I tested our anonymous surveys. I said some very blunt criticisms against two VPs by name. The one for his treatment against a fellow dev (TL;DR) and the other (our dept VP) for tolerating it. 50% sure our dept VP knew who wrote it (I've been vocal before about the other VP's toxic behavior against our dept) and 100% I would be fired. Not for the comments, but for 'no longer being a company fit'.

@kiki > "Did you try a mosin nagant?"

I have one in my closet. Bought it for $50, bought almost a thousand rounds (~$75 at the time the ammo was almost given away) and haven't fire a single round yet.

"I should take this one out....but there is my AR....sad...lonely...AR it is."

Friend says it kicks like a mule. Not as bad as a Mauser, but not as accurate. I don't know what he used as a benchmark. He's one of those guys who shoots at 300+ yards, so my definition of 'accuracy' is probably different than his.

I hit the target...my weapon is accurate.

He has half-inch grouping at 300 yards "This weapons is a POS!!!"

@Oktokolo > "It is a nice rifle"

It is. I have had the opportunity to shoot a lot of different firearms (50 cal BMG, full autos, etc), and I'd say the Garand was my favorite. Its big, heavy, and damn accurate. There is a reason why the US military picked that rifle.

@msdsk > "Instead of trying to address the problem of homelessness"

I don't know the right answer. These folks have no interests in helping themselves (the city does have programs). Recently, the city cleared out 2 large homeless encampments with the usual suspects protesting, and as usual, offered no solution (just shouting)

One 'solution' was to build a 'community' with houses and facilities for the homeless outside of city limits. When they couldn't easily beg at street corners and steal from surrounding businesses, their representative rejected the proposal.

The individual who manages the homeless problem in this city makes $80,000+ a year, do you think he has any interest in 'solving' the problem?

@b2plane > "teachers parents grandparents etc and everyone kept telling me to go to school get a college degree and you'll get a job without problems."

It wasn't a lie, for them at that time. Consider their teachers, parents, and grandparents. My great-great relatives lived in abject poverty. The only way to get out of poverty was going to school, learning a trade, and/or starting your own business.

At at time, going to school was almost a 100% guarantee you could get a job.

Now, I tell my 16 year old daughter to only go to college if she wants to (and/or her desired occupation requires it, like a veterinarian)

Starting her own business (which she is leaning towards), a 4+ year degree is a waste of time and money.

@b2plane When you control the printing press, you can't default on the debt.

All that 'oh no, the debt ceiling!!' is political theater. They know it, rest of the 99% doesn't.

Proof? Nobody, NOBODY blinked spending trillions on the great 'Inflation Reduction Act', money to Ukraine, etc.

Suggest solving the homeless problem? Universal health care? "We don't have the money....THINK OF THE DEBT!!"

Now, if big parts of the world decide "Screw the dollar, gold press Latinum for everybody!", then we might have a problem.

@aviophile > "Isn’t it common sense?"

One would think so, but not here. I don't know 100%, but I would bet we've passed on great people simply because they didn't have a degree or it didn't come from a 'prestigious' college.

In our local MeetUp group, there is a dev who got his CS experience in the Navy (no formal degree) and would talk about how difficult it was just to get an interview. It's the whole "Rambo" speech about being responsible for million dollar combat systems, but can't get a job creating a shopping cart.

We've hired folks with their master's in computer science I wouldn't trust putting McNuggets in the little boxes.

@retoor And there is more.

These were nice, state-of-the-art buses. Comfy seats, fully handicap accessible, free wifi, and the city decided to 'help the poor' by offering free+unlimited bus passes for those who qualified. That, of course, included the homeless. It wouldn't be unusual to for 10~20 homeless folks to go round and round until they got kicked off (which was viewed as racist and bus drivers getting fired) and/or simply switched buses until the buses stopped running their routes. Winter time was especially bad. No bathroom faculties on these buses, so there was a problem with individuals urinating on the floor, defecating in the seats, and general harassment of paying customers.

As one can guess, 6 buses go to 5, routes are closed, 5 goes to 4, more closed routes, etc. You'd never know because the local news outlets wouldn't report it, only the local conservative radio stations would report the current state of the system.

> "Wake up early. Read books. Workout"

What if the 'secret' is that simple?

https://amazon.com/Baby-Steps-Milli...

@retoor > Insta is blocked at work, I'll take a look when the empire isn't watching.

Yea, the WTFs were never ending. Our local newspapers would have full page spreads showing the 'dangers' of the scooters in the middle of sidewalks, handicap spots, etc (which I'm sure was a small problem) and did not fail to mention Bird is one of those 'evil' billion dollar corporations with no ties to the local community. Coal generated electricity to charge the scooters was harming the environment, no accountability for the safe disposal of batteries, etc..etc.

Next, a full page ad promoting the new environmental friendly natural gas powered buses nobody asked for, construction+expansion of new downtown garages, etc. Funny they didn't mention the near 5% increase in taxes for all this.. yea...funny.

