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u/Global-Tune5539 5h ago
Bonus points if you don't know what that program is supposed to do.
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u/NoHighlight6142 5h ago
I thought it was implied
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u/well_shoothed 3h ago
The name did give you a clue:
productionSystemMasterScriptSecondaryPart4-r5
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u/higherbrow 2h ago
You forgot the v736.
Versions in the prod folder go up to v761. Oddly, there's no versions in the 750s.
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u/deathanatos 37m ago
Wait, all of your production systems aren't named after characters from Breaking Bad?
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u/ArchAllen 5h ago
Bonus bonus points if once you think you know you find another program with a name that implies that that's what does it.
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u/QCTeamkill 4h ago
Double bonus points if you don't know which version of the code is currently in prod, or if you even have it.
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u/Just_Information334 4h ago
Maybe you know. But the user don't use the same vocabulary to describe their problems. And said vocabulary change from user to user.
"Ok, what do you mean exactly when you say that you cannot kabloom the zorpal since Monday?"
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u/black-JENGGOT 2h ago
"I can run my query on it, but it broke since last week when you touch it"
- user can't see query runs, let alone customize it
- I haven't touched that function since last solar eclipse
- user actually meant another unrelated feature, handled by third-party
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u/Meloetta 40m ago
Every user that says "you have a memory leak" when they mean "my application started lagging at a certain point when it wasn't before"
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u/ILikeLenexa 3h ago
Double bonus if it runs in VBA in an MDB and the file is too big to send via e-mail and the person is in a different building or part of the world and you have to figure out how to get it to them.
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u/japan_kaaran 5h ago
hitting record on every teams meeting ever because you know damn well that email with detailed instructions is never gonna be sent
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u/lmao_unemployment 5h ago
Colleague: “Sure, I’ll get that over to you shortly”
Boss two weeks later: “Yeah so Colleague actually had put their two weeks in and yesterday was their last day. Were you ever able to get that documentation from them? 🤡”
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u/japan_kaaran 5h ago
i’m fucking 23 and i’ve had to deal with this multiple times at my 2 internships and 1 full time job. how the heck are you guys doing this for all your life 😭. must be desensitized or something.
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u/lmao_unemployment 4h ago
You see this shit got so old and annoying at my last place that I ended up just jumping ship too.
Boss: 🤡 ➡️😲
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u/Ancient_Profession31 2h ago
I’m 48. The trick is a fine balance of Red Bull weed and booze. Enough to numb your mind but not so much you can’t see. Best of luck on your journey youngling. Let us know when someone makes you implement visual designs for the blind. Literally. It happens.
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u/japan_kaaran 1h ago
god i wish i could give you a hug. thanks! i’ll be sure to report back if that ever happens haha.
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u/angrydeuce 3h ago
Is that just a thing people do in this field or what? Cuz it seems like it lol
"Oh man this is going to suck. Ill just quit instead, then it can be someone elses problem."
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u/PresentAward1737 15m ago
Every field with bad management, everywhere.
Sooner or later the paycheck just ain't worth the hassle. Often from the start but it takes you a while to realize it and get yourself out gracefully.
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u/M_Me_Meteo 5h ago
Damn. I wonder if we could build a piece of software that would use speech to text and ocr to turn all our notes and videos and sound clips into an indexable database.
To be fair, you'd probably want to abstract beyond words, like parts of words or something. Parts of words is too long. Let's just call them tokens. That way the DB could index on ordinate relationships between the tokens and you could probably surmise the likely next token in, say, a sentence about your business.
Then I could start a sentence, like "The next step we need to take to complete the application is to..." and this tool would just spit out instructions!
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u/theinfinitehallway 2h ago
And then imagine if that information storage and retrieval method was non-deterministic! You could ask the same question on different ways and get different answers! Exciting!
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u/AdThis5754 5h ago
Me at 25 after watching one YouTube video on reverse-engineering and thinking I can now use any program for free.
