u/PressureHumble3604

This issue has been going on for months now, I am dealing with a new system and learning about it. Colleagues that have been working on it for many years didn’t explain anything but still told me to ask for information which they are not that easily giving instead of figuring out myself.
Well when I ask there is a 50% chance they tell me something wrong.

They don’t do it on purpose, they simply overestimate their knowledge of the system the built or worked on for many years.

I always have to fact check them which means that asking them for advice is almost pointless. if I donk’t fact check often I waste hours on an implementation based on the wrong information.

I am not talking about simple questions but questions about the design and inner working of a very complex system.

AI is helping but it’s not fixing the human interaction, which is often unavoidable.

what do you advise?

Almost all the airline support this. I have dozens of membership card saved there.

They re-did the app and couldn’t fix this?

Who is in charge of making it decision at BA?
It’s embarrassing.

They simply show that they not care and I am starting to care enough about the enshittification of the company to start flying with KLM or others

Imagine working in a big org in a big company.

Your team is made of smart engineers with a lot of knowledge.
But they all seem to share a weak point: they completely ignore or are unable to see some aspect of software engineering that are usually industry standard.

You ask why the org decided to do things differently from the rest of the industry and is like explaining AI to a caveman that has yet to discover fire.

Sometimes you propose some standard practice and first you struggle to explain why and then your proposal is usually shut down with the most bureaucratic reasons.
Usually you are proposing something that will help the team a lot.

This is not coming only from the higher up, although the entire org has similar issues (I don’t know the others very well to extend this judgement) but your fellow coworkers as well: they are just fine to do things they old ways.
Even young coworkers, even coworkers that want to improve things but usually their improvements are very limited or bike shedding.

Don’t assume I am the one proposing to refactor a huge critical system, absolutely not, I am usually talking about small changes, usually tooling to simplify our daily routines (that are absolutely over complicated)

I will make an example, not the real issue, but another one that can fit the magnitude of the problem:

Imagina a backend team that doesn’t care about observability.
Imagine the same team having frequent preventable outages because of it and still not learning the lesson.
Not just management, all individual contributors.

How these situation can even exist?
I feel I am in a parallel upside down world.
If you are a smart software engineer with year of experience how can you miss big parts of the picture?

Since we are also pushed to use AI everywhere, I use LLMs to sanity check my proposals and keep my salinity.

Bethesda is a technological embarassment.

The gamebryo engine was severely outdated at the time of Skyrim.
The hack they used to implement the metro in Fallout 3 has been a meme for almost 2 decades.

They rebranded that pile of crap of an engine as Creation Engine more than a decade ago.

Fallout 4 ran horribly and had insane loading times.
Fallout 76 was a total failure
Starfield was still full of issues and lacked any ambition.

They haven’t release a TES game, their flagship, in 15 years and at best they will release in 2.

Fallout 5 started preproduction now, that means that it’s many years away.
They confirmed they will be using their crap engine again.

Obsidian switched to unreal and released several games (none of them good though) in few years.

Why is Bethesda so obsessed and stubborn with their crap technology?

They could have tested a switch to Unreal Engine with Oblivion remake but all they did was to use UE for rendering, the game logic still ran extremely poorly on the old engine and it was a huge disappointment.

Someone at that company really want to test how much they can underperform before being fired. Honestly whoever is responsible should have been fired years ago.
Their IPs are hostage of their incompetence.

I am tired of hearing every other day about some violent crazy criminal that assaulted or killed someone in the streets.

Usually these people have an history of violent crimes and instead of rotting in jail are freed to be in the public and ruin the lives of more people.

Politicians and the judges/juries the let them out are not held accountable.

I propose a simple tool to make people visualise the damage: an interactive map.

A website, like Google maps that displays the location of the violent crimes, filterable by crime, year and past history of violence of the perpetrator.

When people will realise that crimes are happening everywhere, even close to them they will finally ask politicians to do something about it.

I started from the bottom now I am here, working as a Sr.Eng for a major software company with several very technically skilled engineers.
I also know many people who work for the most prestigious companies of our times: FAANG, AI, Fintech…

I have realised that I don’t really connect them on a personal level and I don’t like working with them much.
Not because of toxicity (Never had a truly toxic coworker or employer yet) but because of the following personality and cultural characteristics

There is a lot of bro culture about programming and insecurities that manifest by trying to look smart all the time.
Also a lot of technical talk 24/7 which usually is in the form of bike shedding.

