Modern_medicine_isnt

@Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
8 Post – 376 Comments
Joined 12 months ago

What goal post have I moved. My initial comment could have said work well for the user. But the second sentence implied that pretty clearly. And I am still saying it now. And great for you. You probably drank the kool-aid to get that position, so you feel the need to claim carry water for the illusion that upper management always try to project. I mean, you might be the exception, and truely believe in the things you say. Maybe you even work for one of the rare companies where it is true. But the vast majority of people working in the field that I have talked to have said that just isn't how it is most places. Many said it used to be, when their company was small... but that it changed.

And yes I wrote regression tests. And I worked hard to maintain them while writing tests on features. But with a 5 to 1 ratio of devs to QA, it wasn't possible to not cut corners. A year after I changed jobs I found out they had lowered the bar for releasing to 55% passing of the regression tests. I never had the tools to make them able to resist change as they had no one owning the automation tools. The next guy just didn't care as much. The job I moved to was qa automation so the qa's were my customers. I did my best there to give them automation that would reduce maintenance costs. But we weren't allowed to buy anything, we had to write it all. And back then open-source wasn't what it is today. So the story was the same, cut corners on testing. And of course the age old quote... "why is QA slowing down our release process". Not why are the devs writing poor code. The devs weren't bad either, but they were pressed to get features out fast.

As for why do they invest in it at all. Optics is a big part of it. But also to help maintain that low bar you spoke of. The moment industry trends started touting the Swiss army knife developer who could do it all including testing, they dropped qa teams like a bad habit. Presentations were given on how too much testing was bad, and less tests were better... that pendulum swings back and forth every decade or so. Because quality drops below the low bar, and the same exec who got a promotion for getting rid of the qa team at his last job 7 years ago, gets accolades for bringing it back in his new job.

In one thread someone questioned if I even work in tech. So I started mentioning my experience to back up my claims. My current CTO fully admits that we have to cut corners and deliver features to win customers. That why I work for him. He is honest about it. And he is not new at it either.

As for time is money... take a person working 40 hours a week, and replace thier tool with a cheaper lower quality tool, then tell them to make it work. They start working 44 hours a week. You saved money and got the same result. Awards for you. And a lot of people will do the extra work, because they care about the work. As a bonus, the people who won't work extra leave. Now you have a self selecting group of people who will work longer for the same price. And those tend to be the people who won't leave for various reasons. So now you can even not backfill some of the ones who left, and tell the ones who stayed to cover the slack. Wow, even more money saved. I've seen that happen at a company with billions in revenue and great profits. But the shareholders demand growth, so if they can't sell more, they must cut expenses to grow profits.

Stock price is all speculation. Revenue yesterday doesn’t mean revenue today. And you don't buy stock in a company that stays the same, you buy stock in a company that you speculate will go up in value. Revenue can be going up, and the stock price down because people think the price will go down. How do layoffs make revenue go up? Yet they often make the stock price go up. If the stock prices was super dependent on metrics, algorithms would be making soo much money we wouldn't have anything else picking stocks. But the algorithm traders can't predict human speculation. So they tend to work much better on smaller companies where there is less attention and less speculation.
And not all companies by any means just the big ones. And I am sure there are some exceptions, there always are.

There is no financial motive for software to work well. The people who sign the check for it almost never have to use it.

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Because I have worked with software for 30 years. When the employee is salaried, thier time costs nothing. I will say I have no experience with call centers. So those may be an exception. I believe the majority of computer use jobs are salary though.

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I haven't been in the board room, but I have seen the department heads deflect by focusing on different numbers that do look good for unrelated reasons. Then blame the poor performance that was the result of a bad decision as an expected outcome of a long term decision. These people at those levels are pros at this. And the board cares about the stock price. Guess what, the stock price is not based on numbers, it is based on speculation. If the ceo can spin it, it doesn't matter what it is. Like how layoffs often make the stock price go up. "We are reducing expenses to accelerate progress and be more nimble..." no they are firing people because they can't manage to use those people to make money.
And I wish it was just me who has encountered these people... but sadly it isn't. If you want an example. Look at Google, and read up on how the culture changed over time as it got bigger. It probably staved off the change longer than most and grew faster, so the number of employees that triggered the change is a lot higher than average, but it's easy to read about.

