Every 2 months without fail:

Manager: I don’t understand what the point of writing tests is. They only ever pass and when they fail we just fix them so they pass again! It’s completely redundant!!! An exercise in absolute futility!

Dev: …

I mean he's not wrong.
Fixing bugs. Making more bugs. It's all futile. He just has the wrong attitude about it

He might like a more functional approach; move business logic to the bottom of your architecture and I/O to the top. Unit test the business logic and integration test the I/O.

Unit tests are for the developer while they are changing things. Ideally, managers never see them fail. So of course they look futile from their point of view. Some dev should explain the actual purpose of the tests to that manager.

Dear manager, why do you get up in the morning?

It's futile.

Hey, manager. Why do you look both ways before crossing the street? If there’s a car, you wait and then go, and if there isn’t you also go. The result is the same so it’s completely redundant. It’s an exercise in futility. So next time just don’t bother with the looking step, and just go.

@Root 😂 I love it.

@iSwimInTheC @Root I mean in fairness the fact that roads have cars on them is an architecture issue that should have been dealt with at the design phase 😂

@boombodies yes, you should have been digging more tunnels for ages!

@boombodies public transport aka Tram?

He’s not wrong. It’s all futile, everything

Do you ever update dependencies? I had to do that for a year on a system without tests. Now that is a futile waste of time. Reading every changelog (if it has it else check out the commits) and than test affected parts. Some updates are fundamental so they hit a lot and have to manually go over everything. Don't even want to know how much of my life I lost there.

“Manager: I don’t understand”
Props for honesty.

From the manager perspective, they fix tests, not bugs and errors in the code

That reveals a lot of his way of thinking

I don't understand the point of managers. They're supposed to make sure devs do their job, but devs will write code even when a manager's not around. The end result is the same, managers are redundant, having them is futile

@lungdart shitty managers, sure.

But the better ones take care of a lot more things so you devs can fuck around and write code.

... Red tape as one example. :)

@IntrusionCM red tape like fighting for TDD against the product and feature teams?

@lungdart

Red tape like... Recruiting process, organizing your work materials, licenses for programs, device management, getting funding, managing time budgets, ensuring research & development doesn't get chopped....

There's a lot depending on size of company and type of company.

Worst is dealing with government.

Getting government funding e.g. for research projects, like machine learning or events like local / regional hackathons - lots of networking, paper, legal terms. Not fun.

@IntrusionCM woosh

@lungdart 🥞 🤔?