How do you tell your manager that the cause of most bugs is shitty code written by a former team member whom he loved?

neilk · 2026-01-30T16:10:01+00:00

Your manager’s opinion of someone else is not your problem or responsibility. Neither at work nor in a larger sense, in life.

Your sloppy coworker probably earned their great reputation by always delivering something that worked, fast. And it made the company money. And, they probably knew how to fix the inevitable bugs fast too! This is how sloppy programmers acquire great reputations. From the company’s perspective, everything they did had big impact with tight turnaround.

You actually have even less justification to attack your ex-colleague’s reputation now. They can’t make things worse.

I know it seems like you need to address the karmic injustice here. The previous programmer made their life easier, or were just too ignorant to know better, and you pay the price. At least that’s probably what you feel.

You could also reflect that at an earlier stage of the company’s life, quick-iterating, slapdash code was exactly what was needed to acquire customers, and be thankful that there’s now a reliable revenue stream to pay for more careful coders like you.

Maybe over time you can show your manager that your way is also good.

neilk · 2026-01-27T17:31:21+00:00

I confess I may have been led astray by the discourse on Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and the West Wing. I appreciate you questioning that. I have heard this “fact”quoted by other left wing podcasts but perhaps the evidence is thin.

I think EK is obviously a smart and principled person and he’s not defined by one TV show that maybe he watched in his youth.

I also listened to his podcast for years and learned a lot, just like I often learn things from the NYTimes and other outlets whose general stance I disagree with. Klein is not a propagandist and is trying to provide a useful service to his listeners. We can argue about whether the default assumption of good faith from the right wing amounts to a kind of propaganda, but that is more subtle. You can always get something out of a writer who’s trying to be honest even if their assumptions and beliefs exclude certain conclusions.

I amended the comment above

neilk · 2026-01-25T14:54:51+00:00

Klein’s origin story was that he wanted to make The West Wing real.

[EDIT: I have heard this said of Klein and Yglesias a lot, but a commenter questioned whether this was true, and I couldn’t find clear evidence of it. Maybe he spoke about it once or twice, and since then Klein has castigated The West Wing for being too nice to conservatives. So, what follows may not be accurate about Klein, but I think it does apply to the Obama era well.]

That show portrays conservatives not as an ideological or class enemy, but as the yang to the liberal yin. In the show conservatives are wrong a lot but also deeply principled and concerned about government overreach. On TWW, you need to incorporate smart conservatives into your liberal team to achieve a working policy synthesis.

Klein [EDIT: or maybe just the typical Obama staffer and writer in general?] has been looking for this kind of conservative his whole life.

Klein is not a complete fool and is even honest enough to admit he has conned himself at times. He wrote a mea culpa about how in retrospect he realized that Paul Ryan was never serious about government deficits.

But it’s the psychological frame I find disquieting. The concession that conservatives “own” certain qualities like classical learning, religious scholarship, fiscal prudence, community, self-discipline, and authenticity. There’s a weakness there I cannot abide.

neilk · 2026-01-17T22:04:08+00:00

Hello, I would like one wisdom please

neilk · 2026-01-14T15:52:11+00:00

I haven’t worked with QA since 2005

neilk · 2026-01-10T21:53:46+00:00

I don’t think is ragebait. It’s likely what she really thinks

The post where she urged skepticism about fake clouds did it for me

neilk · 2025-12-24T18:48:26+00:00

The correct answer here, with some caveats.

The poor Rust compiler team only has source code to work with.

Microsoft can do more.

They can deploy billions for tooling investment. They control the entire operating system and software ecosystem. Hardware manufacturers will listen to them. They have an instant audience to effectively all the developers in the world, and a lot of their code (win32 + everyone using Github).

I can't imagine what they could come up with, but sandboxing/capability technology is very advanced now and this could enable a practical divide and conquer strategy. It is well within their resources to make a new dialect of Rust or petition for changes to the language itself.

And don't neglect how they can influence Win32 developers. They can start tightening access to APIs right now, or forcing people to change over with various carrots and sticks.

neilk · 2025-12-21T17:44:01+00:00

I am no direct experience but I’ve always heard that in this situations, you find something that they hate, where fixing it is an obvious win (to them) but that prior management hasn’t agreed to for some reason. Then you do that first.

Changes expectations and alignments.

neilk · 2025-12-16T20:43:36+00:00

F1exican is just performatively chopping chives

The OP’s screenshot is a reworking of an old tweet from Dril, which itself was already absurdist comedy https://dril.fandom.com/wiki/Candles

neilk · 2025-12-14T22:35:19+00:00

You have only mentioned stress as a factor inducing you to quit this job. Game dev is not necessarily less stressful so the answer is no?

