@lorentz I see, then my comments can be disregarded

(But maybe it's still true that IT would somehow feel that an increased volume of requests makes the matter more pressing. Despite all logic. I know I work that way and can't help it 🤣 )

Advice: Ask colleagues to make a request similar to yours.

Never underestimate the power of multiple requests.

At the website I work for we have a user feedback inbox. If 1 person mentions an opinon we might figure it could be an anomaly, if 2 or 3 people mention the same thing we will take it way more serious.

I figure IT might behave as the "bell curve meme".

* For small companies they are quite chill and allow permissions to those who need it

* For mid-sized companies: they are tasked with increasing security so they become overconfident in attempts to enforce a restrictive policy. (And they might argue devs are a minority, and this is a necessity for all the non-dev employees)

* For a large company, with a larger dev org, they realise they gotta chill out and give more permissions to devs

This is just anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt

I’m hoping the attacks on internetarchive will raise awareness of the importance of preserving history in a more official way

Many countries have a digital archive of every major newspaper print as part of the national library

(but I also assume some of the conspiracy theories are that nation states are trying to censor destroy the web… but still - I don’t think these newspaper archives would be around if they had only been private efforts)

I kinda forgive newscasters.

They are told to simplify things for the average person.

When it comes to subjects taught in science class they can assume there's some base level of knowledge - and they can actually have a scientist as a guest and let them mention stuff like electrons, the scientific method, chemical reactions etc. (Even though they often also simplify things to a 5 year old level and say stuff like "If a nuclear plant was a human, uranium would be like a hamburger")

Software on the other hand is not taught to everyone in school - so they have to assume zero knowledge.

Software is also abstract and invisible, unlike real world physics like explosions.

I've been involved in a situation like this. A dev lead from another team was writing really short and incomprehensible messages on slack.

A colleague in my team gave them feedback.

Got the response "Thanks for telling me! I was not aware it looked that bad. I admit I have a bad habit of replying to Slack questions really sloppily when I'm in meetings. I guess I imagine every question is super urgent. I will chill out and read questions properly in the future. Thanks again"

Consider giving your boss feedback in an structured way.

My team has recently been forced to take a class on how to give constructive feedback - so these would be my tips:

1. Ask if it's a good time (if they have a headache or personal problems, it's a bad time) "Hey, how are you doing? Would this be a good time to talk? I would like to give you some feedback"

2. Lay down the terms. For example "I have some feedback regarding communication. I'll tell you how I feel about what I think is an issue. Then you can share your point of view and we can try to resolve it. OK?"

3. Just tell em the issue straight up, from your perspective - including 1 recent example: "I feel like when I ask you questions - sometimes you respond without having read my question properly. For example the other day I asked about images that did NOT exist and you gave an answer about images that DID exist. Can we talk about this? Are you aware of this?"

Webpack can be notoriously complex though.

(It really depends - in some new projects I've managed to copy-paste another project's webpack config and just get stuff working asap, in other projects I've got stuck with Webpack issues for a long time)

I'm curious what you mean regarding implementing NPM.

Was this your first time using NPM? Did you use to have a ton of 3rd party scripts imported before - but now you tried importing them as packages for the first time?

I rarely hear people imagine coding is easy

Most common thing I hear is people imagine that you build something once and then it's done an will last forever

"Isn't that website DONE?" 🤣 is a common question.

(But if we're honest, us devs might not be better, for example I've heard defvs say "I wonder what devs at Craigslist do - that site has not changed in years" but it is probably under constant development)

I would also consider this exact same rant would've been posted if DevRant would've been around when they switched from Iphone3GS to Iphone4

"Why make it thinner? Just keep it the same size and make the battery last longer"

Might be a constantly valid question though, just saying this is nothing new, just a continuation of thinnification going on for over a decade.

Did you learn anything about development philosophy or debugging strategies?

You should be happy they call it iPhone Air - rather than making EVERY iphone thinner.

Allthough I would be interested in an iPhone Phat - with a huge battery.

I assume it didn’t even cross their mind you could hear their machine

Kinda makes sense to run that stuff at night (if neighbours could not hear it)

I was put off by rust after watching a stream (possibly theprimagen) where some rust dev was hacking along at speed and then had to stop after calling a function, saying something like ”oh, now I’m forced to explicitly handle potential errors from this call. Feels unnecessary. I wish it throw an error that was handled by some global/parent error handler, as you would in other langs like …JS”

No idea if that is accurate but sounded annoying as hell

I don’t worry about devs being replaced entirely

But I can see areas of dev work being replaced by ai - especially within rapid prototyping and mvp experiments

For example: let’s say a web site company wants to experiment with launching some new mvp thing ”just to see if it gains traction” and someone suggests launchkng ten simple games like snake and sudoku.

