If Operating Systems Ran The Airlines

UNIX Airways
Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.

Air DOS

Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again, jump on again, and so on ...

Mac Airlines

All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look and act exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently but firmly told that you don't need to know, don't want to know, and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just shut up.

Windows Air

The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.

Windows NT Air

Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.

Linux Air

Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the Seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do what with the seat?"

C'mon people! Spread the word! "The cloud" is not "just someone elses computer", it's a completely different way to compute!

I'm so tired of the oversimplifications done trying to explain the consept. The massive amount of work, sweat and tears put into the orchestration, automation and abstraction layers to deliver truly elastic, scalable and self healing infrastructure, applications and services deserves a fuckload more respect than "just someone elses computer"!

Hosting and time-sharing have been with us almost as long as we have had computers (mainframes etc), but dismissing the effort of thousands upon thousands of devs and ops people to make systems robust and automated enough to literally being able to throw a wrench in the engine any time during production and not have the systems suffer is fucking insane!

The whole reason the term "cloud" is so fitting is not just because it was coined from the cloud-shape used in technical and non-technical drawings and illustrations symbolising the internet, but also because of the illusion of magic it gives the end-user not being able to see "whats inside the music box".

!dev

So the ceiling in our (upstairs) laundry room started leaking. After some troubleshooting, we determined it was the A/C, and not the water pipes. (The house is cheap as hell and fucking stupid.) We did some troubleshooting and research, and tried fixing it ourselves; no luck. Cleaning the pipes from outside: no joy. Cleaning the pipes from inside: no access. The attic is ... small. Maybe half a small closet? and doesn’t give access to fucking anything. The builders must have installed everything before putting up the walls and ceilings, sealing everything off, because there is no access. It’s fucking stupid. Also, the usual maintenance openings aren’t even there either because why the fuck would they be?

But fucking whatever.

We called an a/c repair guy, who never showed. We assumed he was busy (it’s fucking hot), so we called him again the next day; two days later he showed.

Busy. Whatever.

Guy didn’t bring a ladder. Whatever, we have one right there in the hallway because we’ve been trying in vain to fix it.

Guy didn’t bring a wrench of any kind. Guy didn’t bring a screwdriver. Guy didn’t bring a bucket. Guy didn’t bring any pipe. Or any pipe sealant. Or fucking anything but his sagging fucking pants, fat belly, and fat stench. We had to supply everything, which fortunately we had on hand as we were already trying to fix it. Hoorah for being proactive.

Guy said he drained both primary and secondary pans. Somehow. Without access. I’m not even convinced it HAS a secondary pan. Guy said he cleaned out the pipes, too. From inside the house. Without access. Somehow. Maybe he did that from outside, without tools, while I was chasing the brats and someone else was watching the fat bastard. Who knows; I wasn’t with him most of the time.

When he was done, the guy said “pay whatever you think it’s worth” (or whatever). Fine, if he actually cleaned the pipes out and it isn’t leaking anymore, that’s great.

Guy leaves.

We go up to check. AND THE FUCKING A/C IS STILL LEAKING. BUT NOW IT’S FROM BEFORE THE PIPES, TOO. AND HALF AN HOUR LATER, THE LAUDRY ROOM CEILING IS ALSO LEAKING, WHICH MEANS THE PIPES ARE STILL LEAKING.

It turns out the asshole broke the pan.

We call him back, he goes blah blah blah, we send him a video. Drip, drip, drip.

His response?
“The pan must be rusted.” IT’S FUCKING PLASTIC.

“Oh, in that case, it’s probably a rusted coil that’s leaking.”

a) HOW DID YOU NOT KNOW IT WAS FUCKING PLASTIC IF YOU DRAINED IT?

b) THE COILS CARRY FREON, NOT WATER, AND THE A/C IS STILL WORKING. IF THERE WAS A LEAK, SHIT WOULD BE HOT. AND RANK. FREON SMELLS NASTY AND DOESN’T CAUSE IT TO RAIN IN THE FUCKING HOUSE.

REPLACING A COIL IS ALSO A $2000 FUCKING REPAIR.

THE FAT BASTARD PROBABLY BROKE THE PAN INTENTIONALLY JUST TO UPSELL. I WANT TO FUCKING MURDER HIS LYING FUCKING FACE OFF.

