Tried to do a proper analysis of a bug in homologation that’s preventing our future customer to test the product, while N+3 and N+4 demand twice-daily updates through video call with ten other managers on it. Two weeks of proper madness, that was.

Stopped the meetings for one fucking day and we had it fixed before 5pm.

For real.
I joined this team two years ago and at 46 was the oldest with our PO. The tech lead had to leave after my first year. Then the PO jumped ship after 19 years at the company. Now our N+2, who’s mostly responsible for our PO leaving, is off dying in some hospital. The tech lead he finally got us, a mate of his, has done exactly 4 tickets in four months (I did 50 in my first four) and with good reason since he knows exactly none of the tech stack we use. At all. He’s ready to quit, just hasn’t found somewhere else.
The N+3, who joined at the same time as him, and knew the shit he was getting in, admitted to me this morning that he’s having a tough time honestly. The guys around me, all in their twenties and with one or two jobs under their belt have never seen shit like this and are all on the verge of ragequitting. Only thing keeping them is the difficulty of finding a job here as we’re in the arse end of France.
The (paid) students are kinda all taking it in mouth agape.

Meanwhile I’m just like “eh, sure it’s not perfect but it ain’t so bad. You should see the last place I was at!”.

And I still have to swallow twenty odd years of this shit?
Fuck me.

I can’t wait to meet the two people who just did a round of interview…

Shit sounds about right

The camera zoomed in so it adjusted. I think this is the view from the spotter, not the actual sniper.

Way too many of those morons survived though.

How about get a mechanical keyboard with modified switches for your combining keys? I’ve been wanting to do that for mine for gaming.

That’s true yeah. The seed of all the problems is assuming.

My teammates assumed System.DefaultEncoding must be some default value (UTF-8, they assumed, again) that would carry across all servers so no worries. Except no, it’s “whatever encoding is configured on this machine as the default code page”.
Which was the same across our networks, lucky them.
But for this one machine setup by an external contractor who had UTF-8 as default.
That one took me a while to track down…

In my experience things are fine while you work in a single environment, or you have control over the entire pipeline of data. Things quickly turn into a story from the Bible when different systems start trying to communicate.

You’d think things would be simple, otherwise the existence of UTF-8.

And yet for the last 17 years, every company I’ve been in has had some sort of horrible mess involving unicode and non-unicode and nobody either recognising the problem, or knowing how to solve it when they did recognise it (“well, the £ turns into a ? so we just replace any ? in the filename by a £”).

That’s a good tester.
In my experience coders usually make absolutely terrible testers, testing only for the most inane case, or just positive cases (ie, it does the nominal case without bursting into fire).

Amateur!

Haha! I can’t believe they don’t know about the 3 shells. How silly!

That’s a whole lot more wholesome than most of what goes on in the Stack Overflow arenas.

You don’t need tracks where you’re going!

Glorious. I remember some hilarious nonsense in an API where the devs I worked with hadn’t known they could just use boolean in JSON and had badly implemented it through strings, but this… This is amazing!

That makes so little sense… It detects it’s about to crash then gives up and lets you sort it?
That’s like the opposite of my Audi who does detect I’m about to hit something and gives me either a warning or just actively hits the brakes if I don’t have time to handle it.
If this is true, this is so fucking evil it’s kinda amazing it could have reached anywhere near prod.

Assembly language is not something you would ever really program a game in.

… these days. I assure you all the games my mate wrote on the HP calculator back then were in Assembly. And on the PC I would certainly use C but the core of it, the displaying of pixels and low level catching of input for example, were all in assembly. But yeah, that being said, for the time, everything in assembly was a pretty crazy approach given the tools available on PC.

Sure it’s not normal. He’s chosen the Hermit path. Fair play to him.

Op needs Abby Winters, Erika Lust or Ersties in their life, I reckon.

But that person working mindlessly is not using their brains to think about anything else. Some governments like it that way.