Regarding calling you outside of work hours:

You can probably argue this is something they need to pay extra for.

It might seem normal and something that just "comes with the job" but you can argue it shouldn't be that way. When I joined the company I'm at today - initially they had a list of all developers phone numbers and the rule was "if the entire site somehow dies during out-of-office hours - a boss can call any dev". Since that never happened I thought it was acceptable.

But then we got an employee knew about on labour laws who said "No - if the company wants to be able to call devs outside of office hours - we need to be paid extra" and after that things changed. We (the team) got to pick if we wanted to get extra pay for being 'on call' during certain hours or if we wanted to make sure no one called us

"PM made it clear that they expect to be able to call us an hour before and two hours after"

Expecting to be able to call an employee BEFORE they begin work in the morning sounds very unusual.

With remote work - it's normal for people to wake up like fifteen minutes before their work day begins

Yeah, just the other week I was asked to vote on an approach for building some kind of video feature

Which 3rd party provider would easiest to work with based off glancing at vague docs or demo websites

When I asked how the videos would even be selected (Some CMS? Automated feeds?) they had no idea

...But at the same time I can't complain cause I always say they should "involve devs earlier in the process" to prevent insane decisions which are technically unfeasible

Legit answers:

FrontendMasters.com is really good, we pay for it at work

Egghead.io is free and also good (at least last time I checked, 3 years ago)

There are many others too, these are just my top2

But overall if you're not already a programmer - I think a real computer science education is the best. You learn so much more in a class where you can ask and learn from others than only being alone watching videos. (A mix of both is good)

I've always been surprised by how the incompetence of Managers and Designers when it comes to writing specifications or even just casually describing requirements in words without graphics

Some designers I work with seriously cannot comprehend ideas like describing in words what should happen when you click a button

We often forget to do the maths on how much an annual % raise can amount to

If you earn 70K and get a 5% raise you'll end up with 114K after ten years

This is a blessing and a curse - people talk about expecting a % increase but they kinda forget that the amount per year becomes HUGE

And then we have the situation where some people were hired during eras where it was hard to hire and the company was desperate to start new projects so they overpaid new hires and then lowered starting salaries other years

Using comments sparingly is the way to go for me.

Good code can be mostly self explanatory

Exceptions are

* Business decisions that make the code worse than normal

* Stuff that has to be done a certain way due to a 3rd party lib, like "This index starts at 1 because lib-x demands it"

* Describing expected return data of weird 3rd party services which cannot be looked up easily

LOTS of comments is not ideal imo. Then you will not "see the forest for the trees, and people will miss critical comments in a tirade of insignificant comments.

But yes - I hate when people want to forbid comments entirely.

What are we even talking here? Was this discussing what would be included in the next Major Release?

Some guesses of the top of my mind

1) They have been burned before. For example - this year my team had 3 issues caused by people adding code to the end of functions and not noticing some nested condition with a `return` in the middle of the function. So I now advice against those `return` placements

2) Code review culture. Some devs have the idea that they approve a PR if it works. Some struggle to just approve a PR and seem to actively hunt for some detail to object to. This is probably also because they have been burned some time in the past - for example they might have complained about some old code and someone did a git blame and said "LOL - you moron - you approved this code!" so now they feel super-protective over every line of code that goes into master. At this stage you should have a discussion about how your want your PR approvals to work and say "Please consider if your suggestion really is CRITICAL or just a stylistic detail that's a matter of opinion"

Don’t do it

Even if i 100% agreed with this statenent

I’d look at this commit and think ”what kind of loose cannon wrote this as a commit? We know shit sucks right now but you fucking up git history will make it worse”

@mr-user I see how that sounds possible, but do you really think that?

A) by not promoting Jon or Bob you upset 2 people… could’ve made one of them happy
B) do you really think the company is so in tune with the sensitivty of individual employees that they would plan everything around John and Bobs feelings? hire an entirely new person - which is unproven, might be crap, and might upset the entire team - just to make John a little bit less upset? Even if Bob was the best option

My bedroom is too far away from the kitchen coffee maker

I wish i could say I agree

But the thing with art is - it does not matter how easy it is to make - like Mondrian paintings - just squares.

Art lovers say: Anyone could do it - but they didn’t…

So if I saw a nice painting and was told ”that is just ai” i would have to say the same thing

This is a tricky situation, been there myself

You can try saying it again but you might be countered by a boss saying that basically ”devs must attend design meetings to say what is most easily implemented and keep up with the new design ideas”

Another tactic would be to simply find dev tickets in your backlog - and try to pitch them - tey being really engaging like ”Wow now that we finally have no Bugs or Tech tickets - we can actually squeeze in some tech improvement tickets! Like this one about fixing logs - remeber that one, Bob?” 😁

So true.

