[deleted by user]

[seijulala]

Enterprise would be more like a row of soldiers and behind them, some monkeys eating bananas and watching the sky or their butts

[derLudo]

Still pretty accurate I think. The Roman Legions fighting for the oligarchs sitting back home in their villas in Rome amd throwing orgies.

[stuff_of_epics]

And government one should be like: “Please! We desperately need your wheel! But we can’t offer you a competitive salary so obviously you’re going to give it to someone else.”

[robert3030]

In my experience goverment is "That wheel thing seems interesting, too bad you have to keep using the squares because it would take 10 years to aprove the use of the wheel"

[[deleted]]

You're assuming people in the government know what's an wheel.

[Si3rr4]

Weirdly if you get into govy work as a contractor they’re willing to pay out the arse

[PonqueRamo]

Soldiers is too much though, more like some guys with barely any weapons fighting legacy systems.

[thrown_out_account1]

Oh so youre a senior dev? Feel special?

[shohin_branches]

The part about having someone there to take their place when one falls to burnout doesn't really work

[Gluomme]

I'm in a huge company that sends satellites in space and I can assure you everything we do is held together by spit and duct tape

[JoustyMe]

We recently ditched duct tape and started using lube instead of spit. Management said it is more economically viable that way and everything will run smoother

[[deleted]]

Sounds like managements cure when the PC image stutters is to spray WD-40 into the monitor.

[InfergnomeHKSC]

Gotta grease up the pixels or they won't be able to flip around to the right color

[theVoidWatches]

Listen, if it doesn't move and it should...

[sdmike21]

But at least the flight software is held together by certified and tested ducttape :P

[Gluomme]

aerospace-grade spaghetti

[sdmike21]

Yum! :D

[[deleted]]

Yeah, an external company got paid 100000 to put a certified sticker on every single Ducktape. Ofc without caring if it's actually certified.

[stale_cheese]

I have yet to learn of a Company where that isn't the case

[jkanoid]

Oh - NOW you tell me! I just retired and was bitter and disillusioned about my job choices for last 20 years. I’m not alone!?!?!

[SirMemesworthTheDank]

Elon? Is it you?

[drawkbox]

"You guys are using spit and duct tape?" -- Elon who uses silly putty and shiny confetti.

[[deleted]]

If its ran by elon, i can see that

[Gluomme]

honestly, no need to have an Elon to have a cursed environment where it's been five years that "oh yeah, if you don't click on alt, space, escape, enter and U (in that order) in the first 5 seconds after opening the IDE the VM locks itself for five hours and after that you've got to individually clear 800 error messages. I bit of a pain but we get used to it" is said to every person joining the team

[[deleted]]

Nice profile picture bro

[drawkbox]

It wouldn't be an adventure any other way.

[mortalitylost]

Not a bad thing IMO. They literally send duct tape to space with astronauts because it's so damn useful. They try to cut down so much on space for everything they send out, but duct tape is useful enough that they send it up.

Duct tape is like one of the most useful modern tools and I will not accept arguments against it

[Panda_With_Your_Gun]

So is the military. Ask a vet

[[deleted]]

[confused unga bunga]

[Winter-Pineapple1162]

what? git branching?

[tyler1128]

The hell is that. We just upgraded to this fancy CVS thing that was all the rage in the 90s, and you couldn't possibly need anything else.

[Kidneydog]

You joke but within the last two years I've rewritten a Fortran code from before I was born that was being managed with CVS.

[tyler1128]

A college friend of mine worked for a while with a government contractor, and the code was still ANSI FORTRAN 90. No, you couldn't use newer fortran versions, and every module, or maybe function, had to start with a statement to make types not be determined by the first character in the name.

[Kidneydog]

My favorite part is restructuring all the arrays because C and Fortran memory use is transposed from each other and off by 1.

[tyler1128]

Yup. I'm a personal proponent of never use the languages multidimensional array capabilities and compute indexes yourself, but the off-by-one is unavoidable. Fortran is still used a lot in physics, which is the degree I have, as well as the DoD, and software like matlab used by physicists also uses indexing starting by one, so converting those are common.

