Dave.

The problem with stack overflow is that you need to know enough about the domain you’re working in to describe it accurately enough to search and find that previous great answer.

If you have no clue, and then naively ask the no-clue kinds of questions, because you have no clue, then you get beaten over the head about not searching for the existing answer that you don’t know how to search for.

If you’re interested in the systems behind Apollo, go find and read “Digital Apollo”.

It goes all the way through the project and describes in good detail everything, how they developed the control systems, the computer hardware, how the software was designed, how they implemented one of the first real computer systems project management, all the interactions between astronauts/test pilots who still wanted to “manually fly the lander”, the political back and forth between competing teams, the whole thing.

It’s a great read if you have a technical mindset.

“Have you tried formatting your PC and completely reinstalling Windows? That often fixes icon misalignment on the desktop. Please upvote if this helps you!” - every “volunteer Microsoft Support Forum” representative ever.

Usually iterations of:

“Closed and locked due to duplicate of: (question asked 9 years ago about Visual Studio 2011 and Visual Basic, when you’re using VS code '22 and C#)”

“This seems like an XY problem, what are you really trying to accomplish?”, after a one thousand word post describing in detail exactly what you are trying to accomplish and the many different reasons why you can’t just use #GENERIC_EVERYDAY_METHOD.

Either that or the quick and dirty method that I want for a one off data conversion that uses standard libraries is heavily down voted and lost while the elaborate, all-cases-considered, 7-third-party-library-using answer becomes the top result.

There was a series of books in the '80s where a systems programmer gets pulled through a portal into your typical magical world, good vs evil, etc.

They subsequently look at the magical spells in use and realise they can apply Good Systems Programming Practices™ to it. And thus, with their knowledge of subroutines and parallel processing, they amplify their tiny innate magical abilities up to become a Pretty Good Magician™. So while all the rest of the magicians basically have to construct their spells to execute in a linear fashion, they’re making magical subroutines and utility functions and spawning recursive spells without halting checks and generally causing havoc.

It’s quite a good allegory for modern times, where a select few build all the magic and the rest just have useful artefacts they use on a day to day basis with no idea how they work

Someone with only a tenuous grip on their sanity, I’d imagine.

in which case I will go one level down, to the calculateExtraCommissions() method.

In which case you will discover that the calculateExtraCommissions() function also has the same nested functions and you eventually find six subfunctions that each calculate some fraction of the extra commission, all of which could have been condensed into three lines of code in the parent function.

Following the author’s idea of clean code to the letter results in a thick and incomprehensible function soup.

I shall begrudgingly consider it then, with much begrudgement.

But it’s three more letters. No deal.

Time is a cube, and always will be.

And how if you share a file in Teams and then six months later you want to share a file with the same name to ANYONE else via teams, well that’s a big no-can-do. Teams just went ahead and uploaded that file to your “stuff to share” folder in OneDrive and didn’t put it in a subfolder unique to the chat, or add a unique prefix or suffix or anything because hey, you’ll only ever share a file with a particular name once in your life, right?

And nobody would ever want to share a file with the same name, but different data, right? So Teams can just give the end user the choice between replacing the current file with the new one, or sharing the same one again to these new guys, because there’s no possible use case for actually having two files named the same with different information in the file, right?

Nobody would want to share a README.TXT, or Photo001.jpg, or contact.ics, or a zip file of a folder they just downloaded from Teams’ SharePoint interface, the file that’s automatically called “OneDrive.zip” without the option to change it before saving, more than once, right? Right??

Fuck teams. And fuck Teams(New) too, just for the shitty name.

i like how the answers are the exact same generic unhelpful drivel you hear 20k times a month if you’re…

Searching for a solution to any problem on the internet.

There are a million ad- laden sites that, in answer to a technical question about your PC, suggest that you run antivirus, system file checker, oh and then just format and reinstall your operating system. That is also 90 percent of the answers coming from “Microsoft volunteer support engineers” on Microsoft’s own support forums as well, just please like and upvote their answer if it helps you.

There are a million Instagram and tiktok videos showing obvious trivial, shitty, solutions to everyday problems as if they are revealing the secrets of the universe while they’re glueing bottle tops and scraps of car tires together to make a television remote holder.

There are a trillion posts on Reddit from trolls and shitheads just doing it for teh lulz and Google is happily slurping this entire torrent of shit down and trying to regurgitate it as advice with no human oversight.

I reckon their search business has about two years left at this rate before the general public regards them as a joke.

Edit: and the shittification of the internet has all been Google’s doing. The need for sites to get higher up in Google’s PageRank™ or be forever invisible has absolutely ruined it. The torrent of garbage now needed to ensure that various algorithms favour your content has fucked it for everyone. Good job, Google.

I work in OT. The number of “best practice” IT mantras that companies mindlessly pick up and then slavishly follow to the detriment of their mainly-OT business is alarming.

Make your own damn best practice that suits your business best, don’t copy and paste something from a megacorp. Sure, include elements from megacorp’s best practice if they are applicable, but don’t be a slave to the entirety of it.

Australian here. Last time I wrote a cheque, Michael Jackson was still black.

They are supposed to be the glue that binds the internal team together as well as bonding to external groups.

The project manager organises external requirements and steers the project in the direction needed for the business. That direction might change depending on the status of other projects, it’s their job to be on top of that.

They also report progress and roadblocks upstream so that those who manage groups of related projects can work on keeping everything running.

Whether they’re actually competent, well that’s something else entirely.

You can stare at that code all afternoon but you won’t spot the bug until a microsecond after you hit “commit”.

You should release what you’ve written as a framework, that’s what everyone else is doing.

<Insert XKCD standards comic here>

That may be true but if the language is tough to develop with, then those users won’t get a product made with that language, they’ll get a product made with whatever language is easier / more expedient for the developer. Developer time is money, after all.

2004:

User: “I moved my PC to another desk and now my monitor is off. The hard drive is making noises though. All the power cables are in haha. I made sure the connections were all nice and tight it’s a bit strange.”

IT: “Okay I want you to follow the video cable from the monitor to the hard drive. It should have a BLUE connector at the end.Can you see the label where it is plugged in?”

User: “…yes it says ‘serial’, I think?”

IT: “Aha. I’ll drop around this afternoon with a spare monitor. That Trinitron monitor you’ve got will need to go away to be repaired.”

Seems to be a rare thing,

Didn’t you know? All the cool kids these days skip documentation and just hang out on discord, where you can get a laggy response to your query about build dependencies in 2-3 business days.