Many of us devs care about productivity, but we over-do it

Quite often it over-productivity is not even helpful, wanted or appreciated

If you work for a company for 4 years and worked your ass off during 2022 - no one is gonna remember it today. But if you burned out in 2023 they will.

Might differ per culture..but at least in western europe it’s preferred to be a steady marathon runner over a fast sprinter

This is jumping to conclusions and drawing irrelevant guesses

You can bet some of the most tidy programmers live in a dump, and some of the worst coders live in amazing photogenic homes

This is the type of ”simplified persona” idea that was suggested 40 years ago but never works. For example thinking ”Bob is opinionated at work so he must also be the most loud guy at parties” when Bob is just a tech expert who is only loud when it’s about tech and otherwise is silent

Yeah, rude colleagues can be such a motivation killer to the point where you feel like you wanna ruin shit to make them regret it.

If you have a boss or colleague that does care and you do like: my advice is to bring it up with them 1-5 days after something really bad happens

(Wait 1 day… because you gain some perspective if you sleep on it)

A little bit.

I will just write 2 random thoughts - one for each side of the argument

Anti AI: For decaded we have had tools like site-builders. Yet the company stakeholders I work for want a custom site. It’s not just about the end result - it is also about the process - they wanna talk to humans in a dev team.

Pro AI: Stakeholders often do not know exactly what they want so they ask the dev and design team to come up with suggestions for a GUI. This is time consuming. But with AI you could generate 10 variants of an idea for a GUI within second and present it to a stakeholder. This work might take 3 weeks with a human team.

For that kind of throwaway temporary work AI potentially saves the company so much time and money

Hell yes!

My first terminal program was inspired by WarGames. ”SHALL WE PLAY A GAME!”

The Bike game from Tron was also a fun project

(Both these films were before my time - I’m just into their vibe)

This is also social media

Never heard of ”fix time” before. Can you explain?

Is that the hours when they expect everyone to be working? For example at my company we assume most are working around 09:00 to 15:00 - so we say ”don’t book any meetings before or after that” even if some start at 07:00 and some work until 18:00

Are you a consultant?

Just asking cause you mention ”client team”

In this case I think you should just talk to your boss and say ”hey, I got hours outside of my contracted hours” - because it is possible in a consultant company that there’s too many managers, clients and projects and they just forget which consultant can work which hours

@vane ”What is the gain from visuals if content is crap ? That's lifetime question is content more important than form ? I'd say yes.”

I’m struggling to understand this.

but I agree with the last part: ”content is more important than form”

So it is important to not ruin the content accessibility by trying to achieve pretty visuals

Nah it is not about the burning hatered for a file format based on indentation

It is more that each prop in a yaml cloud config can have 12 similar variants - take a while to grasp - and can bork your server if you get it wrong.

And the company changes cloud deploy strategies every 2-3 years

In a large company it make sense to have a few devops doing this instead of 90 devs learning it from scratch to do it once

I imagine this is a template

Recruiter: "1. Which tech are you looking for? 2. Do you need low, medium or high experience?"

Company: "1. Generative AI models. We mostly use OpenAI and Python 2. High"

Output: `if (requiredExperience==="high") makeJobAd("10+ years" + "building and deploying" + techName)`

@Demolishun Yes, looking at my Windows10 Documents folder I have about 20 folders which have been automatically created by games or other software

For example:

* Overwatch - contains logs and settings

* Battlefield 3 - contains screenshots and settings

* Bioware - multiple bioware games here. Which store userProfiles, savedGames etc.

* WindowsPowerShell - empty folder, I haven't used powershell but assume settings and snippets would be saved here

* VisualStudio - contains stuff like backups, settings, snippets

* NetworkMonitor3 - this program seems to have saved some code files.

@usr--2ndry Nah, it's unthinkable that the links are designed for a specific email client. A link is a link.

It's just that some programs will notice when a link is rendered and try to render the page title for that link - and that causes a request to be sent to the page.

Other email clients do this too.

And it's also done if you paste a link on facebook - they will make a request to that link to fetch it's image. If you write a link in google docs and hover over it - it'll render the page.

So essentially "one time usage only"-links can be screwed by many programs.

One guess: it is possible that your email client renders a link preview (either by default or on hover)

That causes a request to the link - which ”wastes” it’s one time usage

Stuff like this sometimes boils down to mistakes in build scripts

Like having a monorepo with a core prettier config and a sub repo with an additional prettier config - and some mistake where you can use one or the other depending on where you run the build from