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I feel the need to take a different approach to this week's rant. I think someone needs to defend teachers, for a number of reasons. Obviously this is probably out of place on devRant but it is a kind of rant against those who think they know everything and have nothing to learn.
1) Teachers are not industry specialists. They do not spend their lives keeping on top of the latest framework or project management methodology or code management tool. They are educators and that brings its own set of out of hours challenges and training exercises.
2) They have a course to teach and have probably used the same one for quite some time. Years probably. They (should) teach the fundamentals of programming not a particular language or syntax or quirk. Those fundamentals don't really change. Logic, problem solving, precision, structures, etc.
3) They need to provide a course which will cater for different skill levels. There are always class members who are bored because it's too easy and others who struggle in any subject.
4) Teaching is like any profession - there are really, really good ones, OK ones and there are shit ones.
5) They have probably never developed a detailed project or solution in their lives. They don't know the pitfalls and challenges that teams face in this kind of environment. Should they - maybe. But the probably don't.
I think that's all... I'm not a teacher (although I did fancy the idea at a time) but just feel they get a rough ride sometimes (particularly on here).4 -
a stored XSS vuln in a banner-like component, visible in ALL the pages in the portal. Anyone can attack anyone.
HOWEVER this was not discovered by 3rd-party security specialists during latest security audit. I have escalated this to my manager and got replied that unless client actively requests this to be fixed should I do anything about it.
FFS.. it's only 2 lines of code.. And there's nothing I can do about it.
Eventualy I was transfered to another project. Now it's not my problem anymore.4 -
WordPress 'specialists' love to proclaim that 27 per cent of the web is powered by WordPress (which is incorrect anyway - https://rarst.net/wordpress/... ).
However, that doesn't mean it's the best CMS, like many try to suggest. It just means a huge percentage of websites out there are using the wrong tool for the job.30 -
I'm a web developer and know jack about hardware. My wife's personal laptop was going very slow so decided to upgrade to a SSD. How hard could it be?
Turns out to be very fiddly trying to disconnect and reconnect 4 ribbon cables. To get to the HD and replace it.
Restarted laptop and thought it was all good, but only certain keys worked and the mouse pad moved but didn't click?!?
Had to take it apart and reconnect twice more but now it's fully functioning once again.
Sticking to software in future. Massive respect to hardware specialists!6 -
Our company maneuvered themselves into a classic technical debt situation with a project of a second team of devs.
They then left, signing a maintenance contract and now barely work on the project for exorbitant amounts of money.
Of course management got the idea to hand off the project to the first team, i.e. our team, even though we are not experts in that field and not familiar with the tech stack.
So after some time they have asked for estimates on when we think we are able to implement new features for the project and whom we need to hire to do so. They estimates returned are in the magnitude of years, even with specialists and reality is currently hitting management hard.
Code is undocumented, there are several databases, several frontends and (sometimes) interfaces between these which are all heavily woven into one another. A build is impossible, because only the previous devs had a working setup on their machines, as over time packages were not updated and they just added local changes to keep going. A lot of shit does not conform to any practices, it's just, "ohh yeah, you have to go into that file and delete that line and then in that other file change that hardcoded credential". A core platform is end of life and can be broken completely by one of the many frameworks it uses. In short, all knowledge is stowed away in the head of those devs and the codebase is a technical-debt-ridden pile of garbage.
Frankly I am not even sure whom I am more mad at. Management has fucked up hard. They let people go until "they reached a critical mass" of crucial employees. Only they were at critical mass when they started making the jobs for team 2 unappealing and did not realize that - because how could they, they are not qualified to judge who is crucial.
However the dev team behaved also like shitbags. They managed the whole project for years now and they a) actively excluded other devs from their project even though it was required by management, b) left the codebase in a catastrophic state and mentioned, "well we were always stuffed with work, there was no time for maintenance and documentation".
Hey assholes. You were the managers on that project. Upper management has no qualification to understand technical debt. They kept asking for features and you kept saying yes and hastily slapped them into the codebase, instead of giving proper time estimates which account for code quality, tests, reviews and documentation.
