Forget the answers, Stack Overflow is just a toxic place to ask a question. You might get lucky from searches where others had a similar question, but god help the poor soul who makes an ask. I've ASKED AI more things this week then the last decade+ with SO, and get what I'd consider comparable quality of answers for my very specific questions. At this point, why bother with SO?
Yah, I got hit by this as well. Was pulling some stuff off of windows, it updated overnight, rebooted, and I woke up to my default Ubuntu boot being horked. A bit of a WTF till I started searching for it. I'll be backing up and leaving that box as Linux + a vm.
Ah man. Back in my university days, I worked in an infectious disease (HIV) lab that shared space with some GI docs. Went down to Mexico and came back with enteropathogenic e. coli. While they were super happy to get some fun samples and blood works, I've never felt sicker in my life.
My side would immortalize b-cells with Epstein-Barr... but that experience left me with a healthy respect for e coli.
I've really come to appreciate blameless post postmortems. People hide mistakes when you have a culture that punishes.
My biggest foible: Our 400 person company had issued blackberries and was pulled into a project where all the work was in India. I covered EMEA, and phone rates were like a quarter a minute, or something like that. There was no concern about using the phone/data.
I ended up spending a significant amount of time over there and one thing I noticed is it looked like I had a different carrier every time I looked at the device. Did not think much of it in the couple months I was there. When I got back - one of our Ops guys called me and we discovered it was closer to $9/min, with absurd data charges. Sat down with the CFO, as the $12k charge was not projected. I had no idea if I was about to be canned or not.
Instead, leadership and sales got brand new blackberries, with an unlocked SIM card. Celebrations by all the brass... Was very happy to have a job.
In the early days of the web, that is exactly what we did. I was part of a home shopping network, prior to HTTPS being a thing. We were given enough budget to put together a pentium pro, a fractional T1, and coded up a website in C++ that allowed folks to use the same cable TV call center infrastructure. That original 5K generated 200k+ orders.
When I'm interviewing, I'll usually start with something simple with an input that is a phone number and the first 'questionable' input I'll hand them is 1-800-FLOWERS and ask how they are handling it. There are a lot of interesting edge cases with phone numbers. None super tricky , but it makes for an interesting first set of how someone thinks
In many, many cases - teams don't have enough time to do maintenance. The programs where our developers become line order cooks, only having cycles to add the features for that sprint, almost always spiral into despair. Dependencies will go unpatched, tests become untrustworthy, and the code review cycles from those who should catch things goes away. Business gets what they wanted and then starts to shrink the pool of developers to save even more money - either with fewer resources or less experienced. You really have to force teams to give time to polish things, because I don't think business understand they need to change the oil on the car.