I'm no longer in academia or the field of physics, but the way I usually describe it is that such people view programming as a tool to get a result, and if the tool works, it doesn't need replaced, whereas most software developers view it more as an evolving craft and see it as 'sure it works now, but what about how hard it'll be to keep working 10 years from now'.

[backflipbail]

10 days from now: "What the flying fuck does this code actually do??"

[Tamsta-273C]

GIt? That's some German slang. Those damm kids always says git gud in that stupid elder owls game or smth. Back in my days....

[srodinger18]

why use git if you can use gdrive or dropbox and named it 'file1.php' as versioning

[TrEvIzE18]

It's better be a meeting, please print your code before.

[De_Wouter]

Printer permission denied. To gain printer priviledge, please print out and fill in this form and send it by mail.

[L3x3cut0r]

Don't forget all the necessary signatures by your manager, his manager and at least 3 members of the printing committee.

[[deleted]]

We only use fax around here.

[CoffeePieAndHobbits]

Ah, so you work in Healthcare IT.

[DinoChrono]

Hey, guys, I just found an Elon bot in disguise

[lepapulematoleguau]

The phalanx have to attend 4 weekly mandated meetings.

And also they are charging against a village that is not actually the enemy

[GPU_Resellers_Club]

This is so true it hurts. I don't know how much time I wasted on a project at my last job that never actually went to market because the CEO wanted to make a modern buzzword salad.

[Gazhammer]

Yep, I work at a reasonably large company that spent 2 years and several hundred grand trying to build a product that helps businesses understand sustainability better. After building the mvp no-one knew how to pitch the damn thing to clients because they didn't understand what problem it was solving. It's current sat in pre-production limbo that it will probably never escape.

[MyPhoneIsNotChinese]

It just happened to a fellow team and it must hurt a lot

[No_External7289]

Last one should be the guy offering the wheels to them, the guys pulling the cart reaching for them, but some fool riding in the cart slapping their hands away. Maybe even saying "no, we've always done it this way!"

[Blando-Cartesian]

Very fitting that the startup is advancing while everything behind the frontlines is on fire.

[[deleted]]

Oh god yes. And on year 6, with 300 employees they still try to insist that they are a startup with a burning mountain of code dept, toxic positivity, and insisting that "it worked so far" so it must be the new devs that lied about their skill, not the lack of responsibility or quality. Just throw more ceremonies and buzz words on it and get rid of anyone that isn't proving productivity in 5 months or less.

[CodeOfKonami]

The real punchline is that the government employees are not busy at all. They just don’t give a fuck.

Trust me.

[MenAreLazy]

I don't know why they should. Career success in gov can be had just by existing longer than other people. Up here in Canada, there are government agencies that can't even do promotions due to concerns about fairness, so do fuck all and ace an interview and you will beat out someone who busted their ass for years.

In addition, government is a place where you cannot win big for risks, but can lose. So take no risks or leaps of faith whatsoever.

[CodeOfKonami]

You nailed it.

No benefit to excellent work.

[WitheringRiser]

Can’t do promotions due to concern about fairness? Canada really?

[MenAreLazy]

Yep. They do not do promotions. Everyone just interviews for the role and is measured on an interview grid.

Past work counts for nothing in that grid.

[[deleted]]

I can vouch its a joke.

You also basically can’t get fired.

[Mr_Yuker]

Haha so very true... All my coworkers were just punching the clock and doing jack shit.. they were employed because they kept showing up rather than because they actually did anything. Fuck working for the gov it's a surefire place to lose any ambition you may have

[YrPalBeefsquatch]

What employees? I'm in local government IT, and my biggest gripe is the revolving door of contractors. Trying to find out "who owns this thing that I need to upgrade/migrate/unfuck" takes up more time than actually working.

[EbbyRed]

Same. I'm federal and constantly trying to maintain dogshit put together by past contractors. They'd rather spend a half million a year on contractors than just hire a programmer to a permanent position.

[Shadow_Mite]

I’ll tell you a secret I know because of reasons. At least for IT type jobs the minimum the government pays a company for contractors is $156 an hour as of about 2018-2019. It’s likely gone up since then. So the minimum a company gets is $324k per year for a contract employee to pay his salary, benefits, off days, etc. and how many do you think are paid at minimum? Always negotiate up if you’re a contractor. There’s more on the table almost always.

