But be mindful that this is her place of work, dont embarrass her or make she look unprofessional or something. And that she might say no even after what appears to be some special interest, after all this is her place of WORK, lad. 20% is peanuts compared to the margins in the retail of restricted products like vape. She might just be hitting quotas by influencing repeat customers to come back to this same specific store. That is just business, dont take it personally if she says no.

@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.