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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.detoProgrammer Humor@programming.devInfinite Loop
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    6 months ago

    No wonder COBOL programmers are paid a lot, because what would be a 1-liner for “hello world” in other languages looks like this in Cobol:

    IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
    PROGRAM-ID. IDSAMPLE.
    ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
    PROCEDURE DIVISION.
        DISPLAY 'HELLO WORLD'.
        STOP RUN.
    

    This is already $6000 worth of code right there!


  • The Lead Dev/team Lead was quite arrogant and in his own mind the worlds best developer who had all the answers. If some technology or software was not written by him or already existed in the 90s it was “useless” and not fit for the company (without him having looked at it or the docs). If asked why we would not use X which was out for years, well maintained, had no critical bugs would solve problem Z we where having, he would reply “because i said so” and insist in writing out own variant - which ended up having 10% of the features, 10 times the bugs, terrible UI and would take months to develop.

    When support repeatetly told him that users had issues with feature X because the only error message on a 10 fields forms page was “Error”, he would respond that this is a user problem, the end user is clearly stupid (despide used in a field where you need to study for years) and that support must hold training sessions so the users can “learn” how to use his product.

    As such, the company would reject git and instead email each other files and changes.

    Each meeting felt like living inside a Dilbert cartoon.


  • You only hurt yourself down the line. My last job had not improved their own product, processes, tools or frameworks, so everything was still stuck in the 90s. Their product was build on an discontinued an proprietary database and server system you never heard about, jQuery UI from 10 years ago and other BS.

    However if you don’t upskill yourself in this situation you will be unemployable in the future, because all other employers demand modern technologies, git, docker, unit testing etc., which I was yelled at in meetings for suggesting it.





  • It could be a cost issue. A chip that collects data from connected sensors and sends it via Wifi is small and cheap. Adding a display and buttons ads size, complexitiy and costs. Therefore manufacturers offload the interface to an app and a device you already own, and they can update without expensive recalls.

    If the task or device is more complicated and the device would also need it’s own storage, CPU, display, sound etc. the product costs could go up by hundreds of dollars, depending on functionality and how many units they plan to ship.

    I also hate apps. Still have my 2010 smartphone in a drawer that still turns on, however it;s useless because google playstore, maps and email now used an more modern SSL standard that this phone does not support anymore, and it won’t receive any updates. I expect the same will happen to a lot of devices that are controlled by apps when the manufacturer decides he won’t support it anymore, or Google breaks the app because some new protocol must be supported now that didn’t exist 2 years ago when the app came out.



  • I see you never worked in a developer team. My current boss once in 1995 opened a geocities page about someones poodle and favorite girl-band. After 3 minutes on that page he proudly declared “I now know everything there is to know about HTML and user interface design, and never have to see another website ever again!”

    Since then, he is making designs, and the tiniest amout of criticism or improvements (“maybe we should have a placeholder telling users what format we expect here.”, “Can we use a date-input instead of a textfield here?”) is shot down with a 5 minute yelling how “the users just have to learn this” and “we always have done it this way!” or “if the user is too stupid, he should read the manual” (which is incomplete and still features windows XP+IE6 screenshots). There is an option in the bug tracking system which says “user error/user training required”, but if you read it it’s really all huge usabillity issues because people cannot figure it out, and the system has no helpfull error messages…





  • AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.detoGames@lemmy.worldGrand Theft Auto VI Trailer 1
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    7 months ago

    The earlier GTA games where quicker to develop because the computers did not have the CPU power or RAM to support large cities, many different NPC models, detailed cars, objects or enviroments. This means levels, assests and the engines where much quicker to develop.

    if you double width+height of your map, you have to fill 4x the area with meaningfull content, belivable cities, scripted events, nature, streets, shops, maybe NPS who have a daily routine to walk from one place to another.

    Plus, you have to create a large amount of different(!) buildings to place around your map, because you dont want to recognize the same house, shop, park or Parking lot multiple times in the same street. On top of that is car physics, traffic simulation, cop chase behavior and now apparently NPCs interact with each other.

    None of this has been done before, and getting this right and bugfree is not trivial - see cyberpunk.