Company: We were able to save a couple of dollars by purchasing an entire fleet of ipads instead of iphones through our supplier!

Dev: Our users walk around an industrial facility carrying things all day, how will they carry these devices now that they no longer fit in their pockets.

Company: We can get them backpacks!

Dev: …

Dev: did you at least buy protective cases for them?

Company: We have to save money! Don’t worry we told the users not to drop them. Plus none of the old iphones were ever broken so this is a non-issue.

Dev: The iPhones are in cases, they drop them quite a bit.

Company: Oh, well they shouldn’t be doing that!

** They proceeded to buy the cheapest knockoff cases I’ve ever seen. At least one ipad is smashed a week now, backpacks aren’t used because of lack on convenience. All this in the name of seeming to shave off a couple bucks for a one time purchase that didn’t even need to be made, iphones were working perfectly fine. Meanwhile there are glaring issues at the company getting ignored because they get themselves continually distracted by unhelpful pet projects that address things that are not broken and often make them worse.

Grandad showing me a commodore 64 that he had gotten for my uncles. shit was legit, had a bunch of games and cool shit in it. He also showed me BASIC (not programming or anything, but that it was a thing in it and the booklet explaining how to do games and stuff)

Mind you, the commodore was way beyond my years, I am a 91 baby, but he had it and kept it working and in good shape, the booklet was pristine (none of my uncles wanted to fk with that, neither did my dad).

He only showed me the machine because my mother had more vision that a lot of my family members at the time, asking him to let me use the computers that he had because she was sure (just as he) that computers were the future and a good educational tool for me.

Mom played a big ass role in me getting my comp sci degree, she was the one that celebrated it the most with my wife (wife pushed me through that degree to be honest) and my gdad is dead now, but he would have thought it would be cool to have another engineer in the family (he was an industrial engineer)

I've really begun to resent working with an organization where everyone above the team has a complete industrial mindset. Everyone seems to look for someone to blame, covering their own asses, and that leads to gateways and checks to make sure the quality is good before showing anything to anyone. Typically the agile mindset accepts failure, learns from it and moves on, continuously improving. Blame should not be a part of it. Failure should be a lesson on how to improve. Damn some people are just dinosaurs.

All that I have been ranting about this year are first world problems. Not only because politics is the only taboo on devrant, but also because I have been making too much compromise again.

It seems that most of the money is paid in projects for industrial companies, marketing, and useless products. So I ended up doing only some work for impact projects and ecological startups, taking time to learn new technology, and otherwise waste my potential to make a change by doing web development for well paying companies.

Still better than the years before, when I was an employee. Corporate culture sucks, at least it seems so at most companies in Germany and probably also America and even more so in other countries?! As a freelancer, at least I have the choice not to agree to any offer. And I did say no to many offers this year.

But still ...

New year resolution: prioritize customers with a purpose to make the world a better place. Make less compromise. Stop complaining about bullshit tech and just get things done instead.

Building a development department from the ground up is exhausting AF i mean all the research, trying to find best industrial standards to us, best practices, main tech stack to use, working on projects and trying not to get fired

I've become so cynical during the pandemic. Got a message from some HR lady in LinkedIn, and while I am in no way looking for a new job, I looked up the company. They make one type of industrial devices and sell them around Europe. Rather low turnover.

I'm a pretty high skilled web developer / architect. I build highly scalable web based applications using cloud platforms. The message was obviously just copy pasted and sent to various people, but the initial reaction in my mind was to ask her where did she get the idea in her small little head to ask me to work for her shitty company instead of the one I'm working for now which has over 500 expert developers in various fields, incredibly interesting projects that you can take your pick from and in general one of the greatest work cultures ever with no corporate bullshit. Were you gonna pay me triple the money or what? because I still wouldn't do it.

I just messaged her that I'm not interested atm.

Agile ways of working has us do more customer collaboration, but I just despise talking to business owners who are so stuck in their ways of thinking and working. Their opinion is that they're reached such a high level of efficiency, that learning new things and changing their way of thinking now is useless. Especially if they come from an industrial background. Often it takes a lot in me to not just explode in their face when I hear them claim how they know what's best for the product, while we developers try to advocate that we need user feedback to know what the outcome of something is.