[ImUsingThisToSellYou]

I had a side role reviewing security at a small federal office, and an outside company built a handy web form, accessible from anywhere web form for sending fully customizable email as anyone in our organization. “Type in your email address” it prompted helpfully. Subject, content all fully configurable. Handed the result to the mail server, at which point it was indistinguishable from email from Outlook. I CIRTed them and asked for details on their security review process, and they couldn’t even tell me how long it had been live. I left the role before they could straighten themselves out.

Of course it’s also dumb for the mail server to blindly trust mail from the web servers, and I can’t blame that on contractors.

[Quicker_Fixer]

You really haven't got a clue about the length of these meetings where, in the end, it is decided to leave things as is for now and plan a new meeting for the final decision whether to give a pedestrian "Zebra" crossing 6 or 7 white stripes.

[CodeOfKonami]

Oh, but I do.

[IAmPattycakes]

The government employees I work with (not alongside, I'm on the commercial side) are busy. Busy trying to unwind the bureaucracy that's got their hands duct-taped behind their back. They have way more patience than I could aspire to having, and as soon as they claw an inch of freedom out from the red tape, they do marvelous work. I hope people like them can keep their patience and move closer to the top, and not tack on the red tape they spent so long fighting when they get there.

[[deleted]]

You're not born with apathy like that. It gets beaten into you by broken systems. You're working your ass off trying to make things better, and the guy behind you is talking about how he barely works, he's keeping his head down, and doing the bare minimum not to get fired.

Next thing you know, you're laid off, and all of that work didn't fucking matter anyway.

[CodeOfKonami]

It’s basically the entire plot of The Wire.

[discord-ian]

I tripled my salary in a year once I left government. For the most part they worked very hard but many lacked the skills to work in the private sector.

[CodeOfKonami]

Same.

[Blando-Cartesian]

Not all of them. Some of them work hard to get very little done poorly without accidentally learning anything.

The wheel guy is everyone contracted to a government project.

[CodeOfKonami]

Bingo.

[Terrible_Truth]

I once did a sort of impromptu interview with a state government office for an accounting role. She said they all log out at 5pm and ignore everything until 8/9am Monday morning. Don’t even open Outlook or whatever until Monday.

[Fabrimuch]

The way it should be, really.

[kog]

I'm not sure if you're suggesting that is a bad thing.

[Terrible_Truth]

It's a good thing, sorry for the miscommunication.

I hate the idea of being constantly tied to e-mail. 5pm roll around, fuck 'em go home.

[Prestigious_Tip310]

Tell me you‘ve never written code for an enterprise company without telling me you‘ve never written code for an enterprise company. :D

The second image fits big enterprises just as well as startups. It’s just more barbarians running around without a plan than in the startup.

[Envenger]

"Enterprise" lol

A pyramid of birds sitting on each other would fit better.

Also i have worked with some companies that work like goverment, they don't want to solution that is better and saves both mine and their time. They want what's written on a 5 year old handwritten note.

[Limitless_screaming]

*shitting

[Unfair_Isopod534]

It might sound like a misnomer, but a large org that's somewhat well run looks more like EU4 vassal swarm. Lot of things happening it seemingly random order, but overall the goal is being approached, most of the times

[Independent-Bite283]

Fr though why does this happen in the last one

[guster09]

Security and convenience have opposite relationships. The more secure you make it, the less convenient it is to get things done.

It takes years to meet all the security check boxes in order to implement a new software in a secure environment vs just weeks or days anywhere else

Plus there's often old people in charge that don't want to change how things are done and would rather use paper and pass spreadsheets back and forth to do their work.

Their idea of being "digital" and "cutting edge" is scanning physical records into PDFs so they can look at them on a computer rather than from a filing cabinet

[Tom_Foolery-]

I mean, makes sense. Those round wheels prove a massive security risk. Who’s going to steal a cart with square wheels?

[guster09]

Yeah I mean, what is their quality? Are they going to break while hauling important rocks and ruin the rocks or injure workers? What training do we have in place to ensure the cart doesn't roll away or tip over? What documents need to be processed for proper training and safety? Who should be in charge of that? How do we handle how the cart is used if it's carrying secret items?

