"when you requested the confirmation code [it] was generated client-side, then sent to you via a POST Request"
That is shocking. What must the internal culture be like for such an idea to even be a possibility?
That is shocking. What must the internal culture be like for such an idea to even be a possibility?
There were some genuinely good, smart people working there, but the culture was such that I’d be very surprised if they shipped a working product in 5 years time. If they did ship it, it would be an awful thing to behold.
I don’t know how to fix this issue. But from what I’ve seen and heard, the best minds (other than the rare altruist) stay in the private sector. It pays better, and there’s just so much less BS to deal with.
I worked on an application a number of years ago where it was trying to load all the comments and details about an internal bug tracker into memory. It must have worked fine at first, but after time it was a POS.
If the database fits onto client hard drive and the modifications are rare, preloading everything is almost always better.
If you have a dynamically changing system such as bug tracker, it is still possible to go fully local, but that would require considerable cooperation from server side. When the back-end does not have a fast, efficient API for sending diffs, you may get stuck waiting for it to be implemented. But that's a purely organizational problem.
Of course, all of above applies to actually saving data to permanent storage. Storing everything in memory is a sin by itself.
"Hard discount" stores like Aldi are supposed to have <1500 SKUs, for example.
Now the user will immediately get to see the full item and will be able to page through the results much more quickly.
I've definitely had cases where I had to process the data before sending it to the client, but I've also sent absurd amounts of data and rendered it client side. In fact, I think sending data embedded in HTML to the client is rarely a good idea, and once you've adopted that mindset, apps can look very different.
* Make it easier to fire incompetent people. A job that's in the service of the people should not be a cozy "I'm now set for life" type of gig.
* Pay semi-market rates.
* Stop going for the lowest bidder for contractors.
Yes, my point exactly. I think it's cheaper to pay people a reasonable salary and less job security. Otherwise it just ends up being a lot of dead weight throughout the organization. This dead weight leads to low productivity, which in turn e.g. leads the management to bring on expensive consultants to try and fix it.
I remember when healthcare.gov was launched and the clusterfuck it was, and then a much of FAANG level employees had to quickly go and clean it up as charity.
Same reasons judges are paid a lot
Private sector unions (making them impossible to fire)
Nepotism
Layers and layers of bureaucracy
In which case I could totally see how it's part of the culture, having worked in orgs like this:
- A person brings up this concern
- "Uh sweetie, I think IBM wouldn't make a mistake like that"
You'd think an agency as important as the FBI would verify who is working on their systems, but probably no one did.
Why?
The upper echelons of these federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies are universally political animals with names suffixed by III and IV that instinctually perceive anything as even vaguely technical as far beneath them. The only time something like the security of a network becomes a priority for these people is when it causes them embarrassment. At all other times the operation of these systems is a budget item that gets farmed out according to the prevailing political prerogatives of the day; actual competence being well down on the list of priorities.
Or the second: https://www.newsweek.com/fbis-expensive-sentinel-computer-sy...
The security focused mindset we have today in web development just wasn't developed to that level whenever this thing was written. It's kinda a case in point for replacing websites entirely from time to time.
I have been trying to get US government contracts for years through my company, including offering $0, $1 and other guaranteed low price bids to try to get the work. We exceed every requirement in the RFPs. We are recognized as the best in the nation in our service area and have 200+ full time employees. Crickets.