They are usually very skilled on the details and bureaucracy but not as much on the big picture and they do have huge problems in communication.

I started this careers dreaming of working for “builders” of the late 2000s - early 2010s eras.

I miss old workplaces where they people were less technically sound but you could have normal conversations, talk about something non work related at least half of the time during lunch breaks and no one was afraid to brainstorm and make stupid questions because no one was playing that game where you try to look smarter than everyone else and have to carefully limit what you can say.

Do you think that working for such smart people leads to crazy good tech?
While many things are indeed better, the general system/product state is still extremely sloppy and high level decision making is surprisingly bad.

Is there any secret way for me to find a top company with different culture and people or is this expected for certain levels of prestige and remuneration?

Disclaimer: I am pro Europe, critical of the EU and I think that Brexit has cons and pros.

Brexit was supposed to be the end of the U.K. plenty of people predicted almost immediate disaster.

It’s been 10 years, the U.K. is still standing and its main problems are all internally caused by some of the worst politicians the country has ever seen, not Brexit.

The ironic thing is that disasters did happen in the last 10 years: covid, invasion of Ukraine, Closure of the Hormuz Strait and despite that the U.K. survived.

Is the U.K doing well? Absolutely not but so are comparable EU economies: Germany, France, Italy and so on.

Was Brexit used to its full potential? Absolutely not, so it could have been better to certain extent.

Leaks learn the right lesson from this (we were fed propaganda by media on both sides)

If you ever worked in finance, fintech, hedge fund, HFT firms, banks and so on…

What’s your opinion of a career in this sector and their engineering culture there?

What are your main takeaways?

I am considering a move to that sector.

My Elipsa can’t find the wifi anymore (was working fine few days ago) and may need a reset/update.
I am quite tired of Kobo shitty software to be honest and I am considering moving to something else.

Did they fix the problem with the reset button? I mean that if you hold the power button too long you may reset the whole thing. it’s a very stupid decision that can come only from several layer of incompetence in the company.
if they haven’t fixed it, I think they are hopeless and it may be better to move to a competitor.

Dealing or Exiting a Chaotic Work Environment

I work for a big company, have been there for a while but not too long.

My org is struggling due to managerial shortcomings from above.
My team is struggling due to:

1. Tech debt created by the aforementioned shortcomings and some bad engineering by people who have left the company a long time ago
2. Lack of communication and proper priorities selection: everything is an emergency and there is an emergency every day. Having a proper meeting is hard to schedule. Most knowledge is oral and decaying due to departures and time.
3. Generic chaotic decisions by direct bosses.
4. Plans to fix things that are more pointless informal talks than anything else.

Add to this that the domain of our products is challenging by itself and that all of us do quite a lot of overtime, with half of the colleagues that do it on their own volition.

The use of AI is heavily promoted but not in an healthy way, AI is not ready to deal with our codebase properly and now that we use it, the expectations are for us to produce a lot more code.

I am pretty tired/annoyed by this situation. I want out.
for several reasons I would benefit much more to stay until early next year.
But I do feel like I need a long break.
Additionally with AI getting better, I think I need to get out from code monkey roles (it shouldn’t have been one but more or less it became like this) because I fear that job safety will be like shit next year.

Any advice?

I want to buy a barista towel for the coffee machine and clean the milk residue. I don’t want any non natural material, so no microfibres but most products seems to have them.

A while ago the industry of videogames decided to go from a creative and innovative industry to become a soulless attention seeking void.

Most of the releases since then have been following one of these 4 patterns:

1. Formulaic game as a service products preying on the weaknesses (and wallets) of gamers and young people.

2. Remake/Remaster/More of the same sequel: same idea repeated and repeated until the franchise collapses or the nostalgia goldmine are emptied

3. Pretentious artsy project made by people with no talent but a lot of connections, the gaming equivalent of Oscar bait movies.

4. So called “indie” developers that use their independence to follow the most popular trends, for instance now is all about retro PsOne graphics.

Add to this recipe that the games take much longer to develop and often look worse than 10 years old ones.

The industry is creatively, technically, economically and morally bankrupt.

The recent layoffs are the result of greedy people and corporations try to fool the consumers into giving them their attention and money without producing anything worthwhile.

The model they built was not sustainable and the industry is collapsing as a result, young people are not gaming like previous generations, older people are playing less and less, the talent is gone, many series are dead or dying after years of bad sequels. Even investments are drying up.