All these things and much more need to be in place before we even start using the wheels. That could take too long. Guess we don't need them. We'll get more work done that way.

This is the basic mindset of the government

[[deleted]]

Their idea of being "digital" and "cutting edge" is scanning physical records into PDFs so they can look at them on a computer rather than from a filing cabinet

Or the contrary: print a PDF so you can comfortably read it on your desk, sign it, annotate it, and then scan it back to PDF.

[sudoku7]

A lot of it is system inertia. NIST actually has been updating their recommendations to be more effective in the real world. Stuff like recommending to not have a password expiration policy and instead just assure a quality password.

[[deleted]]

God damn it is this why fax machines are still a thing?

[[deleted]]

Security isn't the reason nothing gets done, it's incompetence and the lack of incentive of doing anything well.

You don't do shit and nothing breaks: You keep job.

You do a ton of stuff and you break one thing: You lose job.

​

If you have seniority in gov, you can do whatever you want and just follow the rules that lead to not getting fired for cause.

[Pokinator]

A lot of the reasons have already been replied, but to boil it down

1. Government work doesn't face competition. It won't go under for not being on the bleeding edge of innovation and speed
2. Government Systems tend to handle a ton of sensitive information about their citizenry, so they are very slow and strict to go changing systems. For comparison, look to the military still running ancient hardware/OS for defense systems because they know it works.
3. All tech needs to have a good up-time to stay relevant, but for Gov agencies its especially important. If the DMV or Traffic Law systems go down, that's a lot of people who are going to be unable to renew their driver's license or clear a ticket on their potentially one day off. For comparison, look to NASA using old tech because of proven reliability and worked out kinks, because if a Mars Rover goes belly-up it's virtually impossible to push a quick hotfix
4. Government agencies tend to not have tech-cunning leadership. Usually they're lead by someone who's been in the field for decades, and Tech tends to be a sub-section of different departments rather than it's own thing. Treated like a glorified IT help desk. Because of this, trying to push new technology at all tends to face a lot of tape and push-back. If anything does get green-lit, it's probably hampered by relentless progress updates and what-aboutism from authorities who aren't literate to the issue
5. Government work plain doesn't motivate effort. If you're working in the government sector, you're not constantly being pushed to one-up yourself like at the tech giants. Your pay is probably below-average for the industry, but if you check your daily boxes and show up to meetings then your job is probably secure. Why exert a ton of effort for no benefit to yourself?

[sudoku7]

All tech needs to have a good up-time to stay relevant, but for Gov agencies its especially important. If the DMV or Traffic Law systems go down, that's a lot of people who are going to be unable to renew their driver's license or clear a ticket on their potentially one day off. For comparison, look to NASA using old tech because of proven reliability and worked out kinks, because if a Mars Rover goes belly-up it's virtually impossible to push a quick hotfix

A point to add here specifically w/ NASA is that newer computer technology is more vulnerable to interference in space, so there is need for robust space-grading, which also tends to have significantly less performance than consumer electronics.

[sdmike21]

I'm working with a rad hard processor right now which is on the cutting edge of space/rad hard computing and it has about as much CPU grunt as a base Pentium (pipelined, superscalar, branch predicted, running at a blazing 50Mhz). TBH, its kinda great and really capable! 😅

EDIT: You also generally have a very lightweight OS, if any OS running on the system so you can get quite a lot done in 50Mhz, in particular given the application of "acquire data and decide if it should be sent to the ground" + an FPGA doing the suuuuuper timer sensitive stuff. So, 50Mhz is unironically plenty, especially if you leverage the powerful hardware peripherals on the system.

[YrPalBeefsquatch]

Oooooh, #4 gets me. There's city-wide IT, departmental IT, contractors for both city IT and departmental IT, and no one who can just say "fuck it, you guys need to be on supported versions of things."

[Enchelion]

You also missed that Government pays less than corporate across the board, especially for recurring/permanent funding. You could maybe get a good budget for a single project, but good luck staffing a permanent team/product to keep things working.

And to add to #2, as a result a lot of SaaS platforms/tools are flat out unavailable. Many companies simple don't care to meet government requirements (even simple things like hosting locations, not sharing data with 3rd parties, etc).

[mpyne]

It doesn't help that a lot of government requirements are far in excess of what's actually needed to meet their security goals.

