IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Neranja said:

Suit yourself, I will probably maintaining ancient FORTRAN code. I mean COBOL is bad, but If you really want to have nightmares you should read some of the code engineers wrote.

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COBOL really isn't that bad, it's just you don't have an IDE (Eclipse Rational Developer plugin doesn't integrate with enough existing technology), so you're probably stuck using an ISPF, which is like a structured Command Line, and a lack of any standard library support, doesn’t have garbage collection, or strong memory protection (some weird shit can happen when messing with raw memory on occasion).

Otherwise, it's a reasonably designed language, especially more recent iterations. For example, the original COBOL pretty much only used Periods as Scope Terminators, and they would subsequently completely drop you out of a routine, but now we have level specific terminators, and honestly it just makes more sense to end an IF with an END-IF, than layering squiggly brackets by column (granting IDE's make up the difference for that deficiency). It's definitely got it's quirks like Divisions, e.g. WORKING STORAGE...so no local variables (which is NOT the same as Global Variables, only linkage/passed parms reach the next program). Like some people get concerned with Column based syntax, but after a month or so, you barely have to give it a passing thought.

There are two languages on the mainframe, that I will disparage. JCL which is a beast and Assembler (not x86 Assembly, although same premise), which I fucking hate working on Assembler, tedious, arduous.

Job Control Language evolved organically, and as a result it's a mess, and there's a 100 ways to do a thing, and different styles of syntax which are all valid...until they're not valid. I have never worked with a Mainframe guy, who ever claimed to be a guru in JCL, and even though given how much they had, and I have at this point, one would argue that I am; I know there's so much I still really don't quite understand about it, that while I can very comfortable work and build my own, I'm usually using previous references and, forbid I run into a system JCL with voodoo in it...man. There is something to be said about running a job, where you've to manage your own disk space...nowadays, you can actually zero out sizes for the most part and it will auto fill, but even so you're often determining the Track / Cylinder size et. al.

Who is our resident Assembly guy, is it LurkingDirk or Noodleface? Ugh, fucking Assembler (Z O/S)...working in that shit heap, building Green Screens (screen maps), trying to debug...

TJT said:

Code that they do not understand in the slightest and cannot even read without a summarized AI prompt explaining to them what a bunch of code lines are doing.

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I feel like that actually happened maybe 10-15 years ago based on the responses I get (or don't get) any time I ask for a query or piece of logic outside of my silo.

I've been maintaining recently that yes we will get these vibe coders, but the technical experts and the people that know how to manage them are going to be more needed than ever.

The new CIO (an Indian from India) apparently announced to the management team that he will be flying to India next week to conduct interviews. I expected them to replace middle management and development teams first but if he's personally conducting interviews in India that smells a whole lot more like replacing upper/senior management first and those new hires will be forming their own teams to move everything overseas at record pace.

This is what's happening now. American companies aren't even hiring foreign consultants/contractors living here for H1-B visas or sponsorships much anymore. They are opening offices in Latin America and India and hiring teams directly there.

I don't know how many of you were working in this field directly after the 2008 market crash but during that recession there was an influx of H1-B consultancy hiring. This has always been a thing in our industry but during that recession when companies were struggling to stay afloat those hires were cheaper. What happened over time was companies also took notice of a decline in quality and as the economy recovered a lot of companies moved back to hiring FTEs and curtailed sponsorships.

What's happening now is senior leadership (and honestly just many people in general) think they can bypass that same decline in quality by leveraging AI. They honestly believe that any novice coder can output quality by just utilizing AI to do it for them so they are cutting costs and moving operations overseas. This surely will work out well for everyone.

TL;DR: I kind of hate working in this field now, maybe I'll buy a franchise.

Phazael said:

The Poo invasion is happening at every level and it needs to stop. You are exactly right that the dipshit senior management think AI will solve the talent issue and that they themselves are somehow going to be immune to replacement by Poos. They are really pulling out all the stops to do to the US what they did to Canada.

