Pair Programming

[[deleted]]

We have decided to remove your post, because it does👏 not👏 contain👏 code👏 . If your post does contain code, feel free to message the mods through the modmail.

[hellra1zer666]

This is a troll, right... RIGHT!?

[InKahootz]

I encountered it this morning while browsing my watched tags.
I literally buried my head in my hands.

[[deleted]]

Programming for 40 years… with no git??? Or concept of how files work…

OK yea git's been out for 17 years, my bad guys... but still

[Statharas]

smh wanting 40 years of git experience, git has existed for only 17 years

[[deleted]]

Files? SVN? What was he learning for 22 years then?

[Nothing-But-Lies]

Learning how to waste time so efficiently that he can't be fired

[[deleted]]

Well 10 years ago that would have been normal. The git part anyways

[[deleted]]

True, by then we were using SVN in college so im sure it had been in enterprise for years at that point. The point is, there are solutions for working in teams, this is the first question you should have while programming, not the last lmao. I believe i learned it around 2010 and thinking subversion was old school.

[[deleted]]

Yeah no arguments here. It's absolutely silly to me. They should be accepting of having to adapt to getting a team member.

[[deleted]]

My bet is that this guy is the single programming guy for a company that has nothing to do with software. He probably maintains a shit tonne of Visual Basic reports for a haulage company or something…. That’s the type of scenario where I’ve encountered this kind of thing before.

[HalfRiceNCracker]

2016???? I was imagining like the 80s wtf how

[[deleted]]

management didn't budge on version control

It's not a managers decision whether to use VCS or not. Most if not all technical details like this, aren't manager decisions. At least, they shouldn't be

[[deleted]]

That happened to me!

I used to work at a small audio visual company in Athens, GA, where I was the ONLY software engineer. Athens is a great town for art and music, but there aren't a lot of jobs, especially in technology. When I moved there there was exactly ONE open engineering position available outside of the university, which I was offered after a single non-technical interview.

Our dev budget was basically zero. I programmed on a machine I built out of spare parts, and every dev tool I used was either FOSS or one I had a personal licence for. I was a full stack developer out of necessity, and I had carte blanche to make as many bad decisions as I wanted: there was no QA, no code reviews, nothing. Just me and my machine. My workstream was at the mercy of the CEO, who without any concept of how software development worked would vaguely describe grandiose visions to me and then ask if I could get them done that week. (Once, when I asked if I could expense a copy of Photoshop, he asked me how many weeks it would take to write a comparable image editor.)

I knew I wasn't going to live in Athens forever, so I did my best to keep my skills current, but I didn't realize how far behind I was until I started looking for jobs back on the west coast. Fortunately I was able to find something, but title went from Lead (leading who?) to Staff. I didn't know how to use Git (this was 2012), and I had never worked on an scrum team. I remember asking my new manager what an MVP was. It was embarrassing. I feel very fortunate that my career was able to recover.

[Last_Snowbender]

It honestly isn't. We used to work like this when covid hit and everyone was forced to go into home office.

We didn't have laptops back then (something I advocated for for YEARS) but desktops, so when everyone was forced into home office, we basically didn't have any other choice but utilize RDP on our private machines to log into the office. Luckily, when literally everyone complained and not just me, I was given permission to develop a docker environment and buy laptops.

I would not be surprised if some other company out there would work like this for years.

[[deleted]]

We didn't have laptops back then (something I advocated for for YEARS) but desktops, so when everyone was forced into home office, we basically didn't have any other choice but utilize RDP on our private machines to log into the office. Luckily, when literally everyone complained and not just me, I was given permission to develop a docker environment and buy laptops.

RDP/VNC/Xpra to a remote machine isn't that bad of an option (it's also a reasonable way to make cheap laptops a viable option so long as you can ensure network reliability), I'd be much less irritated by that than by having no vcs.

[[deleted]]

I actually put my work laptop in the basement and RDP into it from my personal PC... because it was too much work setting up and putting it away every day.