Fast forward ~5 years, the bus system (6 or so buses) is down to one bus, and using one of the original diesel engine buses.

@retoor > "Removed from my city already."

Same here (college town)

Typical liberal/socialist event cycle

- City complains about too many cars, parking, etc (blaming the university, save the environment etc).

- Bird scooters come in, almost overnight, parking problems *disappear*. Even made the front page.

- Bird scooters everywhere, tax free, and city realizes, nobody is taking the bus, paying parking meters, city garages, etc. Decide that scooters are a safety hazard and ban the company. Photos of city workers purposely putting the scooters in the middle of sidewalks, etc. and grandstanding "Look! Scooters are unsafe!!". College town, lots of phones+cameras, not sure how the city thought they could get away with it

- Public backlash, car+parking problems are back, city decides to charge Bird $100 for every scooter, a special 'use-tax', and a big fine for every scooter in their special 'no scooter' zones

- Bird decides this city is too expensive to operate and leaves

@Wisecrack > "But you're telling me you really do enjoy blazor?"

Yes, for our internal apps and as compared to my experience with React and Angular. Nothing wrong with either, I liked those too, but being able to have a single code base (C#) has been a big productivity boost.

Had to do some workarounds for 'Platform not supported' exceptions, but I'd say 90% of our core library works in Blazor (logging, security, and various utilities). Having an in-house GUI genius helps (not me!).

Our public website however will likely always be 'normal'. React, lots and lots of javascript, etc. Our web devs are biased and territorial with their toolset.

Ex. We were on Angular 1...not kidding...up until a few years ago when the "Angular now and forever!!" devs quit and we hired fresh folks.

@Wisecrack > "And isn't rolling your own security considered a red flag?"

Yes, but it is the 'company way'. Recently found out there was a decision that not every employee would be getting an Active Directory account and those hourly employees were logging in via a backup method of SQLServer authentication (employee # and a 4 digit passcode, TL;DR).

DBAs brought it to our attention ('guys, we're not going to maintain your security') and in a couple of days our in-house genius developed his own encryption of storing end-user passwords and full stack authentication and authorization (look up AzMan).

Even has an internal message framework that notifies any+all logged in apps (client side, web app, etc) when a password changes/expires. Ex. I change my password, if I'm logged in to a web app, it auto-logs me out (forces re-authentication).

Again, he did this all within a couple of days (testing, deploy-able docker containers, and hooks into nomad container orchestration).

Here is a good 'question of the week', what are some weird/odd/funny company 'rules' enforced by your HR?

Pre-covid, for our annual holiday party, there is a no dance rule. We have music, one year we had a live band, but HR made it clear...no dancing. No reasoning, nothing ever happened (I've been to most of them over the past 20+ years), that's the rule.

@Wisecrack > "a *good* experience with blazor?"

So far, very good. We're not writing games or anything crazy. We're starting out with migrating SharePoint 'apps' into the modern world.

Security (authentication and authorization) has been the biggest hurdle. Nothing specific to Blazor, just soooo many different ways to do it. Of course, the 'company way' of doing things does not fit in the current security standards, so we wrote our own. Makers of rube goldberg machines would be proud.

Never, ever get rid of that laptop. Even if you have to rip the screen off and pay to store it. Why?

<25 years into the future, cleaning the garage>

Kid: "Hey dad, why are you keeping this old laptop with all those dumb looking stickers? I'll throw it in the Fusion-matic"

You: "WAIT!! Thats...thats...omg...I forgot..."

Kid: "You OK? Why are you crying? Mom! Dad's being a baby about stupid things again."

> "I really hate Atlassian"

You can tell their API has been a mash up and victim of "too many chefs in the kitchen". I can't imagine the quagmire those poor devs have to deal with.

@MammaNeedHummus Maybe it was a stupid question to begin with.

The individual already had the 'correct' answers in their head so no matter how ChatGTP answered, ChatGTP would be 'wrong'.

I had to look up "noided".

@Lensflare > "It depends but trying to avoid unnecessary dependencies"

Agree 100%. Keep things simple.

It's all 'open source' around here, he knows it won't cause a problem.

It almost falls into the camp of genius that when they see what's going on 'under the hood', copy the behavior and brag how you decreased the dependency/complexity.

Ex. Once had a dev that wrote his own parallel for-each library because he found a concurrency 'bug' when he reversed engineered the MS code base (this was before MS open sourced everything). Really low level .net thread stuff he figured out, and it worked (we didn't encounter the bug), but the bug was eventually fixed and his library had a bigger bug he blamed on how the devs were using his library. We stopped using his lib.

If you're curious, the bug was if you searched for product X on our site, you would sometimes see product Y, searched by another customer.

> "I feel like there is no one waiting for me"

Having a 'why' is a powerful motivator and having someone you love and loves you back is a huge 'why' to strive for. Not always perfect, messy sometimes, but worth it.