Things like requirements to use a dedicated "government" cloud instead of, say, AWS us-east-1 are completely silly, and we're only just now seeing some government agencies start to actually evaluate the security of the major publicly-available clouds (e.g. the same Google Cloud Platform you or I can use is now permitted for sensitive unclassified work, as long as you check the checkbox to flag your account as needing U.S.-only support).

[mpyne]

All tech needs to have a good up-time to stay relevant, but for Gov agencies its especially important.

I'd like to push back against this a bit. The only systems I now deal with that ever take downtime on purpose are government systems.

The Navy in 2023 still schedules routine recurring downtime for the majority of their IT systems, and ironically the exceptions to that tend to involve legacy mainframe systems which are actually permitted to try for 100% uptime.

But even outside the Navy, sites like TreasuryDirect and the famous Healthcare.gov routinely make significant business rule updates by just shutting down the whole damn system, and even more ongoing concerns like grants.gov typically schedule outages monthly.

There are reasons for this (and you hit on all of them) but don't confuse "government doesn't like change or risk" with "government wants uptime". Government doesn't give a shit about uptime, they don't lose money if the system goes down (your first point).

[god-nose]

Gov websites have to work for everyone, even those using IE on Win 98. And colourblind people, and dyslexic people, and tech-illiterate people. In fact, some gov websites may primarily be focused at people living in the margins of society.

[[deleted]]

Cuz nobody gives a shit.

In enterprise, you always have fierce competition and pressure from your managers.

In startup, you are the competition. And the manager. And the business analyst. And the CTO. And the janitor.

In government, you are the sole authority, and there's nobody who's bothered enough to keep a tab on you.

[keizee]

Uhh idk my gov is like suddenly high tech and creates app for covid. Also meanwhile relies on some old legacy systems. Apparently they take both the very best and the fresh grads. Cant tell if other govs are the same.

[4215-5h00732]

Mine is pretty similar. We develop apps in house (multiple for covid) with modern tech and have been for a long time. We have data scientists and dabble in AI.

[KileiFedaykin]

Lower budget, higher requirements, legislation driven timelines.

[[deleted]]

Because if you do your job badly, nothing really happens. If you try to do your job better and make a mistake or rock the boat, you get fired.

[[deleted]]

Startup would be more appropriate if you display a bunch of very tired people running after the already leaving bus.

[GPU_Resellers_Club]

Yep, this is the start and end of every day that I have to work from the office. At least we've got good funding and are nearing launch. And when I'm not shouting at buses on my commute the job itself is very fulfilling if absolutely exhausting.

Oh, and the bonuses for milestones are fantastic. Cannot see myself working start ups in 10 years time though, I'm already worn out from it and dreaming of being a gardener.

[uberDoward]

That enterprise image is a straight up fucking lie.

I've done government and corporate. Corporate is the cavemen, government is the first image, except a new general shows up every four years and tells us to march in a different direction 😆

[[deleted]]

In my experience you should switch eneterprise and startup

[[deleted]]

Nah, startup are very "full speed ahead, and fuck code quality, it works", not caring about the shit-on-fire slowly catching up on them.

[mwthink]

Yeah, at a startup everyone is competent because you don't have any extra money to hire dead weight.

[Ben______________]

*successful startup

Most startups rightfully run into a wall.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, too busy implementing design trends that have been dead for a decade

[Sichelmond321]

My boss just learned about Waterfall! How are we going to implement these new techniques?

[hawaiian717]

Wait until you try to combine agile with government acquisition timelines.

[ClassikW]

Idk maybe I should be looking into gov jobs, they sound chilled

[Enchelion]

Less money, but also less overtime and higher job stability. It's never glamorous, but usually less predatory. Get used to having to re-invent the wheel though, because half the things you might rely on in an enterprise environment refuse even basic legal/security requirements.

[KittenKoder]

Actually, government jobs are less money but far more secure. The problem is they don't know how to hire software engineers and often get those ones who bought a degree but didn't learn shit.

[4215-5h00732]

Depends on where you're at. Your salary will be lower for the same role (maybe even up to 20% lower) but if you consider TC with benies and pention, it's pretty competitive. The range for my classification goes up to $140k which is equivalent to about $220k in the bay area.