It’s possible he didn’t break the pan intentionally, so I’ll tentatively remove that from his charges. BUT TO FUCKING LIE?

LIE AND DIE, FUCKER.

I just lost faith in the entire management team of the company I'm working for.

Context: A mid sized company with
- a software engineering departmant consisting of several teams working on a variety of products and projects.
- a project management department with a bunch of project managers that mostly don't know shit about software development or technical details of the products created by engineering.

Project management is unhappy about the fact that software engineering practically never sticks to the plan regarding cost, time and function that was made at the very beginning of the project. Oh really? Since when does waterfall project management work well? As such they worked out a great idea how to improve the situation: They're going to implement *Shopfloor Management*!

Ever heared about Shopfloor Management? Probably not, because it is meant for improving repetitive workflows like assembly line work. In a nutshell it works by collecting key figures, detecting deviation in these numbers and performing targeted optimization of identified problem areas. Of course, there is more to Shopfloor Management, but that refers largely to the way the process just described is to be carried out (using visualisation boards, treating the employee well, let them solve the actual problem instead of management, and so on...). In any case, this process is not useful for highly complex and hard-to-predict workflows like software development.

That's like trying to improve a book author's output by measuring lines of text per day and fixing deviations in observed numbers with a wrench.

Why the hell don't they simply implement something proven like Scrum? Probably because they're affraid of losing control, affraid of self managed employees, affraid of the day everybody realizes that certain management layers are useless overhead that don't help in generating value but only bloat.

Fun times ahead!

How my year has gone so far...

Management: Bobby, we are replacing your old hammer.
Me: Ok cool.
Management: Well actually there's so much going on...here is a wrench instead.
Me: But, this isn't a hammer.
Management: Yes we are aware but we are busy and cannot buy a hammer for a several more months.
Me: How the fuck am I suppose to hammer nails with this?
Management: Oh gosh you are right. That sounds difficult. We will grind down one side of it so you have a flat surface to hammer in those nails.

Management: Oh and by the way, those nails are super important so don't screw anything up.

So... After reading up on the theoretical stuff earlier, I decided to make a real AI that can identify handguns and decide whether it's a revolver or a semiautomatic with 95 percent accuracy...

Well, basically, I been browsing my local gun store's online store for four hours for training data, killed a Mac mini while first training the system and I think I ended on the domestic terrorism watch list... Was that black sedan always there?

Anyway... It's working fairly accurate, my monkey wrench is a revolver by the way.

Isn't AI development a wonderful excuse for all kinds of shit?

"why do you have 5000 pictures of guns on your computer?" - "AI development"

"why did you wave around a gun in front of your web cam" - "AI development"

"why is there a 50 gram bag in your desk?" - "AI development"

Hmm... yeah well... I think it might work. I could have picked a less weird testing project, but... No.

Dear IT troll: I am not some idiot user. I FUCKING WRITE SOFTWARE! I actually CREATE CAPABILITY! I don't create "content", I'm not some fucking suit that pumps out PowerPoint/Excel/Email all day long. I don't need to be handed a consumers screwdriver, hammer, and wrench set. I need to be able to set up the technological equivalent of MY OWN FUCKING FORGE AND ANVIL! Do you get it? Do you understand me? Give me administrator access and go the fuck away. While you're at it, please quarantine this pile of silicon onto a limited access network if it makes you feel better. My development system doesn't need to connect to the wealth of bullshit in your precious little dumbed down corporate Wiki-wannabe Sharepoint system. Keep my creative space away from Test and Prod networks while you're at it. Just give me the goddamed tools I need to do my work and fuck off!

I drew the on-call rotation for Christmas this year. I really hope I get that job offer so I can throw a wrench into the entire rotation.

Best: Got my first dev job a month before I graduated my bootcamp. Was hired till rona layoffs started happening. Found another dev job 4 months later, and just received a promotion from said job just before going on holiday leave.

Worst: Being laid off for those 4 months. Sure unemployment + stimulus got me through financially, but mentally and emotionally I was starting to crack. I had thought I broke through the barrier with that first job and was going to be set. That layoff threw a wrench in my whole plan. In those 4 months unemployed I developed some imposter syndrome. Regardless, I plugged along with my side projects. One company was really impressed with one of them and was using a similar stack for an upcoming project, so luckily they ended up hiring me. Confidence restored.