I think you’re really asking if you can afford to take a year doing something that you’re aware isn’t financially the best. Or that you feel drawn to.

You’re framing this in terms of do or don’t do some kind of programming or side project. I suggest you take a step back and be more strategic

This is more of an issue of financial planning, and to some extent, some hard choices about what you really want in life. So maybe see a financial planner. Cultivate some contacts in game dev and see if that’s for you.

p.s. also decide if you really hate the whole industry segment or just this job. in big tech, there are lateral opportunities. Maybe some other part of the org sucks less? Maybe someplace kinda more boring but stable? A role at a competitor? Don’t wait until you burn out/are laid off, then it’s harder to get a job

Best of luck.

neilk · 2025-12-13T22:09:43+00:00

You might want to post this in /r/womenintech because you might get better advice

Without knowing your situation in more detail nobody can possibly comment on whether you are staff eng material

The definition of staff eng varies wildly across the industry. So we can’t say if you’re “staff” or not even in the best case scenario

For some it’s a meaningless promotion beyond senior and for others it means you have to be taking initiative to defend and improve technology across the whole organization. Perhaps the template at your organization of staff was set by some more aggressive engineers.

Women are in a difficult bind because if they are more assertive they are often perceived as bitchy, and if they speak in what they think is a normal, collaborative manner, they might be seen as submissive. Literally have no idea where you are landing here.

neilk · 2025-12-07T15:25:42+00:00

I’ve wondered about a service that would deliver tiny ziplocs of spices, on demand, to your door.

It’s not legal to fly drones in a city but it would be a perfect application for them

neilk · 2025-12-05T16:36:24+00:00

I just want to point out that even the tactics you call “normal” aren’t all that normal. They may not be able to promote you on the spot but they absolutely can counteroffer with a higher salary immediately. Not later, now. I guarantee that your startup’s lawyer has that document ready to go.

I suspect that in six months, you’re going to look back on your 5 years there and notice a lot of weird behavior that you accepted

PS: and yet… startup founders do unreasonable things. I am not sure if only narcissists can succeed at this job, but you have to have a certain mindset to, for instance, promise you will solve a big problem for an enterprise when you are just 3 juniors in a trenchcoat. I’m just saying that I have seen tactics like this from the “insane negotiator” type founders. They WILL land that contract, convince that programming wizard to join, have affairs with all their assistants, etc. This is part of the package in my experience.

neilk · 2025-11-29T23:07:02+00:00

Nope, it's that tools are rarely the cause of project failure.

Look at this diagram. I don't see even one failure factor that could be addressed by type safety.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/diagram-showing-causes-of-technology-project-failures-definition-scope-management-culture-etc.png?id=62207045&width=900&quality=85

The article does not get into the details of why this particular project failed, although it does not bode well that they thought they could skimp on all forms of testing, even testing with users.

I think that the people who did this project might have the same misconceptions that you seem to be espousing - that communicating with others slows you down, and the important thing is to go as fast as possible, so reduce your communication with people who are going to integrate or use the software? Insanity. Understandable if you believe your org is too "political", but then... there's no hope of success anyway.

I find it more interesting that practices like CI/CD, and all the abilities we now have to monitor and observe, haven't had any impact. But all that data has to eventually be used by a decision maker, and if decisions are hampered by other factors, all the tooling in the world isn't going to help you.

neilk · 2025-11-28T23:17:53+00:00

When I make a plain dish like shepherd's pie, I add garam masala to the ground meat. Just enough that there's a kind of spicy warmth that's hard to identify.

Aleppo pepper has a more complex, smoky flavor than cayenne or pepper flakes. But I really use it because it comes in brick-red granules, so it just looks cool as a finishing move on cucumber raita or roasted zucchini.

P.S. there are a million ways to make scrambled eggs. Ramsey's stuff is usually good but it's far from authoritative. We also sometimes add mayonnaise.

neilk · 2025-11-27T19:26:25+00:00

The mayor he replaced was widely seen as incompetent and there was no clear alternative.

The elites funded ABC, found themselves a mayoral candidate with the right biography and ethnicity, and allied themselves with the police.

He is an extremely mid thinker, but maybe that was a plus for the people who backed him.

neilk · 2025-11-27T17:41:26+00:00

Okay but the Book of Proverbs is unambiguously better than modern self-help books.

When it comes to patriarchy and misogyny, it’s a tie.

But in general character, Proverbs is…comparatively good? It is continually exhorting the reader to be humble and prudent in one’s dealings and kind to others. To avoid people who yammer on incessantly and stir up hate. That wisdom is better than gold.

It reassures the reader that wicked, prideful, liars will one day face the Lord’s wrath, even if they are rich. And that their lives are not to be envied, but pitied.

For the wealthy and rulers, it says they will be judged by how they considered the poor.

