sqircles

LinkedIn has a wild past. I'm surprised that it seems like no one remembers. Scanning users e-mail inboxes, creating fake users, etc.

IBM has cut ~8,000 jobs in the past year or so.

Sounds like business as usual to me, with a little sensationalization.

I would assume one major thing here is that many orgs only need a small subset of functionality from what most products provide. Many times, that small subset of functionality is only "good enough" in and of itself, but the org is paying the premium for the entire suite of whatever it is. This makes realizing that an LLM can get them to MVP and beyond much easier.

Charging hundreds of thousands if not millions per year for very basic functionality is what is "killing" b2b SaaS.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, but does anyone else still work in an environment where they have to do synchronous version control? It's a nightmare and I have yet to find a decent solution.

To give an idea, this is a proprietary system that is extendable via scripts, but all of the artifacts are exported via XML files where script source is escaped into one XML tag within the metadata. Same with presentation layers, the actual view XML is escaped into one line within one attribute of the metadata file. The "view" xml may be thousands of lines but it is escaped into a single like of the export file so any change at all just shows that line as being changed in a diff. Attempts at extracting that data and unescaping it even seem to present problems because when the XML is exported often times the attributes within the schema are exported in a different order, etc.

I recently took a job maintaining and extending the functionality of an enterprise Enterprise Asset Management product through its own scripting and xml-soup ecosystem. Since it is such a closed system with a much smaller dataset of documentation and examples, it has been great at using what it does know to help me navigate and understand the product as a whole, and how to think of things in regard to how this product works behind the scenes in the code I cannot see.

It doesn't write the code for me, but I talk to it like it is a personal technical consultant on this product and it has been very helpful.

As an aside, have you looked at Zulip?

I don't doubt that is certainly a motivator, but I also don't disagree that a formal study on the effects of flooding corn fields en-masse is in order.

If I put corn in a pond to hunt waterfowl, I go to jail.

If I put pond in the corn, I can charge $10k+/yr to hunt my personal duck park.

My son loves trains. There are a couple of state parks near me that have tracks running through them and I once tried to find something like this / flight tracker for trains and learned their security / obfuscation around that seems to be on the same level of submarines? Why?

Meeting the misses on a MUD is a true OG internet love story. That's awesome.

There are a lot of factors that go into achieving success in the workplace. There are usually competing ideas of what success is to you, versus what it is to the one rating you or paying you. You have to, at some level, appear to be good at something they think is good to have around. Sometimes that aligns with what you think is good, sometimes it doesn’t.

Of course the advice in OP is going to be relative, but it’s not a bad rule of thumb to have a good sense of what your immediate does, how they think, what metrics they value, etc. If not for your own advancement- keeping immediate leadership off tilt can greatly increase QOL, or vice-versa. I personally would love to have leadership above me that I think "damn, I'd like to be a little more like that guy" but in almost 20 years of being in the workforce, including military and the likes, that kind of leadership has been hard to come by.

Paper Credentials: I'm going to stack on a masters degree and some more certs. As a kid I was into development and anything tech, but for some reason resisted formal education or even working in the field. I spent my summers and school breaks working different construction trades as my entire family was spread out amongst the trades. After the military I did an entrepreneurial stint, then I took the comfortable, "guaranteed" route, in regard to career- wherever I could land in the US Fed. Govt, where I did about 12 years in 5 or so different positions... I was raised to, and had always worked hard - but I never really had much risk in regard to losing my job until recently.

Preceding wall of text to explain how hard the realization hit, for practically the first time in my life, when stuff started going crazy in the feds: "damn... I really could be ~6mo away from losing it all." As many of you know, the market was and is ridiculous. Thankfully a few years back, even when I "knew" I didn't need it, I finished my BS:CS before my GI Bill dried up. And then as another challenge took the Security+ exam before I started applying for a job in the private sector. A lot of people in this industry like to say none of that matters-- which might certainly be true, but I can say without a doubt that those pieces of paper are the main reason I was about to get out of the hole I was in. I'd rather not be in that position ever again, but I'd like to be well prepared "on paper" if I am.

I thought for sure I was going to see an image map when I looked at the source. Pleasant surprise!

There are entire niches of us that make a living (not at IBM) making certain IBM products actually do what they're supposed to. From my vantage point I see essentially zero maintenance going on with their products. I sincerely don't understand the market (why do people keep paying hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for non-existent support?) - but whatever.

> The Space Jam website is simple: a single HTML page, absolute positioning for every element...

Absolute positioning wasn't available until CSS2 in 1998. This is just a table with crafty use of align, valign, colspan, and rowspan.

Thanks for all of the hootin' n' hollerin' over the past ~decade or so.

This kicked the memories back to playing Alien Adoption Agency with friends in my middle school computer lab class.

