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Maybe you're just not imagining the kinds of workplaces that we work in where we have these problems? There are teams where the political consensus is that eve

by lotyrin 10y ago

Maybe you're just not imagining the kinds of workplaces that we work in where we have these problems? There are teams where the political consensus is that even considering security risks is useless - who aren't budged on that position when after violating PCI DSS and having a database full of plaintext payment card information and also having a shitty copy-pasted-from-the-internet PHP newsletter form with an SQLi have payment card info stolen and used in fraud. "They probably won't sue" so even just fixing the SQLi wasn't important to them. There are teams where "SVN and Git are hard, so we just use Dreamweaver on the shared drive and use the built in file locking to make sure nobody steps on eachother's toes". There are teams where plaintext FTP deployment to production sites on plaintext WIFI is standard operating procedure. I couldn't convince them to change it even after showing them the username and password in Wireshark. "Anyone in the neighborhood could steal all of our client's data." wasn't scary. There are teams where leadership has no idea of technical realities, forms bad plans in the style of "We want to make Twitter, but for IoT thermostats" and gets to set the budget for those plans before even talking to a project manager or developer, and every initiative fails (doubly since they go over their nonsense budget, and have no nonsense customers buy into it) but it's fine because it's not like anyone will ever lose their job because they're 5 levels down from the CEO and five levels up from individual contributors in the software part of a hardware-focused fortune 500 so nobody in the C-suite understands or cares what they do and it's not consequential to the level where it shows up in shareholders reports. There are teams where they use a CMS + custom fields features and pretend it's an MVC framework and build line of business apps with only a few models but internal storage abstraction of the CMS and custom field feature blows that up into hundreds of tables with mutiple-tens-of-ways joins, and normal usage starts to DoS it and nobody can accept that they get to re-architect or even at least fucking throttle requests, it's just "fix it", who knows how.

mkozlows 10y ago
Bad workplaces definitely exist. Sometimes, they can be changed, and there's a ton of scope for you to be the person who came in and got a dysfunctional department functional; sometimes, they're broken at a higher level than you can fix, and you just need to leave. But if you work at a bad workplace and your takeaway is "this industry is completely broken" and you turn into a full-bore cynic who refuses to believe that anything better is possible, you've gone badly astray.
- lotyrin 10y ago
  I've left. I've left every time, and I've got a resume full of shit jobs I left after a year because they were shit, and I'm not sure what to do at this point to get the kind of position where this isn't how things are, where the sky is blue and up isn't down. If there's part of the industry that's not like this, I haven't seen it and none of the people I've worked with have seen it, and I don't know it. At this point my wife has all but begged me to give up and settle for steady money with no purpose, my therapist is telling me to consider going back to school and pull a career change. I'm the only person I know in real life where there's any expectation that software makes sense and I question myself, wondering if pragmatic engineering in software is just a fantasy perpetuated by strangers on the internet.
  - lovich 10y ago
    Nah man. I've had the same experience until my current job and I think the only reason my teams been given the power to so things right is because the company went through 2-3 other teams that would take 6 months to take data from one of our services and put it in an excel sheet. Most of the places I have worked have had the engineers so far removed from anyone who had the power to actually allow changes to the process, that me and my coworkers didn't even know what they looked like. It seems like a matter of luck of being in the right place and right time, so that managers have had so many failures in software development that they are finally open to listening to alternatives
  - neffy 10y ago
    Search for companies whose products you respect, and have quality design, and apply to them. Also, look for areas that require good quality - safety critical, high reliability systems for example. It's not guaranteed, nothing is, but there are good working environments out there.
  - flukus 10y ago
    I'm in the same position. Plus with too many short term positions on your resume it makes finding a job at all (let alone a decent one) harder. I have been at one place that was good though, unfortunately I left it to relocate. I haven't found anyway remotely close to the same quality in they ~6 years since. I've developed a few proxy questions to estimate exactly how shit they are though.

by lotyrin 10y ago

mkozlows 10y ago

Bad workplaces definitely exist. Sometimes, they can be changed, and there's a ton of scope for you to be the person who came in and got a dysfunctional department functional; sometimes, they're broken at a higher level than you can fix, and you just need to leave. But if you work at a bad workplace and your takeaway is "this industry is completely broken" and you turn into a full-bore cynic who refuses to believe that anything better is possible, you've gone badly astray.

lotyrin 10y ago
I've left. I've left every time, and I've got a resume full of shit jobs I left after a year because they were shit, and I'm not sure what to do at this point to get the kind of position where this isn't how things are, where the sky is blue and up isn't down. If there's part of the industry that's not like this, I haven't seen it and none of the people I've worked with have seen it, and I don't know it. At this point my wife has all but begged me to give up and settle for steady money with no purpose, my therapist is telling me to consider going back to school and pull a career change. I'm the only person I know in real life where there's any expectation that software makes sense and I question myself, wondering if pragmatic engineering in software is just a fantasy perpetuated by strangers on the internet.
- lovich 10y ago
  Nah man. I've had the same experience until my current job and I think the only reason my teams been given the power to so things right is because the company went through 2-3 other teams that would take 6 months to take data from one of our services and put it in an excel sheet. Most of the places I have worked have had the engineers so far removed from anyone who had the power to actually allow changes to the process, that me and my coworkers didn't even know what they looked like. It seems like a matter of luck of being in the right place and right time, so that managers have had so many failures in software development that they are finally open to listening to alternatives
- neffy 10y ago
  Search for companies whose products you respect, and have quality design, and apply to them. Also, look for areas that require good quality - safety critical, high reliability systems for example. It's not guaranteed, nothing is, but there are good working environments out there.
- flukus 10y ago
  I'm in the same position. Plus with too many short term positions on your resume it makes finding a job at all (let alone a decent one) harder. I have been at one place that was good though, unfortunately I left it to relocate. I haven't found anyway remotely close to the same quality in they ~6 years since. I've developed a few proxy questions to estimate exactly how shit they are though.