This is a good thing, if your house is rotten to the core, the best way out is to rebuild it from scratch.

I am sorry for the people experiencing layoffs but a good percentage of them is part of the problem and as in any creative industry (and many more industries), they are not entitled to their audience money and when their products don’t sell, they can’t blame the audience.
My best wishes to the talented and morally sound ones to have the chance to rebuild the industry and be successful

This unpopular because many people on the internet, especially communities like reddit, are still in denial and happy to consume products without critical thinking and follow anything their favourite company tells them to buy or rent.

I am tired of my corporate life and I know that there are some people that make money with simple website and services. Now with Fable 5 is even easier to develop and maintain them.

If you have a sensible source of income from something like that, how are you handling it? any recommendations and things to avoid? do you think is a good idea long term to remain henry with a semi passive income?

After the time skip we see Clark mad and he looks older as well. Outside it seems like it’s been few weeks or months.
But inside?
the time difference must have been not that different or characters would have easily noticed.

CLI stands for Command Line Interface.

I am sick and tired of people drinking the kool-aid of the CLIs, just because you are too lazy or too messy to make a decent UI, doesn’t mean a CLI is the best interface.

The CLI has two major use cases:
- Scripting
- Simple and infrequent tool usage (maybe because it’s part of a bigger tool)

if it doesn’t fit these use cases, don’t use it.

Seems like complexity lovers linux nerds (linux should be simplicity)a taken over most tech trying to prove how smart they are by unnecessarily complicating things.

I am tired to have to remember dozens of commands and type a ton of arguments when I could have just clicked a button.

It’s time consuming, it’s error prone, it’s good only for LLMs because they naturally deal with text and have superhuman trained knowledge.

How much do you need to care about new language feature, obscure language quirks and very in depth knowledge of the language?

My situation:
The level of language proficiency varies a lot based on the employee and the team.
Most inefficiencies aren’t specific to the language or its use.

I personally care enough to know the language quite in depth but don’t care enough to be interested in it beyond knowing how to use this tool properly.

I am much more interested in the system design and product.
Am I wrong? I feel that most businesses don’t require this level of attention at the language level and I am fine with it.
Can’t know everything and there are plenty of languages used by very smart people pushing the technology that don’t know very well the one we currently use.

I noticed that in my career (several companies of every size and different industries) the only thing they have done is to show up n times per week for the scrum meeting, chasing people for (a poorly configured) Jira burocracy and nothing else.

What else they do? How many teams they follow in your company? have they ever been actually useful and if they are not why?

I have seen some figures online but they are limited and don’t paint the entire picture at the same time I am not familiar with all the firms either.

Please share TC composition as well.

I tired of C++.
Yes C++26 has nice features but I am just tired of dealing with its ever expanding complexity.

I am tired of having discussions about minor details of the language or programming tricks rather than focusing on what really matters the most.

I just want to build things and I want them to be well written and fast.

It’s a philosophy issue at this point.

For those who moved out of the language, community and relevant careers how do you feel about it?

This is unpopular on Reddit and among the remaining fandom but I think it’s probably what the average person that has been watching the show thinks

The Boys S1 in 2019 was groundbreaking: smart, bold and funny with an amazingly acted villain that was terrifying.

Season 2 was not bad but that’s were the boys stopped to seriously trying to take out supes and began to loop around the same two themes.

It felt like a filler season more than a real sequel.

At that point we had 3 season left to go, 60% of the total in a well built world with well built characters and therefore endless possibilities.

S3 was a decent season with some very good episodes but was definitely not bold.

The finale was a joke, poorly and cowardly written to not move the plot forward too much

S4 was a poorly written filler season I don’t even remember what they did other than killing one of the most interesting characters.

We are left with 20% of the show to go.

They skipped Vought/HL taking over the institutions, Ashley is already vp.
We didn’t see them taking over normal people with grand set pieces or anything close, budget must be gone.

Nothing interesting happens for 6 episodes.
Homelander is a joke now, the boys keep repeating the same plot lines for the 4th season.

The writing is 95% fan fiction trash level.

They try to push Vought Rising after abruptly cancelling Gen V and ruining the character of SB with its random flip flopping about HL.

Another good IP sacrificed by morons.

As usual the fans defended the slippery slope of slopness for few seasons until it became impossible to contain.