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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Ah I get that, like the frustration of a sociological paper pointing out a societal issue but offering no steps on how to solve it due to fixes being out of scope (utterly infuriating lol).

    I still think the criticism is valid, but I do think I agree in that the criticism could be more constructive… But I still think laying the foundation of the argument, so to speak, is still constructive even though it may not go as far as one may need for it to cross the threshold back into polite…

    I am still convinced this is a knee jerk feeling issue more than anything truly being amiss, but I have been wrong before. What do you think?

    I agree it probably is a definitions thing, I’m very pedantic sometimes and it feels like my definition of constructive is much more optimistic/wider/encompassing than yours. That doesn’t mean that my definition is right or that your position is wrong though, that’s just what I think is going on here.


  • The first step to correction is understanding there is a problem in the first place. This is quite constructive, it may just not feel like it is because it’s framed combatively.

    You’re doing it wrong is the phrase that lets teachers teach at one of the most basic levels.

    The public is essentially a self teaching teacher, so this is just the process of public correction happening. It may look/feel like public shaming, and it may be if they’re going too far, but that is the mechanism that I think is playing out here.

    Does that framing make it any more palatable to you or does it still seem unnecessarily disrespectful?






  • That’s a fair perspective, but most people strive for as few clicks between users and their targets as possible. Forcing a user to become semi-tech-competent by sending them on a fetch quest to figure out their os, while not an inherently bad thing, does work against this overall goal…

    Idk, it’s like education vs service industry goal setting, that’s all I’m trying to get at here lol

    Edit: plus, there’s no guarantee that it will remain just the big 3 for forever. There was a time before Linux, maybe we’ll see a time after windows… Unlikely, but one can dream lol



  • Ah yeah, that would be a worry, except I forgot to mention that most of the code I work on usually gets thrown away after like 6 months. Makes tech debt not have nearly as big of an impact on me.

    We do have a longer lasting code base that the little widgets I make run off of. That has a much more strict requirements to ensure tech debt is not introduced specifically so we don’t end up in that sort of a position.

    That said, and yet we couldn’t even keep it out of our own code base. So yeah, I think my original comment is just wrong because I forgot all the ways tech debt actually has effected me in the past and how my industry’s project cycle is so short term that i rarely have the opportunity to run into tech debt that I caused in a problematic way…


  • Fair point, I work in a consumer facing, fast turn around, short lived code project industry. Not a typical software project with long life cycles.

    These practices would almost certainly bite my company in the ass if we had to maintain anything for longer than year.

    Occasionally, we do have to support a client for multiple years, and everytime it’s a hilarious shit show trying to figure out how to keep all the project dependencies up to date. This is likely platform tech debt, and would be the beginning of the problem if we didn’t have the privilege of being able to start over from scratch code-wise for each client’s new order.

    I guess I’m just in a lucky spot in the programmer pool where tech debt literally doesn’t hit me as hard as it usually does others, and I just couldn’t identify that before now lol

    Instead of saying tech debt isn’t that bad, my tune will change to something else. Like I said, I was on a team at one point that had a worse than usual tech debt problem, and it was unworkably stressful to deal with. Im guessing that experience is more typical of being near tech debt than my other experiences.


  • Rarely have I ever actually had consequences for my sins, which tends to be why I don’t go back and fix them…

    If tech debt weight is felt in any way, it tends to get fixed. If it’s not felt, it’s just incredibly easy to forget and disregard.

    (This is mostly me not learning my lesson well enough from my time being on Tech Debt: The Team. I do try and figure out the correct way to do things, but at the end of the day, I get paid to do what the boss wants as cheaply as possible, not what’s right :/ money dgaf about best practices until someone gets sued for malpractice, but on that logic, maybe the tech debt piper just hasn’t returned for payment from me yet… Only time will tell)



  • I’m sorry, but your post seems incomplete or I’m reading too far past what you’re actually saying. Are you meaning to say this is what teachers are supposed to be doing (ie, pretending to be jailers instead of educators) or are you saying this needs to change somehow? Something else, maybe?

    Like the way you write makes me think a lot of unflattering things about your stances, and I’m not sure why… like, for example, it seems like you’re saying it’s a good thing child labor protections are being taken away in Republican states… is that actually your position though? Or is that sarcasm that’s not coming through very well?

    Sorry for the million questions but I see this is already getting quite heated, and I’m trying to figure out if the heat is warranted or if it’s a general misunderstanding.