In the end team #2 was treated badly, so I kinda get their side. But up until the management change, which is relatively recent, they had a fantastic management who absolutely had let them take the time to account for quality when delivering features - and yet the code base looks like a river of diarrhea.
Frankly, fuck those guys.
Our management and our PM remain great and the team is amazing. A couple of days a week we are now looking at this horrible mess of a codebase and try to decide of whom to hire in order to help make it any less broken. At least it seems management accepted this reality, because they now have hired personnel qualified to understand technical details and because we did a technical analysis to provide those details.
Let's see how this whole thing goes.1 -
News station:
"This country is in need of IT specialists"
*Presents some guy from some company*
"We offer schooling for people who want to learn IT"
Also news station:
*Shows footage of the same guy typing some help command into cmd*
*Same guy opens minified js in notepad++*
Way to fucking cringe everybody with slight knowledge out of the continent!4 -
Part 3: today has become a blog post.
WARNING: this is loooooooooooong
Background is my boss and I were talking about hiring the right people, also generalists vs specialists.
Essentially John and I are the specialists. When something goes wrong it ends up escalating to either him or me. But this is not sustainable as I can't handle the stress and most likely he eventually won't either.
And this goes back to general hiring standards.
All the good people leave and the remaining ones are stuck with all the problems and eventually for one reason or another they leave as well... or the code keeps getting worse... until someone decides to scrap everything and build a new one... But now the only people left to lead teams are monkeys.
Now current problem is the only person that can replace me is John and the only person that can replace John, at least in handling issues, is me...
It's a certain type of person, people that have a growth mindset and can pick things up.
Google and strong tech companies are full of these types of people where if needed there's always someone that can step in and help. They have the background and the ability to quickly learn. This also lets them innovate and identify and solve new problems.
I think that's what the technical interviews are for, to find these types of people.
And you really can't train this. I'm not sure how effective our "new" training program on high quality development is but I'm guessing it's not. Excellence has to be in the culture and it's not something that can be built overnight or by randomly hiring people.
So in a sense, tech companies aren't really paying well, they're paying cost to what their hires are really worth, after they've verified it, and enough to keep them from leaving.3 -
I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.
Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.
So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.
How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.
Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.5 -
Wow! They are incredible!
I keep creating new email filters every week or so, and they keep finding new ways to send me spam!
The best part is - these emails are sent from our internal infra. Judging by the sender it looks like they have created a bot collecting various events and sending them to... everyone.
Much smart. Many useful.
Much working
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Honestly I see more and more abstraction layers added and from year to year less people understanding how a computer and some algorithms works. In the end it would be like the mechanicum or whatever the name was of the w40k universum where the specialists have not a damn clue how their creations (in our case software) works and how to optimize it anymore6
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Any malware specialists here?
Yesterday I started dismantling the virus that is spreading on facebook messenger these days.
What techniques do you use? Any special trick that doesn't require years of practice and could make my job easier? I have already familiarized myself with the nicifier and Function.ToString() traps. Now I have an 850 line JS file full of weird code and I have deciphered like 70 lines so far so I'm looking for some tool, strategy or algorithm to make my job easier.10 -
When you realize that there's no "magic" and no "only really smart specialists can understand this" in computers, software and hardware.
Everything is clearly defined in protocols/RFCs. The "magic" part is nothing more than extremely tedious, annoying and boring work combining those protocols together, making them talk to each other, and layering them inside each other.
Understand the little parts and you'll understand how the big ones work.4 -
My coleague's story
- before leaving after long day at the office final look at support cases (after official support hours)
- sev1 ticket logged an hour ago, noone called us (although should have; after support hours)
- angry manager calls and demands to get in touch with the client immediately (we're already after support hours, FTS should pick the case, not us)
- we reach out. Customer has business-impacting case
- after initial info gathering: some cert got expired, they got a new one and placed it in the app's directory. The app still does not work
- the first question we ask: "are you sure you have placed it in the right directory?"
