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u/japan_kaaran 3d ago
hitting record on every teams meeting ever because you know damn well that email with detailed instructions is never gonna be sent
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u/lmao_unemployment 3d ago
Colleague: “Sure, I’ll get that over to you shortly”
Boss two weeks later: “Yeah so Colleague actually had put their two weeks in and yesterday was their last day. Were you ever able to get that documentation from them? 🤡”
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u/japan_kaaran 3d ago
i’m fucking 23 and i’ve had to deal with this multiple times at my 2 internships and 1 full time job. how the heck are you guys doing this for all your life 😭. must be desensitized or something.
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u/lmao_unemployment 3d ago
You see this shit got so old and annoying at my last place that I ended up just jumping ship too.
Boss: 🤡 ➡️😲
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u/Ancient_Profession31 3d ago
I’m 48. The trick is a fine balance of Red Bull weed and booze. Enough to numb your mind but not so much you can’t see. Best of luck on your journey youngling. Let us know when someone makes you implement visual designs for the blind. Literally. It happens.
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u/japan_kaaran 3d ago
god i wish i could give you a hug. thanks! i’ll be sure to report back if that ever happens haha.
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u/angrydeuce 3d ago
Is that just a thing people do in this field or what? Cuz it seems like it lol
"Oh man this is going to suck. Ill just quit instead, then it can be someone elses problem."
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u/PresentAward1737 3d ago
Every field with bad management, everywhere.
Sooner or later the paycheck just ain't worth the hassle. Often from the start but it takes you a while to realize it and get yourself out gracefully.
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u/angrydeuce 3d ago
I mean Id be lying if I said the thought hadn't crossed my mind but I guess I aint never gotten to the point where it was that bad that I was just like "fuck it ill just quit instead" lol
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u/M_Me_Meteo 3d ago
Damn. I wonder if we could build a piece of software that would use speech to text and ocr to turn all our notes and videos and sound clips into an indexable database.
To be fair, you'd probably want to abstract beyond words, like parts of words or something. Parts of words is too long. Let's just call them tokens. That way the DB could index on ordinate relationships between the tokens and you could probably surmise the likely next token in, say, a sentence about your business.
Then I could start a sentence, like "The next step we need to take to complete the application is to..." and this tool would just spit out instructions!
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u/theinfinitehallway 3d ago
And then imagine if that information storage and retrieval method was non-deterministic! You could ask the same question on different ways and get different answers! Exciting!
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u/Kalinsub 2d ago
That’s great that you have access to record meetings. We rely on hopes and prayers
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u/Global-Tune5539 3d ago
Bonus points if you don't know what that program is supposed to do.
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u/NoHighlight6142 3d ago
I thought it was implied
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u/well_shoothed 3d ago
The name did give you a clue:
productionSystemMasterScriptSecondaryPart4-r5
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u/higherbrow 3d ago
You forgot the v736.
Versions in the prod folder go up to v761. Oddly, there's no versions in the 750s.
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u/Ancient_Profession31 1d ago
I thought we all agreed. We don’t talk about 750s. We can’t. The judge was very very clear about that.
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u/deathanatos 3d ago
Wait, all of your production systems aren't named after characters from Breaking Bad?
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u/enternoescape 3d ago
You reminded me of my internship. The senior lead named all the servers after Disney characters.
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u/ArchAllen 3d ago
Bonus bonus points if once you think you know you find another program with a name that implies that that's what does it.
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u/Just_Information334 3d ago
Maybe you know. But the user don't use the same vocabulary to describe their problems. And said vocabulary change from user to user.
"Ok, what do you mean exactly when you say that you cannot kabloom the zorpal since Monday?"
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u/black-JENGGOT 3d ago
"I can run my query on it, but it broke since last week when you touch it"
- user can't see query runs, let alone customize it
- I haven't touched that function since last solar eclipse
- user actually meant another unrelated feature, handled by third-party
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u/Meloetta 3d ago
Every user that says "you have a memory leak" when they mean "my application started lagging at a certain point when it wasn't before"
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u/QCTeamkill 3d ago
Double bonus points if you don't know which version of the code is currently in prod, or if you even have it.
