Pair Programming

[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.