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See, you just set the bar so low. Being able to save isn't working well, it's just working. And I have held the title of QA in the past. It is in part how I know these things. And in the last 5 years or so, companies have been laying off QAs and telling devs to do the job. Real QA is hard. If it really mattered you would have multiple QA people per dev. But the ratio is always the other way. A QA can't test the new feature and make sure ALL the old ones still work at the rate a dev can turn out code. Even keeping up on features 1 to 1 would be really challenging. We have automation to try and keep up with the old features, but that needs to be maintained as well. QA is always a case of good enough. And just like at Boeing, managment will discourage QAs from reporting everything they find that is wrong. Because they don't want a paper trail of them closing the ticket as won't be fixed. I've been to QA conferences and listened to plenty of seasoned QAs talk about the art of knowing what to report and what not to. And how to focus effort on what management will actually ok to get fixed. It's a whole art for a reason. I was encouraged to shift out of that profession because my skills would get much better pay, and more stable jobs, in dev ops. And my job is sufficiently obscure to most management that I can actually care about the users of what I write more. But also I get to see more metrics that show how the software fails it's users while still selling. I have even been asked to produce metrics that would misrepresent the how well the software works for use in upper level meetings. And I have heard many others say the same. Some have said that is even a requirement to be a principle engineer in bigger companies. Which is why I won't take those jobs. The "good enough" I am witness/part of is bad enough, I don't want to increase it anymore.

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Opinions like that are why software quality sucks. And why using software is so painful for most people. "I have to use a stroller to set my phone number on the UI." "Sure, but uptime if 5 9's, so it's quality software".

That's a dream. The googles and such just buy them out and shut them down. There is always a bigger fish that spends more money preserving the status quo than making a product.

I for one hope this simply leads to the end of marriage. That whole concept is built rather one sided. Time for relationship contracts... renewable, but always finite. With separation details worked out in advance. Let's get religion out of it entirely.

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No idea what you are talking about. Product companies are exactly what I am referring to. Some director signs off on the purchase, probably has never even seen the software. But he has seen the sales pitch. That is what the C suite of small companies are for, mingling with the decision makers.

Medical? Your funny. Healthcare software is the worst. There is a reason the stuff that matters is decades old. Cause the new stuff rarely works. And the rest... tell me again why I have to fill out the same forms year after year, and they never populate with my previous answers? Or why I have to tell them my 2 year old son isn't menstruating or hasn't stolen a car yet (on the same form no less). The software is so hard to use the providers have given up.

Good luck to them on that... cause that is how you get a revolution. Lol

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Well it doesn't have to be a formal contract... but I was thinking there would be like a website with a selection you could pick from, print out, sign and done. And the main reason was to make getting out of a bad relationship clear easy, and most likely no courts involved since everything was already spelled out. Open sourced contracts would in theory be well vetted to be fair.

When the buyer isn't the user (which is most of the time), no there isn't. Competitors try to win with great sounding features and other marketing BS because that is all the director will see. The users are then left with the product that has all the bells and whistles, but is terrible at doing what actually needs to be done. And the competition is the same, so they don't really have much choice. Bell's and whistles are cheaper than making it work well.

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Uptime isn't quality. Perf and reliability are easily faked with the right metrics. It's trival to be considered working on PowerPoint without working well for the user.

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Uptime isn't quality. Perf and reliability are easily faked with the right metrics. It's trival to be considered working on PowerPoint without working well for the user

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I have 30 years of work experience on both sides of the equation with companies of varying size. Once a company gets to somewhere between 500 and 1000 employees, the 2nd level managment starts to attract professionally ambitious people who prioritize thier career over the work to a more a more extreme degree. They never walk anything back. Every few years they will often replace a solution (even a working one) so that they can take credit for a major change. Anyway, you get enough of these and they start to back each other and squeeze out anyone who cares about the work. I have been told in one position that it doesn't matter if you are right, you don't say anything negative about person X's plan. And many other people from other companies and such have echoed that over the years. Now small companies often avoid this. But most software targets the big companies for the big paydays. Of the ones I have worked at, some even openly admitted that financially they couldn't justify fixing a user issue over a new feature that might sell more product because the user issues don't often lead to churn, where as new features often seal a deal.