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In case anyone hasn't ran across it yet:

TJT said:

IMO the use of AI solutions is going to exacerbate problems. We are at the stage where companies (mine included) want AIs to actually perform actions.

Take network engineering for example. The whole idea here is you have nerds piece together what your infrastructure is doing at any given time and record steps to fix it. They want AI to do this detection AND execute the network runbook to correct it all on its own. In the hands of a skilled team this will be an amazing tool.

But I know so many tech retards who legitimately don't understand splunk logs for example. Yet they want to sit AI bullshit right on top of that doing things they also don't understand? Yeah that's going to make a crowdstrike 2024 level explosion sooner rather than later, and in more places.

On top of that having retard developers who can't read or write code but are making applications via AI in languages they don't remotely understand it's going to be some shit. Like truly fucking wild.

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This is the only outcome. An AI "renaissance" followed by an epic level of crash and burn.

TJT said:

We've been hashing out the director's fever dream the past week. Dude was getting frustrated when I explained to him that his desire to have the output in source control is a significant hurdle. Because executing some SQL DML or something is one thing. If you want it also source controlled it cannot just "use the REST API for DBT to do it." I am telling him that the DBT API has no part to play here other than telling it to build something if and when it's already been merged to master.

Dude gets confused about this. I sat there explaining that what you are truly asking for here is that this application has to create a branch by itself. Because generating SQL wont be enough here. It has to generate DBT formatted shit and update config files for anything that it adds within the DBT code base. It also has to write its own data validation tests due to your other requirement. To accomplish this it has to create a branch somewhere, generate or modify the code files, commit them, then push this to the remote branch, then generate a PR for it. All on its own. Exact formatting now matters here because this is no longer under the hood execution of dynamic SQL DML. But source controlled, monitored, validation test, blah blah blah.

So now he wants to include an AI Agent that will proofread the generated code so it follows best practices after the application spits it out.

God help me. I am all for creating new cool stuff but I have NEVER heard of an application doing this. I have not found any examples of anyone doing something similar. I have been talking to our app team who also says this sounds insane. If anyone has something I can read about such a thing please send it my way.

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It sounds insane because it is insane while also not really serving any meaningful purpose.

I would probably just have it save the generated sql/code to a secure drive somewhere and then just have a human commit it to the repo if he's that hell bent on it being in source.

I know some of those words but this sounds like a train wreck

How do you distinguish between impostor syndrome and just sucking? I get it all the time when there is something relevant I don’t know. Enough to make me wanna quit some times. I have tons of experience, so I feel like I should just know stuff by now.

pwe said:

How do you distinguish between impostor syndrome and just sucking? I get it all the time when there is something relevant I don’t know. Enough to make me wanna quit some times. I have tons of experience, so I feel like I should just know stuff by now.

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I mean, I probably just suck, but I've always thought it was less about the specific things you know and more about how long it would take you to figure them out if the need arises. That may be less true the more specialized you are, but I think there's a huge % of the workforce that's effectively in the "don't know and won't/can't try" bucket. Compared to that, "hmm, let me take a look and see what I can do" is like night and day.

Control said:

I mean, I probably just suck, but I've always thought it was less about the specific things you know and more about how long it would take you to figure them out if the need arises. That may be less true the more specialized you are, but I think there's a huge % of the workforce that's effectively in the "don't know and won't/can't try" bucket. Compared to that, "hmm, let me take a look and see what I can do" is like night and day.

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...or you just have impostor syndrome. Hard to tell, case in point. I do just fine, it just feels like I'm always a step behind. It's not uncommon that I catch up in the weekend, and then enjoy the next week being on top of everything lol

I would say that every truly intelligent person has at least some imposter syndrome. And it probably reaches its height around middle age, especially in high skill professions that change often (like tech), where companies/managers decide that if they are gonna pay someone to "learn on the job" the higher salaried veterans can fuck off, they'll hire young/foreign cheap labor.

I've always had a minor case of it, and at 42 it's turning into a major case of it as opportunities feel like they are drying up and the industry is moving on without me.