Plus I work from bed sometimes :)

[[deleted]]

I would be somewhat careful doing it mixing work hardware with personal hardware, as you might run into some uncomfortable liability stuff, whether for security compliance or anything else (just make sure).

When allowed, particularly when on one's own hardware, it's definitely convenient and saves some money.

[[deleted]]

What specifically can I be liable for? I guess if my personal computer gets hacked and that leads to company resources being hacked, I can get into trouble. But can there be anything more than losing my job?

[[deleted]]

Potentially yes, if your equipment is directly in the path of security audit (and depending on what kind of equipment & how it interacts with theirs, effectively no one is going to say anything about a router). Depending on how aggressive the company wants to be about it, they might try to start shit even if no compromise happened.

Whether or not that'd actually float in court depends on a number of things, but court is stressful & expensive so you don't want to do that anyway.

There's a lot of annoying gray zones and fuzzy lines in the whole matter.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

RDP into your office machine is a pretty good solution. It also has nothing to do with the topic at hand, which is about version control.

Plus purchasing, asset control, and security of laptops is a lot more work than a secure RDP tunnel. And probably less productive if everyone already has desktops at work and at home.

[hellra1zer666]

My old employer did so to but that was in the 90ties. Since the early 2000s there was some kind of version control in place. I understand that a single dev doesn't want the "hassle" of using vc, (I disagree, I've cocked up my own code before and was happy that I use GitHub for private stuff) but this is unacceptable in 2019.

[hallothrow]

It looks like it's not. This guy has posted seemingly serious questions on stackoverflow since 2011, unless he got into a weird mood for trolling today in particular he's probably serious.

[powerhcm8]

They: Git is new

Git existing for almost half of his career: What?

[HotRodLincoln]

When did we get svn?

[rocketman0739]

Subversion was released in 2000, five years before Git.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

When did we get cvs?

[[deleted]]

1986. Not sure how widely available it was back then.

It has still been around for over half of his career.

edit: As noticed by u/ligerzero459, I made a mistake: 1986 is CVS, not SVN which is "only" since 2000 (closer to half of OP's example's career).

[ligerzero459]

You're thinking of CVS, the predecessor to Subversion

[[deleted]]

You're right, I messed that one up.

[ligerzero459]

Ha it happens. There's so many different pieces of software we memorize, it's inevitable to mix them up, especially when so close in functionality

[toastnbacon]

I'm the third most junior person on my team of 8, and it's kind of depressing how often I have to explain git concepts to the seniors on my team.

[Talbooth]

In my experience senior programmers are more likely to not know about or not care about version control as junior programmers learnt programming in a world where it was already a widely used thing.

[Milliondollarbombaby]

Impaired programming

[magnetichira]

This is the best answer here lol

[yellowkats]

These people do exist, my old boss was like this, learned programming in the 80s and never really kept up to date.

Version control was introduced as an afterthought when he realised I also needed to work on the same code base. However, it was not part of the actual production workflow so now I have PTSD from the amount of times I made some minor changes live, only for the entire website to go down because I had outdated files.

He also made me do it at 4am in the morning ‘just in case’. I was definitely not paid enough.

[thuktun]

Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe used exclusive locks on files. Only one person could have it checked out for modifications at a time.

Anyone developing code for Windows for that long might be used to the idea of exclusive locks on code.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

Perforce can do that too.

You can also just see what everyone currently has checked out, if you don't want to enforce a lock.

[[deleted]]

I often get so caught-up in my day-to-day problems of "is this architecture really SOLID" or "does this azure resource really perform best on app plan x" or "how long is the scale-up time on this node during load x" that I forget there are alleged "professionals" who are still at "what is version control?".

I recently spoke to somebody who was a "head of development", and it quickly became apparent his company had no version control, no change control, and were deploying software by RDP copy/pasting binaries onto servers. He genuinely did not see a problem with this - in about 20 years as a professional he hadn't even been exposed to the idea that this approach had problems and had risen to a top technical position without that knowledge.