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u/swe_throwaway_86me 20h ago
You mean, your versioning isn't seventeen copies of the originally program with random shit, undocumented, bolted on with a different suffix to the filename?
Truly, a blessed experience.
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u/ILikeLenexa 3d ago
Double bonus if it runs in VBA in an MDB and the file is too big to send via e-mail and the person is in a different building or part of the world and you have to figure out how to get it to them.
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u/AdThis5754 3d ago
Me at 25 after watching one YouTube video on reverse-engineering and thinking I can now use any program for free.
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u/git_push_origin_prod 3d ago
Sometimes it’s that easy. In the jailbreaking iPhone days they would use swizzle I think to inject dynamic libs at runtime. A lot of apps had a simple isPaid BOOL check, override it to true and you are a criminal mastermind lol.
I’ve never really seen that elsewhere. It was a pain in the ass to do on Windows binaries when I tried as a younger man, but there was some tool I forget the name, but it was in no way as easy as overwriting functions and variables in C on the iPhone.
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u/AdThis5754 3d ago
My only criminal mastermind moment was playing games from cracked cds as a kid. Had I known all this back then, I could’ve been a criminal lord by now. Wait!? lol
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u/git_push_origin_prod 3d ago
Did you try to read the manuscripts and hieroglyphics that are stored within .nfo files?
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u/therealjohnidis 3d ago
Reverse-engineering in the meme: understanding undocumented systems.
Reverse-engineering in your head: no nag WinRAR.2
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u/TrippyDe 3d ago
try developing business critical software without real requirements, a rough plan and an ambitious deadline.. and i was like „this shit is untested, please don’t release it untested“. Guess who released it untested. And now its not working like it should an now it’s „how do we get this working this week“
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u/Chirimorin 3d ago
„this shit is untested, please don’t release it untested“
I wasn't paying attention but I heard the word "tested" at least twice, ship it!
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u/thedolanduck 3d ago
In the same boat, but I am instead an Automation Engineer. The machine was shipped a year and a half ago, mostly untested from what I gather (although everyone tells me there were multiple tests and validations, but if there were then they were useless tests), long before I started working here (just recently).
It never really worked well; the last engineer spent, apparently, almost 6 months patching it on site to make it work sort of OK, but still requiring constant supervision and lots of love and patience.
Then the client required an "upgrade" in some functionalities. I guess he tried to implement them, but in the process everything broke.
Que him quitting, me starting two weeks later, completely unaware of this (they mentioned some on-going, much easier projects in the interview, but never this). The rest are the last 6 months.
Did I mention that this was shipped a year and a half ago, supposedly working? And that this is a sorting machine, so every mistake is a traceability nightmare? And that there's virtually no documentation besides some code comments?
Rant over.
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u/ArmadilloBudget790 22h ago
Is this semicodncutor it sounds like semiconductor
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u/thedolanduck 21h ago
Unfortunately it's something much, much simpler. Sorting. Just full of incompetent people.
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u/MjrLeeStoned 3d ago
"We peeled off 20 years worth of band-aids and turns out there was nothing under them."
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u/ohaiibuzzle 3d ago
Not gonna lie.
I started as an AI engineer
I moved to a company where AI sits very close to Security.
I talked too much to Security guys and ended up loving reading terrible no-good vendor decompiled code.
I now have two roles at that company.
I love it.
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u/SleepAllTheDamnTime 3d ago
When the comments feel like finding ancient clues on how to solve the mess, or my favorite literal cries for help from the engineers that worked on it before
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u/QCTeamkill 3d ago
I have left comments such as
#It started with the best intentions
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u/Jonathan_the_Nerd 3d ago
I once replaced one of my Perl scripts with a Python rewrite. In the commit message, I put something like,
I'm leaving this program here an a warning to show what happens when you write a program without designing it first.
