What is a coder's worst nightmare? (2016)(quora.com)
quora.com
What is a coder's worst nightmare? (2016)
https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-coders-worst-nightmare
44 comments
It's a continous, demoralizing nightmare called scrum in an administration oriented company.
I know this is urgent, but it won't be finished before end of sprint, so it will have to wait for next grooming session.
shudders
shudders
SAFE looking at scrum affectuously from afar...
* Constantly being asked for estimates while requirements are not clear.
* Having 6 "highest priority" projects at the same time.
* Other functions I depend on not doing their job on time but my timeline doesn't change
* A VP falling in love with a technology he read about in a Gartner report
* Having 6 "highest priority" projects at the same time.
* Other functions I depend on not doing their job on time but my timeline doesn't change
* A VP falling in love with a technology he read about in a Gartner report
Oh gosh, I have all of this going on right now. My CTO read about microservices and now everything has to be in a microservice.
Nothing wrong with that, but for a small development team there is a lot to make that work (infrastructure as code is another requirement), especially when the project timeline is tight energy when building as a monolith.
Nothing wrong with that, but for a small development team there is a lot to make that work (infrastructure as code is another requirement), especially when the project timeline is tight energy when building as a monolith.
You can sell to him that microservices are nice, but nano services? even better! (your classes are already nano services calling each other ;)
Do your microservices talk to the same database?
Things out of my control. Spending days tracking down a bug only to find that there is no mitigation other than modifying some upstream library. Bonus terror: deploying the changes would involve numerous clients also out of the team's control. Cue weeks and months of begging to make the upgrades.
(Edit: one more:) Deploying changes that don't have an easy rollback mechanism. E.g. a risky change involving apps or browser cookies, and both deploy and rollback take e.g. a day.
(Edit: one more:) Deploying changes that don't have an easy rollback mechanism. E.g. a risky change involving apps or browser cookies, and both deploy and rollback take e.g. a day.
Was meant to link to this answer: https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-coders-worst-nightmare/answe...
"The ex-grad student had poisoned the compiler to poison itself when it was recompiled"
I had something similar to this story happen to a PHP site on shared hosting in the early 2000s that at the time seemed like some kind of cursed magic it was obfuscated so well and reasserted itself every time I tried to edit it out. Luckily replacing all the source files solved it (though the breach itself was a deeper issue). I can't imagine if the problem had gone to the level of the PHP interpreter itself or even deeper how long it would have taken me to find it back then.
I had something similar to this story happen to a PHP site on shared hosting in the early 2000s that at the time seemed like some kind of cursed magic it was obfuscated so well and reasserted itself every time I tried to edit it out. Luckily replacing all the source files solved it (though the breach itself was a deeper issue). I can't imagine if the problem had gone to the level of the PHP interpreter itself or even deeper how long it would have taken me to find it back then.
Compiler tampering is a species of malevolence I try not to think about so I can continue to code in a somewhat sane matter, lest I crumble like a lovecraftian protagonist
JIRA. The first true Eldritch horror to reveal itself in the modern age.
There's worse than Jira. Jenkins for example. I guess Jira is notably bad given it's a commercial product that is really bad at its core purpose.
For me, it's not so much JIRA itself, it's having work with control freaks who actively enjoy being an admin of it.
(I can't stand all the modal dialogs and lack of proper Epic -> Feature -> Story -> Task structure, however)
(I can't stand all the modal dialogs and lack of proper Epic -> Feature -> Story -> Task structure, however)
Obligatory: https://ifuckinghatejira.com/
And with it: middle management.
Manager that is:
a) Non-technical.
b) Thinks they are technical.
c) Makes technical decisions and tries to ram them through no matter what the technical team members advise.
Managers, your job is people engineering. Leave the actual engineering to the engineers.
a) Non-technical.
b) Thinks they are technical.
c) Makes technical decisions and tries to ram them through no matter what the technical team members advise.
Managers, your job is people engineering. Leave the actual engineering to the engineers.
The thing you were making was hacked and all data leaked, due to a security error on your part.
Getting a new manager who lies to their reports and their manager.
A: Inheriting a mission-critical legacy code base that is written by some cowboy coder who has left the company and who is in no way available to answer your questions.
Then your manager and skips question why everything moves so slowly in development time, you always repeat the same answers. You start to die a little inside from repeating yourself and they start to be suspicious because nothing changes.
Meanwhile the codebase takes 12 minutes to compile a 1 line change. Each time you compile you forget why you liked programming to begin with and you spiral into an abyss where you think the only solution is to quit and start a hobby farm.
