All fun and games till the PO requests some new feature or change and some poor soul has to add that into your code trying not to break it
Bonus points if the poor soul is you
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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Faster to rewrite the whole thing
Try selling that to management.
And no, it wouldn't be faster.
Fell for the “it’s just an mvp we’ll rewrite it if it’s successful” trap huh.
Thank you for your bonus points.
BUT WHY IS THE RAM GONE?!?
RAM is temporary, meeting the minimum viable product standard is forever
The Pirate's Code Style and Documentation Standard....be more like guidelines.
My boss once asked me whether their entrance test was too hard after several candidates sent him something that wouldn't even run.
That's an instant ego boost
Should working code even be part of an interview? Seems like a situation rife with abuse.
Need free contractors? Just put your code issues up as a 4hr take home interview test.
Pseudocode/general thought process walkthrough should be the only thing imo. Oh no, the interviewee forgot a semicolon, so he is trash at coding and is a no-fit is complete bullshit.
how the applicant thinks breaks down problems and handles how to answer them matters more than if the code is actually functional on the spot
It was a very easy proof of concept. Back then they used XSLT to convert clients' homepages to an intermediary HTML-dialect that would then be rendered out to mobile phones and other devices according to their capabilities. That was before everyone had a smartphone just around the time the first iPhone was released.
The test was to write an XSLT that would convert one very simple HTML file into their dialect. They knew that almost no candidate would have ever touched XSLT before that. So they needed people who could learn quickly. My own entry was plenty suboptimal but at least it achieved the task. That was about two hours of work.
Seems like a situation rife with abuse.
Just like leetcode - where you're helping train the AI that will replace you while not getting a job.
I thought my entrance test was far too easy, I only had to create a blog in my web framework and show doing the basics like validations, secure parameters, etc.
I learned later on that most couldn’t pass because they came from other languages and thought they could get by without knowing anything.
Good old fizzbuzz. https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
Classic write-up!
Although, now that I'm an interviewer, I kind of despise FizzBuzz, because nobody thinks clearly during a high pressure interview.
Whenever possible, I love to talk with a candidate about some concrete past source code they claim to have written. I've better luck putting the candidate at ease and then talking through their contributions to the code.
Of course, when I get enough candidates who shared source code, I don't even invite the ones who didn't share source code for an interview.
One guy completed it, so it was just perfect
COBOL has entered the chat: If it ain't broke don't fix it.
Given the engineer's amendment to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." is usually "If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.", I can only surmise that COBOL must be one of those languages that are so terrible that they deter their programmers from wanting to do that.
I once had to modify some COBOL code. It's a highly organized language, not terrible. But because it's old there's a shortage of people now who are good at it or want to learn it. You pretty much have to decide your career is going to be working on old code.
I’ll add that 20 years ago they said if you want to make money as a programmer then learn COBOL because of the demand
Long ago (mid-90s) I had a coworker who was one of the last people alive who knew still how to program Cyborg, a 1970s-era programming/database platform that was still a legacy platform for a lot of companies. His job entailed making very small changes to the codebase and then waiting literally hours (sometimes days) for the shit to compile. He ended up being able to work from home for three different companies concurrently, making $300 an hour from each company. $7200 per day for about 15 minutes of actual work - while living in rural Texas.
It's on my to-learn list.
If it ain't broke don't fix it.
I loathe that line
If it ain’t broke… maintain it.
+1 - the word "loathe" doesn't get used often enough. The only time I remember hearing it in a movie was in Sixteen Candles.
I wrote "some code" back when I was a child, if you asked me to explain how it works all I could tell you is "through the power of santa's little helper".
Was kompiliert, das funktioniert
points to his ~~dumpster fire~~ programs
yea thats mine