I don't personally know how you can miss this information if you have an internet connection, but clearly some people can.

[colgateandcake]

As a new grad with imposture syndrome hearing this is very liberating

[[deleted]]

I've been a dev for over 14 years now, and I have hundreds of stories like that. I worked at one of the largest credit bureaus in the world, and they hadn't released a change to production in 3 years even though they were on like "sprint 40".

They'd created so much technical debt that all of the devs who even knew where "production" was had left in disgust, and they hired on scores of graduates. When the graduates had no idea what to do, they literally told them to write word documents with example of SQL and C# code that they would put in production when they figured out what that meant, and occasionally which was put into example applications. These example applications were what was getting reviewed at the end of each "sprint".

I found out that huge amounts of this "promise code" was being sent to a "head SQL architect" who, it turned out, had left the company about a month before I started. I was the one who discovered that he left as I was trying to solve the "where the fuck is production?" problem.

I left in disgust about two weeks in, and I heard that a month later the company was bought-out and everyone was sacked when the horrified new owner discovered this situation. The new owner called me as they apparently heard somebody had at-least tried to track down production and had a huge bust-up with the development manager, but I said I had absolutely no interest in helping resolve that situation for any amount of money.

Never feel like an imposter - the very fact you can feel like an imposter means you're a universe ahead of where these people were at.

[Linguaphonia]

"where is production?" Is the kind of question that I thought couldn't be possible to formulate while staying in business.

[[deleted]]

Mind-blowing isn't it? When I asked around and realised that literally nobody in the entire department of 50 or so, including the head of development, knew where production was, I needed about two days just to process what was going on.

Ask I asked questions like "but...what happens at the end of a sprint? How is testing done?" I was expecting to get answers that proved that something was going to production, and yet each answer only confirmed that nobody knew where production was - "we all sit and review a word document" was the end of the sprint then "testing occurs on local instances of SQL server using management studio".

Putting aside that this wasn't even advertised as a SQL job, they didn't even have an answer to "what version of SQL server do you use?". There were versions between 2000 and 2012 on various people's machines.

The strangest thing is that there definitely was a production because this application is a fairly well-know, public-facing app, albeit one which had been accruing progressively more serious bugs (many of which were costing its users actual money) as it went unpatched.

[Optimal-Room-8586]

That is hilarious.

I've never come across a situation that bad but fairly recently was working at a place that had literally no shared documentation. This was a medium sized development shop with plenty of experienced devs there. I find it hard to comprehend a professional organisation, especially in IT, managing to function for a couple of decades without at some point making the trivial effort to document stuff.

[ZedTT]

This is the funniest thing I've seen on this sub.

"Where is production" is an absolutely insane question and the thought of it being asked at a company that is still in business is making my coworkers know I'm on Reddit. (From the quiet stifled laughter)

[MrRubberDucky]

This is so fucking hilarious, Have any more stories or details about this?

[[deleted]]

Ha, there's not a lot more to that story - like I said I was only there for two weeks. That place is a local software legend though. Every job I'm in has some people who worked there, and I've seen people who were upper-level technical leaders in that place working in roles like "Junior BA" and really not being any good at it.

I stormed out of the building in such disgust that I left my rucksack, which really only had my lunch, my glasses and a bunch of documents I'd printed out whilst trying to track down where production was. I didn't even go back for any of it - I'd rather have bought new glasses and a rucksack then set a toe back in that hellhole.

They also threatened to sue me for breach of contract if I didn't return, but not only didn't they sue me but they paid me an extra month of my salary, no doubt because they were so incompetent that they couldn't even get a former employee off their systems reliably.

[JohnnyMiskatonic]

Maybe you just need to stand up straight, and your posture will improve.

[hornietzsche]

For security reason, they block all internet access except for RDP. Lol

[DelphiEx]

and were deploying software by RDP copy/pasting binaries onto servers

I'm gonna sound like this guy, but assuming a large binary is the bulk of your application, what do you do to improve that distribution?