You could pay for a dev team to do that (massive cost - plus it might never be done since it’s a large investment thrown away if you decide to scrap everything)

Or you can have one dev spend a day, generate 10 games using AI, spend a few hours testing, soft launch, and see if anyone plays em - and if not, scrap them

Weird that random people with access to a tool can see anyone’s salary

But the concept of using consultants is common

I was a consultant for a few years - I didn’t get a high salary - but for the company that got a consultant dev the price was much higher than a regular employed dev

Are you sure the figures you see are what the consultants are making - or just the expense for the company

(The expense can be waaay higher than the salary - even for employees)

DateTime is one area where a lib is justified in most cases even if you’re usually a ”we don’t need a library for that” kind of dev 🥸

(PS: for all JS devs I’d just wanna mention I hope moment.js is dethroned and replaced with date-fns)

"A 13 represents a whole 2 week sprint. An 8 represents a week and a half."

🤣 Oh it's so laughable to see these insane systems people make up just to make story points abstract. With 13 points it would be 1.3 points per workday. With 8 points it's 1.0 or 1.1 point per workday.

Did someone enforce the Fibonacci numbers cause you had already bought Planning Poker card decks or configured your ticket system to only accept those numbers?

@ElectroArchiver "It's our customer's staff that's the problem , apparently the marketing team gave access to an external contractor"

Oh, damn. Dealing with 3rd parties (or... if a 3rd party hires a contractor... that's even further out 🤣) is the worst - everyone is unsure of who is allowed to lay down the law for them.

@BordedDev "only happened once in the ~5 years I have worked with him"

Oh! Then I'd say it's a non-issue 😊

(But this is a good example of the type of thing you might have to mention to people complaining about it. If I had recently joined your team as a dev and saw that everyone's editor were configured like this I would imagine this would be a huge potential risk. Before I was told people have used this for 5 years without issues)

…and as a follow-up: in my org we even have a recurring anonymous poll where people can answer if they feel stressed out about work. And if there’s a bad result - all teams have a talk about how no one should feel that way and if anyone wants to voice an opinion about why they feel stessed we could figure out how to reduce the stress.

(Some cynics will say ”anonymous? I doubt it!” but I believe it - we’ve had those talks in my team and everyone said they were fine - but still lead to a good talk over how to communicate to keep our team stress free)

@BordedDev "they have it as the default because most people don't care too much about the message"

What 😱 this sounds awful to me.

I don't care about commit messages being perfectly worded (I love squash-and-merge as the github setting) but I care about them not being entirely incorrect. I'm fine with poor commit messages like "h1" or "fix image" but I would be worried if there's a risk the message is "fix image" when they're working on a h1.

I'm kinda starting to think the PM was right to bring this up as an issue in the retro...

If this was my team I'd advocate for enforcing a setting where the commit message box was blank by default.

LOL, yeah you might be on to something.

The rudimentary simple code that you don't think much about is usually not something you vomit after seeing 6 months later.

It's often the "clever" and "innovative" stuff that you find revolting in hindsight.

Horrible. Sounds like it's time to have a "Team Rules"-talk.

Make it a rule that in editing prod manually is banned except for in rare extreme exceptions. Ensure that in order to be allowed to manually edit you must do something noticeable like post to a slack-channel named emergency-edits and say what you did. That'll at least alert all other devs something has been changed. And it'll keep people from doing it unnecessarily just cause they think "it's no big deal"

Seems to me that many open source contributors work too much in isolation

At work - if a dev has to do anything in our codebase for the first time - they’d get a walkthrough.

I would be kinda upset if I found out another dev studied a 2000 line file in my codebase (if I had such a thing) trying to figure it out on their own - so much time waste

Makes sense.

We’ve had people trying to do it 50-50 and they usually end up overwhelmed cause the PM role involves too many meetings

"squash and merge is enforced"

Wow. Then it's silly to bring that it up in a retro.

"intelij defaults to keeping the last message in the commit box"

Whoa, that sounds like a nightmare. Every time you make a commit in a scenario where you made a previous commit you'll have to clear the text box?

If so - I would make someone in the team spend 10 minutes looking for a setting that could change that. Unless you like it for some reason. Sounds like a potential source for future mistakes.

I also never had a PM who tries to have any detailed opinion about the code.

A rite of passage.

Where I'm from fucking up prod often just leads to improvements in procedure/testing/structure to prevent it from happening again. (But at the same time - we can't spend all our time making systems fully rigid - that would cost too much - a small prod failure usually is less costly than 2000 hours of dev time)

I always think we shouldn't blame an individual. If anyone part of our team did it - most of us could've done the same.