this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (6 children)

git is considered modern?

I don't mean to bash git but I'd have assumed git is utilized in some capacity in every dev environment.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

And he can still do that, because? Friend in management or what?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Sounds painful...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

There are other version control systems out there, and have been for decades. So yes, I would consider git to be modern.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

It's more modern than Visual Source Safe, that's for sure. I kind of miss the days of coworkers leaving for two-week vacations and forgetting to check their shit in first. It was a built-in excuse for the rest of us to not do anything and blame it all on vacation boy.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

pun wasnt intented.
But now I kinda have to commit...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Git wasn't used all that much in the 2000s. As far as I know it became popular in the 2010s (though it was always a thing in some circles I think) and then just supplanted almost everything else.

Also keep in mind some shops tend to follow larger tech companies (microsoft, etc.) and their product offering. So even new products might not have been on git until MS went in that direction.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Takes time to become ubiquitous.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

For sure, I wanted to remind the date because it makes it obvious that it couldn't be much used in the 2000', even its second half is too short.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I prefer to zsh git

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

all other employers demand modern technologies

There are a lot of employers that'll throw good money at you for maintaining and extending their outdated crap. Have you ever considered learning COBOL?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I wonder how much open source COBOL is out there for LLMs to harvest.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The thing people always overlook is that these legacy systems are only still running because they're super important. Nobody's hiring a junior COBOL dev to maintain NORAD, and hopefully nobody's contemplating putting ChatGPT in charge either.

The move if you want this kind of job is to learn a language that's not quite a dinosaur yet, and have 20 years experience in 20 years. Perl or PHP maybe.