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.