- "yes, we are sure. No problems there" - answers a voice with indian accent
- noone finds the root cause for hours.
- It's already 1am
- someone from client's specialists comes up with an idea: "are we sure the cert is in the right place? Let's try to move it to the same directory the old one was in the first place"
- .................................................
- production is working again
- "Why didn't anyone from support suggest this?!?!"
- .................................................
- 2am. Case solved, manager is informed everything's allright now.
- In the morning we get yelled at by the manager bcz we supposedly missed a sev1 ticket and were incompetent during the conf. call
This reminds me why I stay away from support. And why I started hating people. And why I do not work with indians (our ways are too different for me to stay sane and not to kill anyone).3 -
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21 -
My coworker is... something else. He's "coded in Java for six years", bear in mind and this is a bit of .py code he's written. First a doNothing() function (probably didn't hear about pass) and then there's about 400 lines of creating values. No iteration whatsoever. I have no idea how he's got the job. Not to mention that whenever he talks about anything technical it's like listening to Gertrude from Accounting talking about 'mouse not working'.
11 -
We've been using a recruiter who works out of the same business park as us. They purport to be "specialists in technology".
Somehow a conversation got started and I ended up explaining how we make use of open source software, where possible.
Their response: "That's the free one, right?".3 -
All of a sudden, I'm getting connect requests on LinkedIn from "talent acquisition specialists" in India. Interesting, to say the least. Very curious.7
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Backend devs (and yes, even full-stack folks) who naively dismiss the nuance of a frontend dev role have clearly never tried to do a really good job at it. Or, don't realize the fullness of the responsibilities, more like.
Frontend devs have to reconcile all the requirements (and sometimes whims) of the following people:
- End Users, obviously
- Desires of Business stakeholders
- Visual Designers
- UX (Yes, it's a different discipline from vis design)
- Fellow frontend devs
- Performance budgets
- Accessibility specialists
- Content Authors (if using a CMS)
And rarely are they ever ALL aligned. Some days, it feels less like development and more like brokering deals and compromises.5 -
Boss: “Our ecommerce conversions in Google Analytics are less than the actual pace of orders.”
Me: “Nothing has changed in the tracking code or setup. It must be our goals setup which you have to have a Ph.D. to understand, plus whatever mood Google’s algorithms are in today.”
He’s not mad at me. We’re both just confused why Google AdWords, Analytics, and Tag Manager have to be so damn hard to get right. I’ve never been able to do it right. And most data is thrown out because people browse websites while logged into their Google Account, which makes their clickstream disappear and become unattributable because of understandable privacy policies. I don’t want my data tracked when I’m logged in either!
So now we have had to hire specialists at several thousand dollars per month to figure this out. -
Having gone to a bank to reset a password again today (Yes, I forgot it for like... 3rd time, don't judge me, its my backup bank account I need to access like... once a year), I was once again made to think - I come in, give them my state ID by which they authorize that I can even make a password reset request.
Then they give me a tablet to... sign a contract addendum?
Its not the contract part that always makes me stop and think though - its the "sign" part.
I'd wager that I am not the only one who only ever uses a computer to write text these days. So... My handwriting got a lot jerkier, less dependable. Soooo... My signature can be wildly different each time.......
And if my signature varies a lot... then... what is the point of having it on a piece of paper?
I know its just a legal measure of some sort... And that, if it came down to someone impersonating me and I'd go to court with the bank, there would be specialists who can tell if a signature was forged or not... But...
Come on, the computer world has so much more reliable, uncrackable, unforgable solutions already... Why... Don't all folks of the modern world already have some sort of... state-assigned private/public keypairs that could be used to sign official documents instead?
It costs money, takes time to develop etc... But... Then, there would not only be no need to sign papers anymore... And it would be incredibly hard to forge.
