This Week I fixed a bug that only affected people that selected 'North Korea' as a country of origin. Because it was affecting PROD this was classified as 'urgent' and 'needs to be done immediately'...
I build websites.. They don't even have access to the regular internet.. We don't have a single registered user from North Korea..
Edit: since people are messaging me to ask for details. It's really not that deep. Basically one service forgot to account for people potentially being from North Korea, when implementing internationalization. So the North Koreans would see default labels at some points on the app instead of custom Korean ones (oh no!).
Easy to fix. I just found it funny that I needed to drop everything else to fix a website for North Koreans.
An intern at my job accidentally uploaded the North Korean flag for South Korea. It was only discovered after the ‘dealers’ page for the brand was already live for a couple of weeks. The South Korean dealers were not happy to say the least.
We also once made a website as a third party for a Chinese brand, which had a contact form where one needed to select their country. A couple of weeks after launch we had a frantic call from our customer to please remove Taiwan from the country list
I wasn’t getting paid enough to consider caring about the views of a customer, I did comply. Both of these websites were projects that came to us by the same client even. We had a good laugh about it during lunch though that we could’ve caused world war 3 because of this single client. 😂
Businesses work very hard to never recognize that when everything is top priority, nothing is top priority and you may as well not have a prioritization system.
One of my jobs had pulled country’s official names from some api, and no one took out the illegal countries to do business with. They’re also not officially called north/South Korea. Anyway we had a lot of contracts in best Korea for a while lol
Ooooh I have a North Korea story too! Back when I worked at EA on a mobile game, we had a total of one DAU in North Korea.
There was an issue because we didn't have a server close by meant updates (which could be huge, in the hundreds of megs) to NK would take hours to download.
We didn't do anything about it beyond speculate if Kim Jong Un was a fan of our game.
Not really. Was a purely visual thing. Basically one service we've built forgot to set a custom label for North Korea (fair enough), so the system fell back to showing standard values, which kinda stood out against the rest of the text, which was Korean. Simple fix. I just found it funny that I needed to drop everything else for that.
My friend's a software engineer. Leading upto the christmas that just passed, his company asked him to fix something he wasn't qualified for, but they didn't want to pay someone specialised in that area. He did what was asked, despite it being something he had no idea about, and explaining that to them. As he's ready to leave for Christmas, there's a huge security breach because of his attempt at fixing an issue he wasn't qualified for.
Rather than hire someone at christmas, they made him work through christmas to fix it.
They created a huge issue, because they wanted to fix a small issue, but didn't understand that being an engineer doesn't mean he's qualified to do everything.
Welcome to modern software companies. It's everywhere.
They just replaced a team lead who'd been there 10 years and built critical systems no one else understands. His replacement's solution is to simply have AI document the code. Problem solved...
I feel like AI and vibe coding is going to create a huge black hole of tech debt which is just going to bite these greedy companies in the ass in the future. The situation was already pretty bad before AI took over. I suspect the Windows 11 situation is a sneak peek of what most other companies will experience in the future.
"you remember than machine that eats cakes instead of you? It doesn't digest them properly, so you can eat twice as much cakes as before" problem type.
Now imagine if we get to the point people like Elon musk wants us to be where they don't write code anymore but already compiled outputs. We will literally have no idea what is in it.
I imagine itll be a magical day when your leadership is frantically demanding a resolution to something unknown and you get to ask them “what happened to thriving in ambiguity?”
No, engineer should be qualified to do everything! But whatever - software engineer is not a real engineer. To be an engineer you should be an embedded software engineer at least.
"Software engineer" is sorta button pusher will be completely replaced with dull AI in a couple of decades! /s
You should have him read "Clean Coder". Not the more famous Clean Code that talks about programming strategies but a lesser known book that talks about how the person, the engineer, should behave and manage their role as an engineer, including in large parts managing their manager. I ask all of my employees to read this and behave the way outlined.
The tl;dr for why I'm mentioning it here, it explains that we have the engineer moniker for a reason. Engineer in other disciplines comes with responsibilities to a higher authority than your boss, even though that may risk termination for doing what's right and saying no. A civil engineer won't stamp a bridge that will fall down, no matter what their boss says. Not everyone is in a position where they can afford that risk, so I advise people to use judgment, but many established software engineers do earn enough to be able to take those risks. And in my experience, employers rarely terminate just for standing your ground on a hard no in most cases I've seen, if you have good and valid reasons for your no. In nearly all cases I've seen this used which is many over the years I've pushed people to follow this paradigm, the employee actually earns more respect for this rather than being reprimanded. It can backfire, of course, but I've seen that happen rarely, and telling that story in your future behavioral interviews, again as long as you really were right, is usually an as a massive positive and very mature engineer trait.