@Root > "Not true in woke companies, unfortunately. All they see is skin color / minority status, devotion to diversity, and sucking up."

I never discount Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #33, "It never hurts to suck up to the boss."

I'm sorry, I can't imagine the crazy nonsense you see on a daily basis.

My company is rather conservative, and woke nonsense is never brought up.

During an ISO audit (were our docs/processes equitable and fairly accessible) and national+state quality award reviews, being diverse/woke was a top line item. We claimed privacy reasons (which is valid), and didn't disclose any info that would satisfy or anger the woke mob. We were worried by not disclosing that info would disqualify us, but luckily it didn't (we got the awards)

@horus > "Getting promotion has nothing to do with working hard"

And your ability (or inability) to be the 'yes man'

Don't put your value in what other's think of you. Always do your best regardless of getting or not getting a promotion, raise, or whatever.

Integrity is what people will see in you, not your title.

@lorentz > "Any argument involving what is and isn't industry standard tech in the web space is invalid"

Amen.

Pick a tool, does it work? You like it? Users happy? You win.

@Burgundxyz > "we could use Y to get it done"

Getting a little bit of that adopting Blazor for our internal web apps. Fortunately our department mgr approval process has been "If I won't be yelled at for you using X technology, go for it."

As time goes on, I'm sure there will be grumbles of 'we should be using React' and 'industry standard is Angular' will be heard.

Wow, it has a name. For us it is currently:

- Refusing to keep nuget packages updated because 'one time long ago, updating X nuget package introduced a bug'

- Creating a scheduled task to run every minute to create a backup json file for a web service in case the backing database goes down. Contents? Maybe 20 records. Argument of 'that's a little extreme, isn't it?' was met it "BUT WHAT IF THE DATABASE GOES DOWN!!!". We don't do this for anything else.

- Forcing a re-check of a JWT security token *every minute* (is it still valid?, not-expired?, etc) and creating an infrastructure to renew that token. Argument of, "if JWT becomes invalid, simply request a new one?", was met with "NO! THE DEVELOPERS WOULD HAVE TO WRITE CODE TO HANDLE IT!!!"

What's your example?

@netikras > "53 and already thinking about retirement?"

Only from a 401K standpoint and making sure the investments are where they should be.

My wife has made it crystal clear I'm not 'retiring' until they pour the dirt on my grave. Even then she might be shouting "Hey lazy ass!...why can't you shovel your own dirt!" :)

I'm OK with that. My dad, my grandpa, father-in-law (and other family members) never really 'retired'. They work/worked because the want to, not because they have to.

My dad is in his 80s and ran the local VFW for years. Coordinating funerals, driving, riding the 'Rolling Thunder', helped with 'Honor Flights', etc. He even still mows the lawn.

Can almost guarantee that's how he's going to go. He's going to be helping someone do something he shouldn't and I'll get "the call".

@b2plane > "Why would you get fired for being too old?"

Outside a few upper mgrs (and of course, the senior leaders), I'm probably one of the highest paid employees in the company (and I'm not in mgmt). I've been with the company for over 25 years and received performance bonuses on top of the normal cost-of-living adjustments which has not gone noticed by managers getting paid less. In my previous rants, 'John' (the dept mgr) especially wanted me out for that and many more reasons.

I wouldn't be fire for being too old, that's illegal, I would be fired for no longer being a culture fit, I wore navy socks, or any other reason they want that doesn't violate the law.

While there are *a lot* of good things, they do tend to have an itchy trigger finger when it comes to firing someone for no reason.

Ex. they fired our Helpdesk mgr due to 'right sizing', then 3 months had to hire another mgr because the dept was in chaos.

@Oktokolo > " Pretty sad that John had been fired over what essentially is an illness"

Yes and no. John was very toxic towards more and more individuals as time went on. I was on top of his 'hit list', primarily (of many reasons) for introducing agile methodologies (he was a stanch waterfall guy).

TL;DR, when other teams and other departments starting adopting agile, quality went up, project timelines went down, and he began to lash out to non-IS management when they pushed back on his 'we need to have 500 meetings and 1,000 pages of word docs before we write one line of code!' approach.

We believe the 'straw that broke the camel's back' was when the CEO came into our area to ask a dev a question. The way the story went was he told the CEO 'From now on, if you have a project question, you come to me first!'.

Nobody was sad when John was fired. It took everything I had not to sing out loud "Ding-dong, the witch is dead, the witch is dead."

@Oktokolo > "I would never leave a cake just sit there without at least putting a big warning about its purpose next to it."

Since that incident, HR now always prints a 'For event X, do not touch' sign on anything they leave out.

Although, the unwritten rule 'No name is fair game' is in full force.

One of our accountants left one of those big/bulk boxes of ice cream sandwiches from Sam's in the freezer 'unmarked'. I think it lasted two days. Rightfully upset, but the odd thing she said was with that much ice cream, one would think you could walk around and find the wrappers in an area's trash can. Nope, these guys (or gals) hid their tracks.