Is just me or being a developer has become a complete nightmare?
I mean, I never expected when I got into it to have a simple life in the first place, it's a fucking problems solving job.
But heck, I'm in the field from more than 12 years and something has definitely changed for the worse. Believe me I am just seeking for a general consensus not approval or anything, but it doesn't feel anything like 10 years ago.

I have worked with .NET mostly in all his sauces from aspx, wpf, up to today .NET 10 and C#13 and in the meanwhile it happened that I needed to do tech assistance, code in exoteric shit, use arduinos and raspberries, use perl, java, turn into full stack with databases, devops and shit.

Each year it's worse, the "developer" word gets more and more blurred word to say "the one who must know everything".
I'm asked to know docker, kubernetes, kafka, CI/CD and devop shit, web dev, to get ertifications, to learn how AI works to the level of learning again matht to do matrix interpolations, to get on data science, python, numpy, pandas, pytorch and shit, to know every OS, to know about networking because APIs now have to use rest, a single verb for every action, because if routers and new communication protocols break you have to know and figure out why.

Not to mention that marketing and sales guy shove up the big customers ass every new tecnology to make our work look like bling-a-ling top notch 1% developer stuff that always use latest bleeding edge technology and you're forced to learn new immature frameworks every 2 months or so (latest being various javascript/typescript diagramming libraries).

Every idiot feels entitled to puke out a new framework or supersets of existing languages. I lost count how many supersets css has that I had to peek and learn lol.

Every fucking simple software I did from scratch and designed by myself, web portals for big pharma were much simple than whatever PM i get assigned to are and guess what, I published it and fixed ofc some bugs, but most bugs are related to customer unstable datasets and well, I never had bugs after the first few weeks, except once every few months and nothing serious.

The fucking things they let me do now are hypercomplicated and I spend days fixing other people bugs and we get some hair pulling structural problems becuase they shove in all they can (mediator patterns are a must): kafka, docker, messagebus, whatever javascript clusterfuck they can, patchworks of html and css blurred out in layers of hierarchical scss or sass, slapped into angular (the most immature and crappy shit in js) that has all of his hidden ways to bury and hide DOM (ng-deep: anyone? :host anyone?).

And it's all like this. Whenever I put hands everyone wants to do his little frankeinstein experiment cooking togheter in a cauldron a shit ton of different stuff, overcomplicated patterns.

it's a challenge at shooting flies with bazookas.

I'm really tired of technology at all, not only for my jobs. This fucking trend is a plague spread everywhere and now, since everyone has to deal with it, everything is unstable.

In my daily usage of a smartphone app crashes a lot or have weird troubles, slowness, websites are pretending to be full blown app with this shitty SPA trend and are filled with bugs and incompatibilites.

Basically every tech tool we use is 100% more prone to bugs than 10 years ago.I'm really thinking to find a simple job like baker or shit and get an old phone that just can call and send SMS.
I need to get out of tech for a few years to get back my sanity.

This is not a problem-solving job anymore.
10 years ago I needed to study too but once I got the tools in my hands the job was fun, you got a magic wrench and sky was the limit.

Now you got to fucking learn a ton of bullshit everyday and it's not like you see a end on it, everyday people push out new unstable and bugged shit waiting for devs to be guinea pigs for them. You gotta learn a ton of stuff of which 3/4 will be useless/obsolete/broken and considered inefficient the next month.

jeeeeeez

i think we're experiencing the downsides of a decadent civilization without the decadence heh however much sense that makes.

we're not really progressing or evolving we're on the path of gradual stagnation an de-evolution.

I tell you getting rid of these gross fucks would be a nice step in the right direction. I used to think like hillbillies and the like were gross. Well I don't really want to go into this again, but how to make people want to learn and want to live instead of just forcing everyone to just wait till they die and fooling dumb young people into thinking this is somehow going to benefit them continuously because its the lesser of two unnecessary evils ?

Its like trying to fix a hive mind with one wrench, you can only brain part of it the rest remains.

I just listened to the same oddly convincing fake jesus people speak about their day, before wandering by their poor younger coworkers or victims or whatever they were.

Not only can I not download the attachments in bulk from my Outlook account, but the download button opens a new f*cking tab where I have to click download again after it fully loads the whole page. I'd gladly use this shit software if for every attached file I download a wrench would tighten on the genitals of the idiot that design it.