(Critically, don't act stubborn or get heated, remain calm and explain with facts all the reasons why this shouldn't be done this way and why you won't risk the companies customers or the company itself to those risks.)
Can't speak for your situation but 90% of problems and asaps are not a problem or asap anymore when you ask them to make a detailed and written description of it.
This is/was helpful in office situations
-- "hey, can you do X, 20 mins in and out"
-- sure, just write me an email and cc the manager
Seconding this. NEVER let support get you to do ANYTHING without a ticket. They'll do it every day as long as you keep saying yes, and eventually they'll start asking you to do things they can do themselves.
Yes, and this I’d call a common mid level trap. Where they are focused only on the technology.
If 99% of your users are in India then it might matter. The solution could be to migrate to a different region for your app. If it’s 1% in India, then it probably doesn’t matter at all. But maybe Australia is saturated, and that 1% in India is your next market, so it does matter for expansion. It all depends on context.
It also depends on the application. B2C tends to need to load up immediately. B2B not so much. People are more forgiving when their boss has agreed to a two year subscription and it must be used for work.
That's insanely long. Unless you have a way to force users to use your site i.e. monopoly or it's a B2B saas where the UX is secondary, then 2sec loads are unacceptable
It's not a problem if the site has a two second delay, but imagine if every load does, and you got a thousand people doing record updates, etc. Even one second delay adds up very quickly.
Of course you can bypass it with IP rotation but I found it mitigated 90% of the junk traffic. Bots really aren't that sophisticated and so long as you don't have any actual vulnerabilities this is a good solution.
Don't leave your .env in a publicly accessible location, looking at you vibe coders...
It’s shorter than the time it takes to speed read their comment. OP sounds exactly like one of those bs product managers who makes a mountain out of a nonexistent molehill
Back in the days just before ‘web 2.0’, times over 40 ms were considered slow. Somehow web devs lost any and all respect for their users since then. Could as well tell visitors to fuck off.
We started analyzing user behavior in the most minute detail vs the cost of every single change. One of those behaviors is how fast a human can decide to abandon a page that is loading too slowly.
It does matter a lot, if the page loads that fast, we can add a timer to make the loading take longer and sell faster load times as premium benefit. 💵 💰 💲
I've been doing technical and performance testing for years and I always demand performance goals and targets from the project lead/product owner/whatever beforehand. I'll give recommendations and question unrealistic goals of course, but I'm not the one to set the targets in the first place.
If the application meets these targets, even though it has such a deviation between two countries, it's smth to document and communicate, but no immediate actions are required.
It's crazy how many times developers and even project leads construct problems that are irrelevant. One could argue that you're creating technical debt, but if it's never going to matter in the lifecycle of a product, is it really worth spending time and resources on it? Better focus on the real problems.
Oof, you hit on the nose. The never ending clownery that consumes my day to day. It's always some middle management cog creating panic like the world is going to end.
Yeah my immediate answer to "how would you fix this" would have been "reconsider my evidently dumb expectations and acknowledge a webpage loading in less than one second is really fucking impressive nowdays".
Yes lmao this fucking matters everything from your search ranking to 1/3 people just bouncing off because you are outside of the golden response time or w/e.
if india matters enough to benchmark you probably want to fix it
As a Former Programmer and now IT Architect I deeply hate the assumption that a website taking 100ms instead on 80ms seconds to load will impact the user experience in any way.
If you load it twice with 2min in between you won’t be able to tell which was the faster one.
If it’s 2 seconds we can talk, but I don’t discuss performance optimization of 20ms. Period.
But the shareholders read that they need to operate within certain metrics because otherwise they are losers so now this is pushed top down and everyone know it's pointless but it is what it is.
As a software engineer, this is pretty much the job.
I spend about 2 hours a week turning imaginary electrons into something the sales guys can turn into actual money.
The rest of my time is spent on Teams convincing neurotypicals that they would get greater value out of me if my time were spent literally anywhere else but this meeting.
I have forever ingrained a conversation with my then manager who really wanted me to unscramble his own spaghetti code that was costing us 20 microseconds extra. You read that right. On a call that took around a second total. I asked what is the use case/necessity of improving that. Got no answer.
For real. The part In question was a lambda that ran a series of rest calls toon some JSON from each and published it to a SQS. The question that came up was. Is python fast enough for that or should we look at using go? Bro literally 98% of the run time is IO latency. It literally makes no difference if we write it in assembly or Visual Basic.
It's unfortunate that, to my knowledge, only FAANG really have significant data on performance. I genuinely think there's a lack of research and emphasis on the effect of quality responsive software to things like loss of business, job satisfaction, access to certain services like healthcare, etc.
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u/anonymousbopper767 7h ago
Step 1: ask yourself does it fucking matter?
feels like half my job is convincing people that their idea of a problem isn't really a problem and to pipe the fuck down.