Comment on Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported

• afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  You are not doing an accurate comparison here.

  You are ignoring all the stuff that died early (survivor bias). You are ignoring the maintenance crews that keep that stuff going which you know isn’t the same as performing surgery. You are ignoring replacement parts. You are ignoring the conditions of operations, the human body is wet. You are ignoring the changes of electronics that made them less reliable but not prone to giving people lead and mercury poisoning. You are ignoring the amount of work being asked to perform from the electronics.

  Also Voyager was not designed to last 5 years the engineers involved admitted that. They planned for it to last much longer but NASA management didn’t want to oversell it.

  source
• vexikron@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Developing things that are too robust and reliable means you run the risk of saturating your market and then going out of business.

  Developing things that are intended to break down or fail only requires a competent enough legal team to ensure that your company is not liable for that happening approximately sooner than when your disclaimer no one reads states the customer may expect that to happen by.

  Developing software that is bug free, ie, robust, violates both of the proceeding rules of private enterprise in a ‘free market’ capitalist society.

  You want people to be dependent on software updates so maybe you can earn a subscription fee of some kind, or have the ability to remove pre-existing features in the future and then offer their return for a one time or recurring purchase.

  Also, developing robust code that does not fail requires testing and sometimes extensive redevelopment, which is expensive, requires paying competent programmers good salaries, and cuts into the impossibly fast initial development timeframe the idiot manager with a business degree promised to the VP.

  After years working various programming and data analytics jobs for various tech firms, I can tell you that no one cares about making a good product or delivering a good service, maybe other than the actual people designing it. Everyone else only cares about whether it either makes money or earns them social status of some kind.

  I am 34 and am now far too jaded to ever attempt to work any tech job as an employee ever again. The number of times I have explained to managers with no background in computer technology that no, that is a bad idea for all these reasons, then one of those reasons massively delays a project, forces another team to make their project compatible with mine due to absurd imposed design limitations, or outright makes the whole project fail… and then all the blame is pinned on me for a failure I told them would happen if I listened to ‘their idea’, is so vast that I am just going to make my own video game now.

  I have never met an experienced programmer who has not had this happen to them countless times.

  source

  • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I get it. Most days I would love to get out of tech. Any given project I got half a dozen sales people and PEs who want to trash my software/electrical designs. It is commonplace for me to downgrade my work. Giving customers a less reliable more expensive system. Given how much of my work is for the government there is zero mystery where cost disease is coming from.

    I just worry that if I walk away no one will stop them.

    source

    • vexikron@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      One of the jobs I worked, there was an older programmer, who had been their since the company was created, or very soon afterward. He survived Vietnam, learned COBOL via the GI Bill at a college, programmed the system underlying the /entire/ financial data system(s) of the company, from paying employees to receiving vendor payments to intracomapany finances… everything.

      Before I left that job, we would talk often. He told me that his whole career, not a single VP or manager /ever/ listened to his constructive criticism or concerns about requests to make the system do something that would cause a problem later on down the line, that would be incompatible with other systems his stuff integrated with, either internal or external to the company, or often just asks to design totally useless features or even design things according to a manager of VPs specs, even though he explained to them that their design was fundamentally flawed from a programming perspective and not actually ever be able to work at even a test use case at all, because the higher ups think they know how to write code, but actually do not.

      He explained to me that he had been telling them for 3 years he was going to retire, and that they needed to find a replacement programmer who knows COBOL, as the way the company’s systems have culture have evolved will mean that his code his systems, will /need/ constant updates and tweaks to keep utter chaos from ensuing in his absence.

      He then further explained to me that he knew they would not do this because of ignorance and arrogance… and that within a year of him departing he expected to be billing them 3x his current hourly rate as a contractor.

      Management seema to have assumed they could hire someone like me, a young relatively novice programmer at the time, to replace him for 1/3 or a 1/4 of his current wages.

      They did not understand that COBOL is a dead programming language that hasnt been taught in Computer Science courses at basically any American University since, at best, the early 90s… and that anyone who actually knows COBOL would by definition be a very senior programmer, and literally laugh at the pitiful wage they were offering to non existent ‘Junior COBOL Programmers’.

