“How green clean was my valley code base then and the code base of them that have gone. Before the technical debt heap rose up, burying everything in its path.”

Past me was a moron sometimes.

Relax, guy!

“Users will completely understand the increased outages if we just eliminate the point-and-click UI that we’ve spent the last 30+ years getting them used to and instead give them a chat bot that they have to repeatedly type detailed instructions to for marginal results at best.”

– Vibe CEO’s Everywhere

I was looking for something on Academy Sports’ website a while back. They replaced their catalog search with an AI chat which really sucks at searching for products.

I gave up and bought what I needed from a different store.

Congratulations! You’ve given birth to a beautiful baby [object Object].

I saw a job posting the other day that had a hard requirement of 7+ years of experience with a specific IDE. It was phrased as an absolute must have.

That’s how you know an organization is totally clueless. TBF, not all IDE’s are created equal but it would be kind of like a construction foreman refusing to hire a anyone who didn’t have 7+ years of experience with DeWalt power tools.

Next week, we will spend 3 days trying to get the product team to pick out a dress only for them to insist that the one that is way too small “will fit” and that the dev can just “alter it real quick and it will be fine.” Even despite loud protests from the dev team that they cannot alter it and it will not be fine.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t fine.

Eons ago, I had a guy bring me a non functioning Compaq desktop and say, “Wull the fan was makin’ a lotta racket so I greased it.”

What he actually meant was, “I sprayed the entire motherboard with WD-40 because I don’t know shit about computers OR lubricants.”

I gave it a bath in electronics cleaner and it actually fired right up after that.

When it’s the right tool, it’s incredibly useful. When it’s the wrong tool, and it often is, it racks up tech debt at an incredible rate.

I once worked with an SVP at a huge corporation that liked to engage in “bike shedding”. This guy is like seven rungs above me on the ladder and is trying to tell me what fields each SQL table should have.

Then we got a new department director who was very good at keeping upper management distracted and off our backs. Lots of people in middle management don’t justify their own salaries but I would argue that he sure did.

deleted by creator

Only if it can also be a microservice.

“Hmmmm. This codebase seems surprisingly lightweight.”

Opens random ‘Helper’ class.

“Oh… Oh boy.”

10 minutes later…

divideMp4IntoNSegmentsOfLengthTButPleaseDoItCorrectlyThisTimePrettyPrettyPleaseJesusFuckWhyAreYouSoFuckingStupid(){
}

I’ve seen plenty of back ends that needed to be destroyed.

“It’s just a temporary fix.”

…Five Years Later…

The painted pole is still there but the clock is gone.

There comes a point, somewhere late in the evening after my ADHD meds have worn off, where it’s more productive to not do any coding. If I do, I’m just going to end up throwing most of it out tomorrow because it’s a bunch of bug littered spaghetti.

Unfortunately, I also solve most of my big problems when I’m not staring at a screen. After which I have to resist the temptation to go work on it so I don’t make a big mess. It’s some kind of cruel irony.

Yeah, I work for one of these companies. Some senior executive quotes some stupid thing Jeff Bezos said about everything being an API and is like “This! We need to do this!”

Nevermind the fact that we’re not AWS and our business has zero overlap with theirs. Nevermind that this mindset turns every service we design into a bloated, unmaintainable nightmare. And, forget the fact that our software division is completely unprofitable due to the checks notes shitty business decisions made by senior management.

No no, we’re going to somehow solve this by latching onto whatever buzzword is all the rage right. Turns out having an MBA doesn’t mean you know shit about running a business.