theorynoodle:

maybe i’m biased or oversensitive because i’m a programmer myself, but i really hate seeing posts on my dash that berate tumblr’s programmers for some bug or missing feature. i’ve seen some really incredibly nasty vitriol, directed not at the organization as a whole, but specifically at the people whose job it is to write the code.

i have worked at many places like tumblr before and let me tell you, when there’s a missing feature, it’s never because the programmers just “don’t care.” software companies like tumblr have dedicated product managers whose job it is to pick which potential features get developed and in what order, as well as which bugs get fixed and which get ignored. there is always loads of data informing these decisions– measurements like the total number of people affected by a given bug, how often a user that encounters that bug will experience it, and the relative severity of the effects of the bug.

it’s also product managers who get to decide which features go away. there may be myriad reasons why– something was comparatively rarely used, or it’s measurably confusing for new users, or it was implemented in a shoddy and bug-prone manner, with no documentation, by someone who has long since quit the company, and the amount of time spent fixing and maintaining the feature is preventing the developers from doing more important work.

programmers who sign up to work at places like tumblr are almost never building anything from scratch. the reality of life working as a programmer at an established company like tumblr, or any other company you’ve heard of, is this: you will show up on your first day, and you will begin your First Read of the codebase. you will encounter a mind-numbing amount of code that makes no sense to you at all and offers no explanation of what it’s doing or why it’s doing it. to make matters worse, there will often be no accompanying description of what the code is supposed to be doing. this means that you can never tell which of the strange things it’s doing are intentional, and which are accidental. you’ll wonder to yourself: what idiot wrote this? why is everything so needlessly complicated? 

it will take you six months or more to have read the codebase in its entirety. it will take you even longer to understand how the majority of it fits together. all the while you’ll have been dropping in to different sections of the codebase and implementing new features and bug fixes as fast as you possibly can and in whatever way you can get to work, because, whether you understand the entirety of the codebase or not, your job depends on you figuring it out and shipping new updates. you will become increasingly acquainted with the most troublesome and complicated sections of the code, and you will wake up every single morning wishing you could rewrite those sections from scratch to be easy to change and maintain. your product manager will not let you do those things. why? because it’ll take months to do that, and with hundreds of thousands of people clamoring endlessly for the new missing feature or unfixed bug (and publicly berating you, the programmer for it), those are months that simply can’t be spared. not shipping new features and bug fixes for 3 months will set you unbearably behind and cause your site to lose thousands of users– or at least, the product manager will have lots and lots of statistics to support that belief.

over time you will become increasingly disillusioned. you’ll come to realize that the list of cool things you wanted to add to the site will only ever grow longer and longer. the people on the site dragging your name through the mud over their pet feature being missing will only ever get louder, and meaner, and more vitriolic with each passing day. eventually you’ll Burn Out. and you’ll stop caring entirely. you’ll start looking for another job, and eventually you’ll find one, and you’ll quit.

tumblr will hire another programmer to replace you. and on their first day, they’ll read all the code you wrote in the last six months of your tenure and wonder: 

what idiot wrote this? why is everything so needlessly complicated?

(via tellyjandro)

acquaintedwithrask:

the-bitch-goddess-success:

I’ve been noticing a pattern in the workplace

baby boomers have no problem-solving skills whatsoever

instead of taking two seconds to Google something or taking the time to try something out, they call my desk immediately. sometimes, they call before they truly talk themselves through the problem. i’ve gotten calls where I literally just sat on the phone for a minute, listening to them talk to themselves and then arrive to a conclusion that they could have reached without calling me. i have people who call me every week to ask me to remind them of how to do something instead of having the self-awareness to know whether it’s something they can remember or something they need to write down. and it’s fine the first time, even the second. but after the third of fourth time, you need to write my instructions down because i don’t have the time to be a broken record player.

and truthfully, it’s kind of ridiculous that you have young people working themselves to death for free when we have the skills and intuition to run certain processes seamlessly and efficiently, meanwhile there’s 50, 60 y/o people who own their own business who don’t know how to work a scanner and don’t even want to learn.

Honestlyyyy I see and think about this all the time

(via fakehouseresident)

responsible-reanimation:

Seriously though, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy conveys “the universe fundamentally does not care about you” better than just about any cosmic-horror story I’ve ever seen.

Its whole theme is, “the default state of life is a parade of ridiculous out-of-left-field nonsense and disaster and beauty which does not care about your personal virtue” and it can embrace and celebrate the weirdness without getting bogged down in overwrought elder pantheons.

And it’s packed with non-sequiturs and shaggy-dog stories and rambling detours but they’re all in service of that message, and the story’s just gleefully having fun with concepts like an immortal alien who’s determined to insult everyone in the galaxy to their face in alphabetical order.

Basically, the Hitchhiker’s Guide is the guy on the right:

(via buggerit-millenniumhandandshrimp)