Just make sure you know your state's laws and regulations very well. I had a friend in a mid-western state that was caring for a couple of babies when a tree fell and killed their mother. They were in contact with a licensed rescue to get them to them. The Dept. of Conservation caught wind and showed up at their house, took the animals, walked into their back yard with them and shot them on the spot.

I am an adult with ADHD and have never been able to get past the side effects that I have to drugs such as amphetamines and SSRIs. I was prescribed Modafinil for a short period for "Shift Work Disorder" when I worked shift work as a Stationary Engineer and it was glorious in regard to my ADHD symptoms with effectively zero side effects. I wish the US would expand its usage.

How are these "engineers" maintaining jobs? How is pushing code generated by someone/something else that hasn't even as much as been looked at before acceptable in any realm?

Better yet- why are there orgs that accept this behavior? I know mine is far from it, as they should be.

Labs in general are notorious for having insane food drive to the point where when you run into one that does not, they're certainly an exception. All dogs in general have food drive, as it is a necessity to live, but they're given basically unlimited access to it which diminishes it's value in their psyche.

Once you pull that prey drive out of a working dog and associate it with something such as a ball, there's no greater satisfaction this planet than doing the thing for that animal. It usually works better as a reward for what we're doing, is more instant, but also it can be deadly for a dog to eat food when they're at working-level activity.

Jason is phenomenal. There is absolutely no telling how many hours he has had a deck of cards in his hands.

The foundations of card magic are certainly out there, and for me knowing how the fundamental slights work make it that much more magical to see it performed at such a level. No different than having played a sport makes spectating that much more interesting and appreciable.

The "old man yelling at the sky" part of me can only hope the side effects of something like this gaining traction might be that physical-world advertisements fade away.

> There is very little incentive to produce high-quality software, to not alienate your customers, and to support the thing you already sold.

I think some of what I'm trying to portray is that this should be the incentive. Either do it or you don't have a customer. Yet, the customers don't hold this standard.

As an individual consumer, if I don't get what I pay for, I return it or can even submit a charge-back. Is it not irresponsible of business management to not do the same?

If I never have to have two weeks of meetings around discussing how many vCAN points we will need for the next year ever again, I'll be a happy man.

The state of software companies is pretty terrible. I have been on the acquisition side as well as the development / end-user side and it’s mind-boggling knowing the exorbitant costs with bare minimum value delivered, yet companies just keep paying whatever they’re told it costs, until it’s comically astronomical and the customers have to tell them to get bent. Yet still, software vendors keep changing their licensing structure until it meets that comically astronomical figure and pushing customers away.

Enterprise software licensing, support contracts, and technical account managers (TAMs) often run into hundreds of thousands or millions annually per organization. Yet, in practice, support tickets go unresolved or ignored, even for large clients.

The software quality of our most expensive products is extremely poor and unreliable, almost across the board. Many products suffer from bugs, outdated features, or incompatibility issues that disrupt operations. In development roles, this means wasted time on workarounds, custom patches, or integrations that shouldn't be necessary. For a non-small organization, this scales up to significant productivity losses and hidden costs in overhead.

These companies actively alienate us, the customer, through their business practices. Changes like aggressive licensing shifts (e.g., moving from per-core to per-employee models) force reevaluations and migrations and eroding trust (i.e. Oracle with Java, VMWare fiasco). This isn't isolated—it's a pattern where short-term revenue grabs risk long-term relationships, yet companies seem unfazed.

This jacks the entire ecosystem up. These practices stifle innovation by locking customers into suboptimal tools, increase overall IT spend industry-wide, and contribute to employee burnout in dev and ops teams.

It seems like it’s a race to the bottom. The strategy is to create an ecosystem with high switching costs and vendor lock-in. It just doesn’t seem sustainable, yet- it keeps truckin’ along.

This is another "beginning of the end." All eyes are on this situation and how much push back it gets. If there is little resistance, others will certainly follow suit.

People love to talk about management skills and how things should be, but in my experience the autonomy to have that freedom is greatly lost upon the manager. At every level of management you'll be barking down orders as a transitory and the main difference is how you do or do not get buy-in from your reports - and often it is next to impossible to gain that buy-in (more work! longer hours! emergency pragmatic fix for an administrative problem!), which is why you're the one presenting the task.

I believe they're the current "cheat code" to the hiring process. If you get called up for an interview after talking to a company at a career fair, there's a good inclination that you have already passed or at least have a leg up on the "culture fit" part of the interview.

With hundreds to thousands of people spamming every job posting under the sun the second it is posted, just getting your credentials read by a human is a major barrier right now that career fairs help alleviate.

At 2.25% I'm not sure it will ever make financial sense for me to move. Upsides and downsides to that.

The thing that seemed to work best for me was reaching out to dev shops in my area and starting a conversation even if they didn't have a position posted. Go to meetups and talk to people, join their discord, etc... and job fairs, as lame as they seem, produced contacts for me that are still reaching out "just in case" even though I found a position eventually.

What's old is new again. Get those soft skills warmed up and go out and shake hands.