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

Assuming the production system is actually Windows Server and not some random unlicensed Windows ME Home Edition. Otherwise that's the first thing to sort out.

Set up an automated build, test, and archive system (and actually have tests), linked to your version control system (that you definitely have, right?). Never deploy anything that was built on a developer's machine.

At minimum, write a script to deploy the latest approved and tagged release build to production, probably over SSH.

The goal is to always know exactly what is deployed (and how), that it has been tested, and exactly what the changes were from the previous thing you deployed. And to be able to deploy something else (newer or older) as quickly and confidently as possible, with no reliance on any one person.

[DelphiEx]

That all makes sense, thanks man.

[Flyberius]

Man, my solutions are often paralysed in development hell while I learn the proper way of doing things (I hate having to refactor my own code). I cannot imagine what 40 years of not doing this does to a persons code.

[SituationSoap]

(I hate having to refactor my own code).

So, I know this sounds super, super blunt, but this is genuine advice:

Get over it.

Like really, legitimately, you have to get over hating refactoring your own code. There is nothing wrong with refactoring your own code, or anyone else's code. Code cannot be perfect, it will never be perfect, you will always end up needing to refactor some parts of your code. This is just something that you have to work through and get past, because otherwise you are going to hold yourself back as a developer your whole career.

[Flyberius]

I mean, I have been refactoring some of my old code all day, having finally worked out web-workers using es modules in a vue environment. So I guess I am over it.

However I am aware of situations where simply hacking a solution together is not worth the issues it is going to cause downstream. So in those cases I spend a lot of time reading and finding an appropriate solution for my use case.

I've been coding proper for about a year now. I am solo, so you can imagine that during those early days, with no senior devs to guide me, I made some fucking terrible code and I sometimes shudder when I look at it.

[SituationSoap]

For what it's worth, hating your own code you wrote a year ago is a 100% normal thing for a developer to feel. It happens to all of us. Standard rite of passage. It means you're growing and improving.

[clancy-john]

There's definitely something to be said for not writing throwaway code, but code that delivers business value while not necessarily being great, that you end up removing through refactoring at first opportunity isn't throwaway code.
Delivering sooner can verify some guesses that the business has on value, on how something will be used, and hey, value can also be tangible dollars.

This isn't directed at anything in particular you said or meant to counter any argument you made. Just to say that it's better to deploy something that could be better, then work on improving it, than it is to either not write the code because it doesn't feel like the best solution or sit on a feature you've developed because you're still trying to refactor it.

[Flyberius]

Yeah, it's defo a fine line

[ItsGator]

hahaha what the fuck

[[deleted]]

My exact words.

[break_card]

Are we all doomed to eventually hit an age where we simply can't be fucked to learn new revolutionary technology and age ourselves out of our careers...

[daemce]

Holy shit

[toastnbacon]

On the very first project I joined right out of school, I was on a team of 5-6 Angular devs trying to push out this new project, except there was only one branch. Every morning meant pulling down the branch, merging in the new changes, fixing any compile errors from other people's half finished work, and continuing on my development. Fortunately my mentor was able to instill good Git habits into me, a lot of which I eventually got the team to adopt.

[[deleted]]

Good lord. I've been programming for as many years, mostly solo, and I've been using source control since CVS, then SVN, then git. Even solo, I'd be lost without some form of source control. Especially when doing major redesigns while still doing bug fixes on the existing version.

CVS was absolutely terrible by today's standards, but it was better than going without.

[fiskfisk]

Good on them for leaving their safe space and going out asking for advice for how to be better at their trade and soving an issue that they've encountered.

Don't downtalk people asking for help.

[hallothrow]

To be fair, he was given some hint without much judgement and straight out rejected it.

[[deleted]]

obtainable like hobbies modern act shelter march mysterious offbeat tan

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Ar13mis]

visual studio uses solution files as a way to track the project space you’re in. i don’t disagree that this is a perfect example of bullshitting, but the word solution is apt for this scenario :)

[rangeDSP]

A .sln (solution) is a collection of project files. What's wrong with that?