The key could even be encrypted, so the person wishing to sign something would have to know a PIN code or a password or something...
tl;dr: I hate physical signatures as a method of authentication / authorization. I wish the modern world would use PKI cryptography instead...11 -
short: The admin with enough xp is ill, there is no one with xp with varnish is and after 1 restart varnish outputs only 503.
long: there original admin is ill but he gave me an project to migrate an typo3 installation to a new server. Thats ok.
Plan: I move 150 GB of data with rsync to the new server, let specialists do something and switch ips between the new and old and clear varnish with a restart.
Reality: +2 hours to migrate the data, because of false infos from the admin, 7 hours preparing the switch, 5 minutes switch, 3 hours to find out the F*****G varnish is the single point of failure. I and the t3 guys agree to see the next day what went wrong.
ALL HAPPENED TODAY!
Plan for tomorrow: speak with the boss to account the extra hours to that day so i dont get over 10 hours and debug that fucking varnish and delete some servers from another project from the backupsystem and monitoring.3 -
Unlimited time is impossible... But I don't wanna ramble.
The one thing that I absolutely miss in my kind of work is something that does exist in dozens of flavors and each existence promises to solve some thing...
It's "bug tracker" / "time management" / "ticket management" / "board" / "kanban" or what ever pervert method you prefer software.
I haven't seen a decent one.
I'd think I'd want to build one - it would be definitely an all time consuming effort, since I would be in dire need of specialists.
The thing with nearly all of the solutions is that they lack ... an associative mindset.
Simply put, what we humans can.
The longer a project exists, the more it's housekeeping (guess that's a better word for it) turns into maintenance nightmare.
I remember quite well the joy of puzzling together eg Jira / Bugzilla / ... complex search formulars trying to find the needle in a planet of hay.
If you're read so far and have had similar experiences, think about how nice it would be if you had a mixture of AI and BI doing exactly that.
BI / Business Intelligence to get meaningful statistics is possible, but without AI it's a lot of work.
The AI would need to do several things...
- Match information (eg version XY was released at XY, so each bugreport after XY belongs to version XY and higher if no version matched)
- Tag and categorize (crashed / faulted / fried / ... - tag crash)
- "do the mundane work": ask nicely if the marching / tagging and so on was right, ask for missing info, require feedback etc.
There's a lot I could write more about that topic. But that's the gist. ;) -
thought of the day :
machine learning does not totally automate the end-to-end process of data to insight (and action), as is often suggested. We do need human intervention. And having the right mix of specialists is equally important as they have the expertise to build prototype projects in different business lines. Thus, one must hire the right team in the context of her organization to ensure an assured path towards success.
Besides, it is important to note that organizations don’t have machine learning problems. Instead, there are just business problems that companies might solve using machine learning. Therefore, identifying and articulating the business problem is mandatory before investing significant effort in the process and before hiring the machine learning experts.1 -
A question to all software security specialists of devRant. Please, take it serious.
Is it fundamentally possible to restrict a SQL database like Postgres in a way that unintended SQL queries are impossible to execute? Perhaps in some kind of whitelist fashion. Is it possible to achieve the kind of security that will be just fine exposed to the outside world akin to "SQL queries in onClick handlers" scenario?
Or is this an uphill battle of never being able to moderate an infinite set of possible fraudulent queries?4 -
“Epstein promotes concepts. He urges individuals—and parents especially—to abandon the desire for instant gratification and easy answers as early performance on tests isn’t an indicator of professional success. He emphasizes traits over particular skills—be curious, flexible, open-minded, adventurous, experimental, and playful. Try and fail and try again. Explore. Read outside your field. Supply your mind with lots of ideas so that you can make the connections that specialists miss, helping you thrive.
Never decide you are too old or too late to the game to try something new. “The tidy specialization narrative cannot easily fit even [the] relatively kind domains that have most successfully marketed it,” Epstein concludes. “So, about that, one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind…research in myriad areas suggests that mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated.”
https://qz.com/1638869/...2 -
Why do IT Indians tend to lie so much? So many indian freelancer transform into John from USA and work together with a team of highly skilled specialists that studied in the most Elite universities in the world
6 -
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