@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

quixoticgeek

@quixoticgeek@v.st

Geek, Dyke, Brewer, Rider of Bikes, Archer, Quixotic, Generally Curious, Mostly Harmless, she/her

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quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

The postoffice horizon scandal in the UK has put the spotlight on the coding practices of Fujitsu.

With the publishing of some code snippets, several people who have looked at it have replied "Wow, are they paid by the line of code?"

Which, while often meant as a joke, has some basis in history, and it opens up the discussion, of how do you incentivise programmers and how do you judge their achievements for the basis of bonues?

It's thread time.

1/n

quixoticgeek,
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

Burnout is a major problem in the IT industry, not just in software development. Insane on call rotas, poor management practices. They are incredibly widespread. Even in the poster child MAAAD companies. Especially at MAAAD.

You've all seen the joke. "What's the difference between a programmer and a lightbulb? The lightbulb stops working when it's burntout". But it cuts really really deep. I see so many people in this industry who are almost destroyed by burnout.

10/n

quixoticgeek,
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

The bonuses should be based on the whole team. Or ideally, the whole company. This allows you to concentrate on the quality of the product you produce, not simply hitting numbers for actions taken in the code base. We've seen disasters of projects where the programmers are burning themselves out in crunch before a release date that was always unrealistic. All that guarantees is a bug fix release a few weeks later. Late is better than buggy in most cases.

7/n

quixoticgeek,
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

So for a short time you'd get people paid based on the number of lines of code written. Thus rather than a one line for loop such as for(i=0; i<10; i++) dosomething();, you right out do something() ten times, thus your lines of code output is higher, your pay higher. Everyone's happy. Right?

Ye gods no, you end up with write once code that's a fucking nightmare to debug.

Fortunately such practices didn't last very long. Generally.

But the problem remains. How do you judge performance?

3/n

quixoticgeek,
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

In the modern age of agile with sprints and stories etc... it's easy to setup a bonus structure of complete x stories, finish x sprints, do x commits. But to do so is Just Bad Practice™.

I'd like to say I'm able to give you an easy system for how to incentivise your programmers, how to make sure they have a bonus to work towards. But there's no easy solution here.

Personally I dislike bonus structures and incentives that are solely based on my performance. I work as part of a team.

6/n

quixoticgeek,
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

In the past shortly after programming went from being considered women's work, to being considered men's work (see my thread about thread, and how weaving changed from women's to men's work). Management found themselves with the problem of how to judge the performance of their programmers. You can judge a brick layers performance by the number of bricks layed, a rivet maker by the number of rivets. What's the output of a programmer? It's line's of code.

2/n

quixoticgeek,
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

There's a lot of problems in the software industry. From poor working conditions, to poor software development practices. But most of them stem from poor management. Pushing the wrong incentives, pushing the wrong goals. This is how we end up with a simple mobile app that's 300 meg to install. Or a code base with 4000 dependencies noone fully understands.

So if you manage a group of programmers. Stop. Step back.

8/n

christineburns, to random
@christineburns@mastodon.green avatar

The apparent inability of Fujitsu technical and middle management staff to remember the detail of what they were doing 20-25 years ago has been on my mind this week, so I dug out the profile which my employers used to sell my consultancy expertise 25 years ago and asked myself if I could recall the details of each assignment. Sure enough, I had no difficulty. Was Fujitsu putting something in the water? What else might account for staff amnesia?

quixoticgeek,
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

@christineburns stress. People working under high stress levels are going to have trouble making memories. Likewise depression. Everything about the Fujitsu code screams very stressed programmers.

quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

Mildly miffed this corner got damaged during glue up. But still plenty pleased with the assembly.

quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

Ok. Fun for you. (I worked out the solution, your challenge is to work out what the cause is).

Machine a is connected to machine b, via a direct ethernet cable. On machine a it's connected to eth5. On b its eth0. A is assigned 192.168.1.1, and b is assigned .2. There is no ping. Communication doesn't seem to work.

Running tcpdump on machine a causes ping to work. But only while tcpdump is running. Tcpdump on b makes no difference.

What's the cause of this ?

quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

"this Cisco asa vulnerability, don't we have one of those in the rack?"
"Yes"
"Are we vulnerable?"
"No I have mitigations in place"
"Such as ?"
"I unplugged the power cable a while ago"

quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

Am very happy with my new plane. It's crazy sharp. As I've now found. And lovely to use.

quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

Housemate: can you draw a network diagram so we can better organise the network?
Me: sure <Draws>
Housemate: topologically accurate... But unhelpful...

The diagram:

quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

This? This is riveting...

quixoticgeek, to random
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Woo. Mastodon is back. The instance I'm on had a short outage. And I was unable to come to mastodon and toot about it...

quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

I ordered a new staple gun, and the package is clearly aimed at the American market as it has multiple warnings about the contents causing reproductive harm.

Which begs the question. How the fuck are people using this staple gun?!?!?

quixoticgeek, to random
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Bah. Can't even walk into a pub in a city I don't live in without someone recognising me.

Argh.

quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

Indications you're not fully awake.

I spent far too much time trying to work out why I couldn't get rsync to login to a user that has nologin as it's shell...

The clue is in the name moron.

quixoticgeek, (edited ) to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

A friend who was on queer.af woke up this morning to find the instance gone

Can anyone recommend suitable instances to migrate to that are accepting new sign ups ?

(Corrected autocarrot)

quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

I have this pair of really useful bit sets from Bosch. They both come in almost identical boxes (one is grey, one green). Annoyingly tho. Bosch provides no easy way to search for other things they sell in the same form factor. Cos if I had 4 of these. I'd make a nice wooden box for them on the tool shelf...

quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

When did humanity decide that the thing everyone wanted was AI? Especially and AI that isn't actually all that I, but is basically just sparkling autocarrot? MS talk of including it by default in the OS. etc... Why is it opt out, and never opt in?

I'm really hoping that the AI bubble bursts sooner rather than later.

quixoticgeek, to random
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Just taking my workshop on a train...

quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

Talking about reverse DNS records. Colleague asks "why does it have arpa at the end?"

Queue one quick lecture on the history of the internet. (I should probably do a thread on that here).

quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

Ok. Unix nerds. Tell me your most obscure, interesting, or downright weird abuse of pipes. Bonus points for using tee and named pipes. Please if possible give the whole command (redact file names if necessary).

I'm teaching some people about what you can do on the UNIX command line and I need more examples.

quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

Look you can try to push past me, but I'm 100+kg of butch dyke, and I've got a fucking big backpack on. Simple laws of physics say you're not going to be on the winning side of this interaction...

quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

@felixf thank you for being the first person I've seen publicly talk about personal carbon footprint being a hoax. Thank you!

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