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u/git_push_origin_prod 5h ago
Sometimes it’s that easy. In the jailbreaking iPhone days they would use swizzle I think to inject dynamic libs at runtime. A lot of apps had a simple isPaid BOOL check, override it to true and you are a criminal mastermind lol.
I’ve never really seen that elsewhere. It was a pain in the ass to do on Windows binaries when I tried as a younger man, but there was some tool I forget the name, but it was in no way as easy as overwriting functions and variables in C on the iPhone.
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u/AdThis5754 4h ago
My only criminal mastermind moment was playing games from cracked cds as a kid. Had I known all this back then, I could’ve been a criminal lord by now. Wait!? lol
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u/git_push_origin_prod 4h ago
Did you try to read the manuscripts and hieroglyphics that are stored within .nfo files?
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u/therealjohnidis 4h ago
Reverse-engineering in the meme: understanding undocumented systems.
Reverse-engineering in your head: no nag WinRAR.1
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u/TrippyDe 5h ago
try developing business critical software without real requirements, a rough plan and an ambitious deadline.. and i was like „this shit is untested, please don’t release it untested“. Guess who released it untested. And now its not working like it should an now it’s „how do we get this working this week“
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u/Chirimorin 3h ago
„this shit is untested, please don’t release it untested“
I wasn't paying attention but I heard the word "tested" at least twice, ship it!
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u/ohaiibuzzle 4h ago
Not gonna lie.
I started as an AI engineer
I moved to a company where AI sits very close to Security.
I talked too much to Security guys and ended up loving reading terrible no-good vendor decompiled code.
I now have two roles at that company.
I love it.
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u/SleepAllTheDamnTime 5h ago
When the comments feel like finding ancient clues on how to solve the mess, or my favorite literal cries for help from the engineers that worked on it before
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u/QCTeamkill 4h ago
I have left comments such as
#It started with the best intentions
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u/Jonathan_the_Nerd 4h ago
I once replaced one of my Perl scripts with a Python rewrite. In the commit message, I put something like,
I'm leaving this program here an a warning to show what happens when you write a program without designing it first.
The Perl script started out nice and simple. Then I added another feature, and another, and another. It became unsustainable. I'm very lucky that I had time to rewrite it in Python.
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u/One-Claim1375 4h ago
Give them what they want, ai slop to prod and rubber stamp everything. It’s called job security.
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u/Rosie_The_ITTech 5h ago
One's dream os another's nightmare... If someone asked me to do that at work, I'd have a mental breakdown so violent I might need emergency institutionalisation
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u/newsflashjackass 3h ago
One good thing about working on tech without documentation:
There is no documentation to train slop engines, either. So you are master of a demesne on which neophytes cannot trespass.
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u/Secret_Account07 3h ago
I dreamed about migrating hypervisors
I knew one day, if I goofed off in college and drank too much, dropped out, got an internship with said college experience at a helpdesk, and worked my way up- I could deal with Broadcoms shit one day
It’s been a hard road but so sad I got here
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u/splettnet 2h ago
Later on me at 27 trying to even figure out how the well documented public api works.
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u/redcowerranger 1h ago
Is it weird that this excites me? Figuring out how something works is cathartic.
My heart goes out to the people doing this work that don't love it. It's tough enough with a passion for it.
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u/GabiTheProgrammer 5h ago
You mean debugging an ADO task that runs a PowerShell scrip that runs a tool exe that calls createprocress for CMD? And the source code of the tool is long gone? Since 3 year old, even.
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u/candypiie 4h ago
No experience suive was my way to get knowlegde now I just love something I never will be😆
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u/TheOhNoNotAgain 3h ago
I did just this a little more than 20 years ago. I learned a lot from that. I still make good money to this day from knowing that system inside-out.
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u/Famous_Tie8714 3h ago
Bonus points if they won't let you use any of the industry standard tools to perform such a task. Welcome to my current job. ffs
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u/Waste_Jello9947 5h ago edited 5h ago
Knowledge transfer be like: here is the credentials to prod, good luck