A thing that hallucinates uncompilable code but somehow convinces your boss it’s a necessary tool.
A thing that hallucinates uncompilable code but somehow convinces your boss it’s a necessary tool.
My cousin rented Megaman 2 and I spent at least an hour in awe of the fact that he could get hit more than twice because he had an energy bar. Then he switched weapons and threw a saw blade and I had to go sit down and think about it for a while.
Yeah, I bought one in my 20s.
“I’m a specialized clerk interested in mathematics” if you don’t wanna get burned.
At some point, they’re gonna have to debug it.
If you’re trying to pull your weight, and it sounds like you are, the problem is either with the tasks, the codebase, or the teammates:
Potential problems with the tasks:
A ticket needs: clear repro documents (if necessary), screenshots, and clear steps to reproduce. It needs more than “Title: Add X to Y. Description: We need Y in X. Implement it.” unless you’re intimately familiar with the codebase. And even if you are, you still need a paper trail to back up what you’re doing. If you’re not closing tickets, be very chatty in the comments. Share where you are, problems you’re running into, and who you’re waiting on for help. If there’s a consistent theme to the things you’re fighting, keep a list of them and bring them to your manager. Be your own advocate and be very transparent about all the research you’re doing because other people didn’t.
Potential problems with the codebase:
Hey, it works. But it’s not documented, someone decided to be clever instead of elegant, the local story sucks, or it’s optimized to such a degree that you have to refactor just to add a simple option ("lol why would we ever need that data here? It’s inefficient!)
Potential problems with teammates:
Everyone pulls their weight. Everyone communicates in clear, declarative sentences and provides examples if necessary. “I don’t know” is an acceptable answer. Evasiveness, vagueness, specialized jargon, or acronyms point to the dev being insecure about their knowledge in that area. Be very suspicious of the word “should”: “that should work”, “that shouldn’t be hard”, “you should be able to…”
And, as an aside, I’ve seen this happen a lot. A new dev or contractor comes on, blows through tickets, gets good marks, and an existing dev or two get called out for not contributing with the same frequency. One of two things are happening here: the new devs are getting softballs, or they’re creating a lot of subtle tech debt that someone else will have to fix because they don’t have a full picture of the codebase. Eventually, those devs will be where everyone else is, but it’s still frustrating.
Hang in there.
It’s funny how soon they realize they want a good one.
I use a car analogy for these situations: You need a mechanic (IT professional.) I’m an engineer (coder.) They’re both technically demanding jobs, but they use very different skillsets: IT pros, like mechanics, have to think laterally across a wide array of technology to pinpoint and solve vague problems, and they are very good at it because they do it often.
Software engineers are more like the guy that designed one part of the transmission on one very specific make of car. Can they solve the same problems as IT pros? Sure! But it’ll take them longer and the solution might be a little weird.
Sometimes, very rarely, I tell my squad that today’s our unlucky day and we’re actually going to have to do math to the problem.
Oh hey, it’s a list of everything I’ve been ranting about for the past three years.
They’re a motherfucker to steer?
It’s been ages, but we’d done rough calculations for the three controls so we roughly knew what we needed. Our teacher was big on manually tuning instead of just using formulas since he thought just running numbers “lacked artfulness.”
So we grabbed a point and started searching around manually. I think we were just tuning the derivative portion at that point, trying to get a fast response without the system without it going chaotic and noisy.
The final project in my instrumentation class was to tune a PID controller for a hot/cold mixing valve. I (CS/ENG) was paired up with an engineering student and a lot of it was throwing parameters in, seeing if weird shit happened, and then turning down or up based on the result. I had a programming final and something else I was supposed to be studying for, so I just started doing a binary search with the knobs. We got the thing tuned relatively fast and my partner acted like I was a wizard.
Huh. These things are a central plot point in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. I always thought Agatha Christie just made them up.
releasing a new kernel, re-written entirely in Golang using Copilot
I just got so mad.
Yeah, I swear it’s part of the culture at some places. At my first full-time job, my boss dropped the production database the week before I started. They lost at least a day of records because of it and he spent most of the first day telling me why writing sql in prod was bad.
Yep. If you’re in a situation where you have to write SQL on the fly in prod, you have already failed.
Oh wow. The box is long gone and I’d rather keep it, but that’s awesome.
Yeah it’s ridiculous how many ranges of movement they fit in. And I have no idea how I got it. I’m guessing it was a drunken stumble to the mall.
Not the flex he thinks it is.