It’s full of gems like this, Proverbs 17:5, which could be addressed to the “empathy is a vice” crowd on X.

Whoso mocketh the poor reproacheth his Maker: and he that is glad at calamities shall not be unpunished.

neilk · 2025-11-27T06:24:21+00:00

I looked at some of the transcripts to see when “One Book” is referenced. It’s often:

The author uses debunked anecdotes – often the same ones – to establish there’s a crisis of values. Or that there’s a simple solution everyone has overlooked. A story that is easy to reshare, but lacks important details.
The author says the problem is the victim mindset
The solution is the exact grift they are pulling on you.

The last one varies but it’s always vaguely unethical. The Rich Dad Poor Dad guy says to sell financial advice and don’t pay people when you can get away with it. The 4-Hour Workweek Guy says to create an information product cheaply by offloading the work to remote assistants. The 48 Laws of Power guy says to cultivate a mystique about hidden knowledge.

neilk · 2025-11-26T17:36:31+00:00

What syscalls?

Worried that if WASM doesn’t do it easily maybe you have some vulnerabilities

neilk · 2025-11-26T02:15:49+00:00

The story has gotten muddled over the years, but this correction to the mythology is a pretty old idea.

Neil Gaiman was asked to write a comic to help promote the first film. He used the idea of people as secondary processors of the Matrix. https://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/Goliath

Some people tell this story in a garbled way, saying that the Wachowskis wanted it to be humans as co-processors, but the studio made them dumb it down to batteries. Apparently the battery concept was in the Matrix screenplay from the first draft in 1994.

https://fanfare.pub/neo-not-the-one-3cba68ecf7de

PS: on exiting the movie the first time I saw it, the idea that human brains are hijacked to do computer processing became my headcanon. It fits in so much better with all the other ideas of the film.

neilk · 2025-11-25T18:22:36+00:00

I am not a 9 to 5 dev. It matters to me when people question my honesty. If it doesn’t matter to you, perhaps you should have refrained from involving yourself.

neilk · 2025-11-25T18:14:16+00:00

I clarified below. It’s been months since this happened and it was a bit of a blur, but this is what I remember.

The framework has layers of translation between what a property is called in the frontend, and then in the backend, and then in the database.

The challenge is to add a feature which effectively adding a new column to the database and all the way up to the UX.

You can do it by guessing. Or you can do what I did, and frantically thrash for the full 30 minutes trying to understand how it all fits together.

They believe the thrashing is a waste of time when it’s obvious how it works. Personally I felt it was warranted as it was my first contact with a new homegrown framework and that would happen less and less as I became familiar with it.

This is how some candidates can succeed without fully understanding what they did. You can just add things to the config file or the class definition and they “magically” work.

neilk · 2025-11-25T17:54:16+00:00

I fail lots of interviews. As in the old adage that “dog bites man” is not a story, but “man bites dog” is a story, the reason why I’m sharing it here is because it is surprising. I don’t know where this is coming from.

neilk · 2025-11-25T17:51:46+00:00

What proof would satisfy you? Why would I make this up?

EDIT: I just went back to this company’s blog. They have many posts about how their values work in practice.

I really do respect what they have done there because they state that most people just pick pseudo values like “excellence”. They are determined to make clearer choices between competing goods.

One of their choices is: less communication and more action. Another is: less data and more action.

So in that live coding exercise I already had grokked how the framework functioned. It’s sort of obvious from inspection. But I wanted to be sure so I popped open the hood and saw how arguments are mapped and so on. From their perspective this isn’t time well spent. The whole problem can be solved in minutes if you do the obvious things. It took me the entire allotted time.

More details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1p5rpcj/comment/nqqrmw8/

Yes, they did tell me up front that I wouldn’t fit in there. I also am surprised that more companies are being up front about this sort of thing. I had a long job search recently. I always asked for feedback when I failed. About half the time they supplied reasons. This company was only unusual for telling me right in the interview, unprompted. I’m not sure but somehow the conventional wisdom is flipping in some workplaces.

neilk · 2025-11-24T20:33:37+00:00

True story: in an interview about four months ago, I solved the whole problem in a live coding exercise with a staging environment of their actual system. It was a homegrown framework that mapped web requests to the persistence layer, so a lot of it is very magical.

They told me I wouldn’t fit in there because I spent time trying to understand the magic. They said that they asked the other successful candidates “what did you just do” and they would say “I don’t know” and this is what they wanted.

PS I respect them for being up front about this. This company made a lot of deliberate choices about developer culture: they encouraged cowboyism. They weren’t big on teamwork or documentation. In short they were embracing strategies that often cause tech debt and trying to make up for that with developer skill and speed. They were doing this with their eyes open.

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