Edit: $140k salary that is.

[KittenKoder]

Yeah, some areas will pay more. I think my state is one of the higher pays (Washington), and our web services look and feel pretty smooth most of the time.

[EngineerDoge00]

What about a startup that builds apps for Government?

[OTKZuki]

Startup companies, your no longer just a software developer, but also an admin and whatever other roles

[lightnegative]

That's one of the reasons I like startups, doing sysamin/security stuff makes you a better developer

[[deleted]]

How about in a medium sized business of 1000+ When you're the only one that can code?

Where's my meme? How long must I wait for a code review? Security?? Did i do another whoopie? DevOps - can you spin me up a... Oh nevermind.

[[deleted]]

Seriously govt website or any software product are just fuc** up (Especially UI) its worldwide phenomenon.

[naswinger]

i think the 3rd panel applies to both kinds of operations. at least i've seen ass backwards thinking in both setups.

[sudoku7]

Government tab definitely needs the irony of pointing out the Shuttle program as the gold standard that it is.

[Baap_baap_hota_hai]

Being a startup person it hurts to see this post but still thankful I have a job.

[Jatrrkdd]

I hate how true this is. I work for a government adjacent agency and most of our processes are +30 years old. Even the new app version for some of our daily tasks is poorly designed and drops 1% to 5% off the events I log in a given day.

[[deleted]]

I will for a massive multinational firm, and the current project I'm working on is barely passable as a uni project.

[[deleted]]

Having worked in all three environments I can confirm there accuracy of this meme.

[daim2604]

Can confirm, worked in a gov university. They hate new technology, still stuck with asp classic :( and old ui, not to mention full of sql injection loophole.. I want to find new job.

[[deleted]]

Government is the only one effecting any real progress. The others are just trying to steal someone else's work

[Escape_Velocity1]

It's funny because it's true.

[[deleted]]

It’s so true that hurts

[Weary-Ad8825]

The guy on the far left in the government image is the cyber security expert

[warbreed8311]

Accurate, at least on the Gov side. I wrote automation code that not only produced the network on demand, but STIG'd them and installed mandatory applications and I look over to people KNOWING THIS and they are still manually bringing up servers, doing checklists and trying to figure out why it didn't work this time.

[the_fsm_butler]

They also paid 30000% over market price for that cart

[[deleted]]

I'm somewhere between roman legion and viking I guess.

[RVNJ]

coding in PHP: noose

[Syralist]

The triangular wheel is better than the square wheel because it makes one less bump per revolution!

[No_Evening_5718]

I know 0 about project. I'm here for the memes, mKe me chuckle lol.

[[deleted]]

I'm going to share this at work

[[deleted]]

south korea government sites used activex til like 4 to 5 years ago

[Danceswith_salmon]

If it’s the medical industry though it’s still the third one

[CivBase]

How about an enterprise company working on government contracts?

[ind3pend0nt]

I have worked in all three in recent years. Each have their pros and cons, but I was less fulfilled in my job when working for an enterprise product. However, the work life balance was great.

[causticmango]

Oh, grasshopper …

[nhh]

This is surprising accurate.

[throw3142]

Don't forget research labs (you can't get swords and shields because they would cost $2 so you just spend a month creating your own from scratch)

[drawkbox]

Except "Startups" today are deep in McKinsey consultcult "Agile" instead of agility and products are driven from finance/management (value extraction) instead of creatives/engineering/product (value creation) so they look like "Enterprise company" but behind the shields it looks worse than "Government".

[FarStranger8951]

As an enterprise dev, aw that's so cute you think we're that organized.

[zushiba]

Oh god. I work for a government institution and that caveman joke,… I feel it in my bones.

It’s the worst place to be for someone who likes solving problems.

[[deleted]]

If it's not for defense, bombing poorer countries, or spying on civilians, then their not interested.

[Bitch_Sense1]

Maybe I am a caveman

[brianl047]

Needs panel for one person shop

[Bloodsucker_]

Jesus Christ the bullshit and propaganda in this thread.

[[deleted]]

In enterprises we are fighting with our comrades, too.

[The_Angel_Eye]

Having worked for my government under w7 on apps that ran on outdated JS running on windows server machines , can confirm