      And so, he left, within 3 months other systems in the company evolved until they broke the underlying COBOL system. Cue 3 months of ‘make everything reliant on the COBOL code work witbout touching rhe COBOL code’ for me, which is of course impossible because the parts of it some of my reports drew from were now outputting either nothing, or an error code.

      I leave because the stress is too much, and within another 3 months, he is being contracted to fix the mess he told them would happen if theh did not do what he suggested.

      source
  • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yup sounds look one of the good reasons to hate on capitalism. The guys able to create reliable long living stuff should be praised to the highest degree. Its why I believe job/career should not be attached to survival income. So much energy gets wasted because stuff is designed to break. So much talent is wasted because too nice things are not profitable

    source

    • vexikron@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      My last job was as a data analyst, database admin, programmer, IT support, and internal auditor for a non profit.

      You will note that my actual job title was Data Analyst. And that I was doing the work of at least 5 different job descriptions, while only earning the wages of one.

      VP level managers were beyond incompetent. They were actively harmful to the mission of the organization, wasting absurd amounts of money on proprietary software for tasks that could easily be done with a simple HTML 5 website, paying outside contracting firms for translations you could use Google Translate for just fine, oh, and requiring the databases my team managed to interface with the accounting team’s database for a new service we were going to provide with a newly received grant.

      But they did not realize that we would need access to the accounting database. Even though they asked us to interface with it. Then when we explained that we would … you know, actually need access to the accounting database, as the whole point was to make sure that we were doling out charity money for individuals in a way that followed internal standards to make sure we were not not being defrauded.

      So we run some analysis with the data we do have access to, as the accounting database is only fully accessible by the head of accounting, and they are busy or on vacation all the time.

      We notice significant discrepancies between what our system, the one that basically the entire org uses to manage clients, including disbursements, and what accounting says has actually been disbursed.

      Then, personal life happens to me. After 3 years of seeing therapists and psychologists at the best medical organization in the state, they tell me that I am likely Autistic.

      I tell my family this.

      My family attempts to send me to a long term mental institution far away from any major city, as they believe I am actually schizophrenic. You know, while holding down an 80k a year job, making more money than any other member of my family, having no delusions, not wandering through the streets screaming at things that arent there. My brother’s girlfriend does that, but thats uh, fine apparently.

      So, I grab all my stuff and put it in my car, and stay at a motel for a while.

      In this time, my brother removes me as an authorized user on our shared phone plan, and uses the parental control feature to stalk me on foot and in his car.

      I am preeetty good with computers, and manage to replace nearly all unnecessary Google parts of Android with open source stuff, thus disabling the parental control and tracking my brother is able to do.

      He cancels my phone plan and disables my phone number within 45 seconds.

      I get a new SIM card.

      Ok good! The phone is successfully de-googled Android, and works with a new SIM card. Great!

      Problem: All of my online accounts, including banking, require 2FA linked to a phone number that is now disabled.

      Then, my car gets stolen and I get the shit beat out of me.

      Homeless for a while.

      Eventually manage to get a phone. Call the non profit I used to work for. They help homeless people after all.

      The project my boss and I were working on, to rectify database discrepancies between the main system we maintain that the whole org uses, and accounting’s database? Well the point if this project was to have the underlying digital framework to be able to help people who are in exactly the situation I am now in.

      But, because I lost my job, the project was cancelled.

      So I have now been basically homeless for a year.

      Good thing I qualify for SSDI (hooray Autism?), other wise I would have starved or frozen to death months ago.

      source

      • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Wow what the actual rollercoaster.

        As a fellow autist i am not sure if i would handle such a chain of events so well as you did.

        I actually have some context for autism-schizophrenia.

        Both medical disorders as well as adhd/add/ocd/dislexia/bipolar are all part of the neurodivergent family,

        Therefor its common for overlap between these conditions and for different medical diagnoses to be more common in a single family tree.

        None of that matters to how your family treated you because even if you did have dillusions or psychotic feelings they are still no reason for forced therapy. These conditions, are very misunderstood and the only person that can truly know if they need help is the neurodivergent person themselves except maybe if they cause proven major harm.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I am curious when in my career I have ever designed anything to break.

      source

      • vexikron@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Well you must not work for Apple then. Planned Obsolesence woooooo!

        source

        • -> View More Comments