About a decade ago, I was the sole developer for a special project. The code took 2 weeks to complete (a very simple Java servlet + JDBC app) but an entire year to actually deliver due to indecisive leadership, politics, and extremely overzealous security policies. By the time it was successfully deployed to prod, I had been chewed out by management countless times, who usually asked questions like “how on Earth can it take so long to do this one simple thing??”.

I saw two projects in a row in a German Fintech (the one that has AI in its name that forbids usage of AI) go exactly the same way.

Two/three months to code everything ("It's maximum priority!"), about four to QA, and then about a year to deploy to individual country services by ops team.

During test and deploy phases, the developers were just twiddling thumbs because ops refused to allow them access and product refused to take in new projects due to possibility of developers having to go back to code.

It took the CEO to intervene and investigate the issues, and the CTO's college best friend that was running DevOps was demoted.

I see that a lot too. Something is super urgent, you work your ass off to deliver and then somebody sits on it for months before actually shipping. If ever.

I don’t actually mind (because I won’t work my ass off). So when enthusiasm fizzle out, I just take a lot of notes (to onboard myself quickly) and shelve the project.

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Not always simple to switch jobs unfortunately

Why were you getting chewed out over it? Presumably the dickhead doing the chewing would be aware of the circumstances.

IME, in most cases, it's the dickhead's fault in the first place.

This is often a CTO putting pressure on a dev manager when the bottleneck is ops, or product, or putting pressure on product when the bottleneck is dev.

The normal rationalization is that "you should be putting pressure on them".

The actual reason is that they are putting pressure on you as a show of force, rather than actually wanted it to go faster.

This is why the only response to a bad manager is to run away.

I’ve tried this method, but it didn’t work out for many reasons. I often have to deal with people I don’t personally know for various reasons (mechanic, lawn care, doctors, school staff, etc.), and I have missed too many important calls like this, so I basically just have to deal with it. About 50% of the time it seems to be caught with “spam risk” or something like that, otherwise I just use my judgment.

XML might have “lost” but it’s still a format being used by many legacy and de novo projects. Transform libraries are also alive and well, some of them coming with hefty price tags.

As a Black Sabbath fan, I love that they envisioned dystopian stuff like this. Check out their Dehumanizer album.

BTW the O2 monitoring is inaccurate and unreliable compared to a proper pulse oximeter.

AFAIK most pulse oximeters themselves are plenty inaccurate (these "stick-on-your-finger" kinds), as they all work by the same mechanism.

The ones that send light through your finger and measure it on the other side are much more accurate than the ones that bounce light off your wrist like the Apple Watch. That said, they both work. This is easy to verify by holding your breath.

My Apple watch always rates my O2 2-3% lower than my finger unit, likely due to my hairy wrist.

Well, then you can be reasonably sure that the actual value is somewhere in-between, possibly closer to the finger unit though.

It’s not necessarily driving me to piracy, rather disengagement because the aggressive and deceptive practices have become abusive. For example, I pay for Disney+/Hulu and tried to watch Fargo (the series) and finally gave up after being constantly interrupted with the same exact unksippable ads every 10 minutes. With YouTube Premium, it seems like every streamer just switched to “sponsored content” to get around the no-ad experience. It’s very disappointing and just causes me to lose interest.

Now I understand why Black Mirror is a British show.

And Britain was Airstrip One in 1984 with most of the scenes taking place in what would have been London. Orwell definitely considered it possible that they could go that way.

If you really must embed JSON in YAML, just encode it to base64.

This is just an introductory language and if you’re in a CS program, you’ll definitely move on to more advanced ones. It actually makes sense to switch to Python since it’s far more ubiquitous and accessible than Scheme. Scheme is not widely used in commercial software development, but still enjoys a presence in academia. Python has strong presence in both.

On the other hand, Pascal was my “introductory” programming language (I already knew BASIC pretty well at that point), but it certainly wasn’t the only one in my program - we did Perl, Prologue, C, C++, etc.

In a professional software development career, it certainly won’t be the last language you’ll learn.

But this is the problem. Our premier academic institutions shouldn’t merely exist as job training programs for big tech.

If anything, tech is still one of the better off fields in the university.

Look at history or literature programs for where this is heading. I’d imagine that most literature majors don’t even read at all these days. As recent as 50 years ago, the requirement involved hundreds of pages of reading per week, over a sustained 4 year period.

Honestly, just close down the university at this point, if all it wants to do is print out degree certificates for social signaling in the job market.

oldpersonintx2, your account is shadowbanned.

Which colleges did you send your kids to, what kind of degrees (just bachelors? undergrad and grad?), and how many kids?

The $800k figure without that context tells us nothing. If that's for 2 kids to get a BA/BS/BE, you got ripped off. If it's for 4 or 5 kids it makes much more sense when examining current costs.

This is one of many divides in the field that makes many general discussions hard.

There are many people who think of themselves as a “X programmer” (and perhaps Y and Z), and managers/companies looking for them.

Then there are people who think of themselves as software engineers, and the language does not really matter (and companies that hire for that).

If often see the two camps talking past each other.

I certainly consider myself a software engineer first and programmer second, and you’re right, the language doesn’t matter. I recently got a position developing in Python having never really used it professionally, but it’s so similar to other interpreted languages I knew so I was able to jump right in and start making meaningful contributions. Often we are expected to learn new languages, which is exactly how I picked up the 10ish languages I can confidently say I’m good in, despite never having been formally trained in those. Most common languages don’t stray from certain basic principles anyway.

I learned so much about computer science by doing my intro course in Scheme. Concepts that have helped me throughout my career. Concepts that I feel just cannot be expressed or understood nearly as well with Python (and I love Python, almost all my professional and personal coding is in Python).

It’s baffling that TV ads for alcohol and cigarettes are illegal, but pharmaceuticals? That’s free speech!

TV ads for cigarettes are not legal in the US at least. And alcohol ads have a bunch of weird regulations like they can’t show people in the act of drinking (holding the booze is fine).

that's what illegal means.

I think you mean regulated. At best you could say ads showing people drinking alcohol are banned, but alcohol ads in general are regulated.

Pretty sure the cigarette companies are stoked they can’t / don’t have to spend any money on TV ads

Transport yourself back to the 60s when America was great and Fred Flintstone was hawking Winston's.