You IT people sure are a contentious bunch.

The complicated thing here is there are so many layers of abstraction to make things easier to use and understand that if you didn’t age with the tech, it’s really hard to fully understand. That’s everything. I see Angular and React developers who don’t understand CSS.

My last position, we had classes that set sizes for everything in multiples of 4 pixels. So size-1 is 4 pixels, size-2 is 8 pixels, etc. And everything was sized with those classes. Which means if you ever wanted to resize anything, you have to go to every element and change the class instead of you know, having input controls have distinct classes.

People are layering on abstraction without understanding why and throwing away all the benefits, time to invent another abstraction layer! I had my tech lead argue with me that this was a better system because “standards”. I’m going to assume the standard was poorly understood because I can’t imagine a multi-billion dollar company hires idiots to set standards.

I got started learning transistors and Boolean algebra and programming an 8-bit cpu in college. Had computers for a few years before that. It’s surprising how many conditionals I see that can be simplified by Boolean algebra.

I don’t actually hate computers, and I try to give IT workers some grace because I’m not always proud of the work I do when I have to finish 3 months of work in two weeks. But I’ve worked with a lot of folks who aren’t curious or looking to learn and improve, and I have to wonder why they ever got into IT in the first place.

For me the worst part of IT is the god damned management. Any possible productivity gains from agile are undercut at every turn by management who has to have a concrete promise of a delivery date before they even define the ask.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. Started my long weekend early and starting a new job next week, so I have a lot of pent up rants from my last company.

Thing is, back in those days computers were deterministic.

A certain action caused a certain reaction, and always the same reaction (given the same context).

Anyone could learn that, as long as they bothered to read the screen (a surprisingly rare talent, to be fair).

Now, at least on windows, it’s anyone’s guess what random mayhem a certain action might cause, or where the interface to perform that action has gone after the last update, supposing it still exists and the system survived the update.

No one can learn that. And anyone foolish enough to try will certainly be driven insane.

Todays computer illiterate workforce is doomed to be incompetent because they don’t understand how their main tool works. Nobody bothered to train them.

There also so many things restricting the usage of the tool. Every week my scanner tells me it has a new software update and I cannot install a simple update without admin access, so I have to call help desk and have them remote into my computer so they can click the “ok” botton.

Everything is so walled off there’s no reason to learn how any of it works because you have no access. When the security bios update (forget what it was called) fucked everyone’s computers last year I found a fix online and could have easily went to several locations and got them up and running, but no one on site has the access to boot into safe mode and instead we all just sat on hold with help desk for 2 days waiting for IT to do the thing I already knew how to do.

We hate ones setup by other people or used by other users. Our own network is a glorious shrine to the one true faith.

I have read this ten times now, and I still can’t figure out what it is supposed to mean…

Try this and the result may shock you!

Doctors hate it!

If an animal gets shot with lead, survives and runs away, there is now a wounded animal or an animal carcass containing lead somewhere in the wild.
If it is wounded or freshly dead a carnivore will eat it and accumulate lead. That may be large carnivore or a smaller carnivore that later gets eaten by a bigger one. Birds tend to have stronger stomach acid that most mammals, allowing them to dissolve the lead better.
Vultures having it the worst as they will eat any carcass and have the strongest acid.

Is that… me?

Not to forget a lot of cats, who also hate cats

Original author too. He was hired by The Register.

Software devs sure are a contentious bunch

I thiiiink the thing with UX is that they consider overall usability and click paths, while UI is more down in the reeds and looks at more specific things like alignment, design language and color choices. The line between seems pretty blurry though, and how it works in practice probably differs widely between companies.

A good UX/UI team can make or break a project. As a Frontend-focused software dev, that kinda hurts admitting. It’s just always very frustrating to deal with them, because designers are specialized in design. So they neither know about technical limitations that make trivial seeming things hard (like conditionally changing a buttons color based on server state) but they also don’t know about technical “freebies” that the libraries we use give us (like just telling a component that they can overflow and render things wherever you want in ways that Figma would never allow you to design). So talking to them is hard, which leads to a spiral of never talking to them, fucking up the UX, and then dodging them while they try to get the UX fixed. That just sucks for everyone involved.

Hating the Design Team is apparently such a universal experience that Josh W Comeau has a great article on it. Really worth the 15min read, if you want to improve your relationship with the design team!

I would never be able to explain coherently the difference between UX and UI people.

In theory, UX deals with the psychology behind it: What do people want that our product can provide? Does our product communicate that it can do so? Do people understand how to use the product? Does the product guide them through usage helpfully? Are they satisfied with the result?

Perhaps most nebulously: How do they feel before, while and after using the product, independent of the product itself, and how does that impact their experience? For instance, if you’re buying a train ticket, you might already be stressed and annoyed, so you’ll have less patience.

Source: My wife, who had UX as the focus of her undergrad.

In practice, a lot of people are like you in that they don’t really know or grasp the field, particularly managers who aren’t qualified to make the hiring decisions they do and accordingly there’s always gonna be people capitalising on that ambiguity and grifting their way to a cushy “I’m important and get to have a say, so pay me well” job.

Count another one for the sysadmin building a homestead in the forest while also building platforms for evil corpos from home.

I also have no intent of ever turning my farm into any kind of income. But it is definitely worth all of the extra work to spend any breaks sitting outside surrounded by animals, trees, water and sky.

That does sound nice, but in writing this from my work from home location right near to the beach. But my second choice would be someplace with a lot of woods and some good star gazing.

I know 2 people that both had an accident this way. One tore off a tendon around the knee, the other fractured their hand from trying to cushion their fall. And I don’t know that many people.

Fell on a throw rug yesterday

Some real TIL gems in this thread.

As someone whose name escaped the skipping record that your name is, I concur.