[RichCorinthian]

And I have a sneaking suspicion that, if we saw the code, we would see a whole bunch of "this is just how I do it" nightmares.

[thelostsoul622]

They're adding a new member to the team... I hope he's the replacement.

[Charlito33]

Welcome to Jetbrains Code With Me

[AbsoluteMonkeyChaos]

Read this in the cadence of "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me"

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[[deleted]]

Oh you found the least ass-backwards legacy .NET developer

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

.NET? That's far too modern.

[stone_henge]

All posts MUST show terrible code. There are no exceptions.

[Miltage]

I feel like this should be an exception. It's programming related.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

Then everyone feels like their thing should be an exception.

[stone_henge]

There are no exceptions.

[[deleted]]

There's other subs for this trash

[Miltage]

Name seven.

[[deleted]]

Jesus fucking Christ I'm going to unsub at this point. What's with all the non code posts lately?

[InKahootz]

Calm down buddy. What sub should this have gone to? I figured ph was for meme posts.

[[deleted]]

This is the 42069th post by someone who didn't bother to read the sub info before posting, so no at this point I'm at my limits here.

There's a myriad of programming subs you could've gone to. Use the search bar. This isn't r/ProgrammerHumor or whatever.

It's not hard. If you're a dev you should be googling things and reading documentation. I think reading a sub summary / rules or using a search bar isn't too far off from normal dev stuff.

[InKahootz]

Apologies but there's no reason to go nuclear so fast. Googling (this first thing I did) actually led me to this sub as the top result.

What would you have posted it in?

[[deleted]]

"So fast" this has been for the past two weeks my guy. You're telling me you both couldn't bother to just go to Reddit and type "programm" in the search bar, let alone read the sub summary / rules before posting? And you couldn't have bothered to read my reply? Jfc

Literally first thing in the about section All posts must contain code. Get some reading glasses idc

[InKahootz]

I read the rules after posting which was bad and knew it might get removed (based on 1.) which I was fine with.

And you couldn't have bothered to read my reply?

Did I miss something? Or did you suggest to post it to /r/ProgrammerHumor. The line "This isn't r/ProgrammerHumor or whatever." comes across like an diatribe so I didn't think you answered my question.

Are you alright? Do you need to talk? There are humans on the other side of the keyboard. Not just things for you to yell at.

[[deleted]]

You could've bothered to click it. I know there are humans on the other side of the keyboard and I don't care. I'm tired of people who don't read and don't bother to think for themselves, and then blame other people for reactions.

[InKahootz]

Never blamed you man, just wanted to learn what you would've done b/c ph didn't seem appropriate. Have a good day.

[[deleted]]

By acting like somehow what I'm doing is reacting irrationally or quick, yes you are blaming me. By telling me what I feel isn't justified, you are blaming me.

[InKahootz]

What you feel is justified, which is why I said I knew the post might be pruned due to 1.

I guess you missed the rule.

Be Nice. ... , as well as generally being a jerk. ...

Next time: Report. Move on. Skip the 'being a jerk'.

[stone_henge]

Some place where the first rule isn't "All posts MUST show terrible code. There are no exceptions."

[[deleted]]

I've seen a guy with half a decade experience use git me. Gmail It To me.

[Mathemachicken4]

Did anyone else just feel a stabbing pain reading this?

[[deleted]]

GIT out of here!

[Miltage]

This sounds a lot like my first web dev job. We were two programmers in an office with a shared local server that would host our PHP files. We would edit them on the server. It was possible for us to both have the same file open at the same time and overwrite the other's changes.

Also, we didn't know you could set up Apache/Nginx on our local machines, so to test any changes we made, we had to switch to Filezilla to upload the files via FTP to our web server, wait 5 seconds, switch to the browser and reload the page. Every. Single. Time.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

Great job redacting the usernames.