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I don’t play these games, but my kids do. And I am thinking (as a man), why wouldn't I want my character to be a hot girl. If I an going to spend hundreds of hours staring at an ass, I would rather it be a hot girl ass.

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Next up they will advise women to carry a note from thier husband or father detailing where they are going so they can avoid suspicion. The cops will pull them over and ask for thier papers.

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does the law allow a school board to override the law? That seems odd.

Smart locks are fine. Your door isn't particularly secure with a regular lock. If they want in enough to bring tech, they are coming in anyway.

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Why are states wasting time with resolutions for international issues. Stay in your lane.

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Not buying it. The companies that I know of that are hiring still can't find people. And I still remember all the doom and gloom articles when google and meta were laying people off, while at the same time anyone with a pulse could get hired. Heck I got a 40% raise by taking a new job during the layoffs, and I am not that talented, nor was I really under paid. Just can't trust media owned by billionaires. They will say anything to try and keep the working people thinking they are lucky to have a job.

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Fees are predatory on people who are swayed by lower advertised cost. Basically, they are extorting the way many people's brains work. It's just another way to keep the not rich from ever catching up. Not just in dollars, but time. If you try to price compare, you have to sink a ton of time into uncovering all the fees. The rich just don't have to worry about that. So it ends up as a time tax.

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The bible

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Price increase alone isn't enshittification. But the amount and quality of what they offer is dropping at the same time.

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Seems like all we need is a search engine that only returns sites that don't shove unwanted content down your throat. Tall order though.

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Ok wait a minute. The conservatives are wrong on all 4 of those. So are you saying that logic would be wrong for banning guns also? Not sure which argument you are making here.

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I'm was right there with you a few years ago. My daughter plays, and I was sure to point out how it was catering to male fantasy and all that. But then I took her to some conventions she asked to go to. Do you know what I saw. More women then men.
And there was a space of computers that people could stop and play genshin and the like. Again more women then men. And the women were all playing genshin while the guys were playing games with more zoomed out interactions. It turns out that women are a big part of the reason for the intricate costumes on female characters and such. I still don't know what really to make of it all, but I do know my first impression of a game just objectifying women for male pleasure is not accurate. And don't get me started on the female cosplayers at these conventions.

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These days mutual masterbation is better for your relationship than having kids. It's not the kids fault, society has made having kids a nightmare.

And of course the reason it is demonized is that any powerfull organization/society needs peoples shoulder to stand on. So, the more people, the more power. And they don't really care if it was by rape due to sexual frustration, they just need more people to take advantage of.

Whoa whoa whoa...he didn't say ripe, fertile and likely to survive child birth... this is pretty consistent with thier priorities.

I hope they do it, and get arrested and convicted so they can't vote.

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What you need to do is report your illegal income in a legal way. Like say you are a life coach, and you advise people.

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Like others are saying, it is a new york thing. But in general, upstate means further from the city than where the speaker lives. Until you crouse some imaginary line, then downstate means closer to the city. Comonly, but not always, it is used in a derogatory sense. They city people think the upstaters are rural hicks. And the upstaters think the city people couldn't survive outside a city. Source, I grew up in an area that didn't consider itself upstate, but all the city people sure did.

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These people just don't get it. Very few religious people actually care about the religion. They care about using it to feel better about themselves. They don't read the holy books. To make a place they would want to go to, it would have to have VIP access if you have a letter from your pastor, and be all about how great you are for believing and much better than nonbelievers you are. But I guess the optics on that aren't the same.

I say, keep them an extra week, and let the US gov pay the fine for not noticing on departure.

probably could get arrested for that in Florida

I am less concerned with his opinion, and more concerned a place invited him to speak to graduates... some of whom I assume were women.

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They hired full time the contractor who brought down prod 3 times in his 6 month contract. I updated my resume that very day. Edit:spelling