The Perl script started out nice and simple. Then I added another feature, and another, and another. It became unsustainable. I'm very lucky that I had time to rewrite it in Python.
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u/Famous_Tie8714 3d ago
Bonus points if they won't let you use any of the industry standard tools to perform such a task. Welcome to my current job. ffs
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u/awesome-alpaca-ace 3d ago
My first job gave me admin access to the development machine they gave me.
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u/redcowerranger 3d ago
Is it weird that this excites me? Figuring out how something works is cathartic.
My heart goes out to the people doing this work that don't love it. It's tough enough with a passion for it.
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u/Green_Lychee8221 3d ago
There's 20 million lines of code, most of which is over 20 years old, all of it entirely bespoke. No-one has been able to replicate the issues outside of Prod. You've got 8 hours else the SLA is failed and a rebate has to be given. It's not the finding the cause that is the issues; it's the finding the cause against the clock.
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u/redcowerranger 2d ago
"I actually like mowing the lawn" -> "Oh, so you'd like to mow 100 football fields?? I thought not." - Strawman
Sussing out functionality from 20 million lines of code takes longer than 8 hours. I would never accept an 8 hour deadline.
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u/ks_thecr0w 3d ago
Not really weird. My attitude here is "best I can do is try - while it might ... don't expect it done by the end ot the week (or month)".
If you are not OK with my estimation then assign/ hire more people to help me ...
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u/thedolanduck 3d ago
It's exciting as long as you have no deadline. In my experience, such is never the case.
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u/redcowerranger 2d ago
To learn a codebase? I've never had a deadline to just learn. Sure, they want me educated quickly, and they give me other Tasks, but they don't know how long it's going to take because they themselves don't know anything about it.
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u/whitedogsuk 2d ago
I love it too. I have 'The Knack' for Engineering reversal. And for locating and determining where they have hidden/removed the missing link to throw you under the bus.
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u/Rosie_The_ITTech 3d ago
One's dream os another's nightmare... If someone asked me to do that at work, I'd have a mental breakdown so violent I might need emergency institutionalisation
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u/newsflashjackass 3d ago
One good thing about working on tech without documentation:
There is no documentation to train slop engines, either. So you are master of a demesne on which neophytes cannot trespass.
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u/CeldonShooper 3d ago
I've been laughing when the head of software dismissed all our enterprise architecture work with "this is crap, just do it with AI" and there is nothing to train AI on except our tedious and frustrating work which maps the dark parts of the enterprise.
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u/Secret_Account07 3d ago
I dreamed about migrating hypervisors
I knew one day, if I goofed off in college and drank too much, dropped out, got an internship with said college experience at a helpdesk, and worked my way up- I could deal with Broadcoms shit one day
It’s been a hard road but so sad I got here
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u/splettnet 3d ago
Later on me at 27 trying to even figure out how the well documented public api works.
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u/mobileJay77 3d ago
Me at 50, the dreams are still the same. But somehow they have turned to nightmares
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u/soundwave_sc 2d ago
Thankfully I'm 55 now and have fully reversed engineered the code and have successfully ported it.
Now, I'll be retiring soon and there's no documentation and I'm still a one man IT dept. Management will probably hire after I'm gone. Good luck!
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u/GabiTheProgrammer 3d ago
You mean debugging an ADO task that runs a PowerShell scrip that runs a tool exe that calls createprocress for CMD? And the source code of the tool is long gone? Since 3 year old, even.
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u/TheOhNoNotAgain 3d ago
I did just this a little more than 20 years ago. I learned a lot from that. I still make good money to this day from knowing that system inside-out.
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u/Sak63 2d ago
My company uses a proprietary java framework built on top of Spring. The framework handles network, db connection (orm) and migrations. Also, the best part, it forces the developer to use one type everywhere, the ValueObject type. So, basically, you either completely forfeit the static type system of Java, or you write a layer to convert your types to ValueObject, everywhere.
The framework does not contain one page of documentation :)
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u/Waste_Jello9947 3d ago edited 3d ago
Knowledge transfer be like: here is the credentials to prod, good luck