Meanwhile the codebase takes 12 minutes to compile a 1 line change. Each time you compile you forget why you liked programming to begin with and you spiral into an abyss where you think the only solution is to quit and start a hobby farm.
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Being told what to make, how to do it, oh and hurry up.
I like being told what to make. Clearly defined requirements of a problem that I have the skillset to solve - that's my dream, not my nightmare.
My nightmare tends to be times when I'm told to make something that includes x, y, and z technologies, but just make it flexible enough to handle whatever problem we think we might want to solve with our vague mission statement. (Oh, and hurry up!)
My nightmare tends to be times when I'm told to make something that includes x, y, and z technologies, but just make it flexible enough to handle whatever problem we think we might want to solve with our vague mission statement. (Oh, and hurry up!)
Wonder if they clawed back any of the billabe hours. Seems like a pretty clear case of hate crime / criminal computer trespass.
Inept Product Owners or Program Managers
Devs/engineers' skills are technical. we can design and build you something. Why are our managers and directors okay with Product Owners or Program Managers farming their jobs onto us?
Prioritization, feature design, product design, writing product specifications, writing acceptance criteria, creating stories... why is a firmware engineer assigned to these things? bruh, what do these people even do anymore?
If you dont know what we want, lets create a plan to figure it out. Writing 2 sentence AC and rejecting iterations until time runs out is NOT A PLAN.
Devs/engineers' skills are technical. we can design and build you something. Why are our managers and directors okay with Product Owners or Program Managers farming their jobs onto us?
Prioritization, feature design, product design, writing product specifications, writing acceptance criteria, creating stories... why is a firmware engineer assigned to these things? bruh, what do these people even do anymore?
If you dont know what we want, lets create a plan to figure it out. Writing 2 sentence AC and rejecting iterations until time runs out is NOT A PLAN.
oh to return myself into the comforting cloak of nightmares, soothing in their unreal fantasy, but for the ringing pager of a 24 hour on call rotation after product rushed a feature out last Friday
"Hell is other coders" -- Jean-Paul Sartre
Do you have abit of time? It should be quick...
People enthusiastically promoting and using languages that are basically corporate Trojan Horses to extinguish open source in the long run.
Not being able to find a job?
Timetable.
sending another customer's data to the wrong customer.
One company I worked at literally gave every customer (high-touch B2B, not an untenable customer count) their own database to reduce that risk and serve as a crude sharding strategy for horizontal scaling.
That is a legitimate strategy. It's being done in many products, often with SQLite or similar embedded databases, synchronized between devices and backend systems. It has the wonderful property that some fault of one database does not impact others.
I recall some major GitHub outages not too long ago and learning that they'd built the system on one globe-spanning distributed MySQL database, that fell over a couple times. A GitHub designed around separate databases for projects wouldn't have that failure mode. Obviously that would create problems on the backend for aggregation, billing, etc., but those are mostly "you" problems, as opposed to the "me" problem when you topple the monster database and take away my repos.
They've since had to isolate problem children to separate databases, away from the hoi polloi in the big "primary" database[1]. So I suppose I wasn't wrong.
https://github.blog/2023-12-07-upgrading-github-com-to-mysql...
I recall some major GitHub outages not too long ago and learning that they'd built the system on one globe-spanning distributed MySQL database, that fell over a couple times. A GitHub designed around separate databases for projects wouldn't have that failure mode. Obviously that would create problems on the backend for aggregation, billing, etc., but those are mostly "you" problems, as opposed to the "me" problem when you topple the monster database and take away my repos.
They've since had to isolate problem children to separate databases, away from the hoi polloi in the big "primary" database[1]. So I suppose I wasn't wrong.
https://github.blog/2023-12-07-upgrading-github-com-to-mysql...
> That is a legitimate strategy
Yeah, definitely. Sorry if my post came across as saying anything else. The word "crude" simply referred to the facts that it's not complicated (which is good, one of the technique's strong suites tbh), and it's not complicated in a way that throws away parameters you might actually care about and which a more advanced strategy could consider (e.g., if you have one really big customer then you have to amend the sharding strategy).
It introduced its own set of costs (those "you" problems you mentioned, like aggregation and billing), but I think it was the right choice.
Yeah, definitely. Sorry if my post came across as saying anything else. The word "crude" simply referred to the facts that it's not complicated (which is good, one of the technique's strong suites tbh), and it's not complicated in a way that throws away parameters you might actually care about and which a more advanced strategy could consider (e.g., if you have one really big customer then you have to amend the sharding strategy).
It introduced its own set of costs (those "you" problems you mentioned, like aggregation and billing), but I think it was the right choice.
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