Work Life: Should Developers Be Fired For Overlooking Small Details or Should the Company Be Happy That We Have Cheap Developers?

• 08/09/18 
• 11/09/18
• 02/22/22
• 06/05/2023
• 2024-06-24

These are the dates in the comment history of a source code. There is no documentation requirements in this team so technically they are doing no wrong. Also these are not consistent across the board. It is also not consistent among the same developer on the same file.

These are the developers we kept. The solution of 20+ years is becoming more and more unmanageable. Maybe because I am seeing it from a low, low point-of-view... and I just do not understand the macro-level of running a division or a company?

Personally, I find the ones that are worse at keeping the immediate local patterns also tend to have more issues from their changes. Unfortunately, this is just my feelings... and as evidenced no one seems to confirm my feelings are ever correct even though my feelings seem to be correct a lot of times after the fact.

Why Can't Good People Make a Good Company?

I think maybe I just do not understand normal people and the sheer number of normal people. I think I may have disillusioned myself in thinking that I am normal. Is this the dilemma of being above-average but not clearly smart enough to be obviously above others? Or am I smart and I just have not found the right person to identify me as smart? Or maybe I am just too smart for my own good... in that, in reality, I am normal and normal people inflate their self-worth?

Am I autistic? Or do I just run against the grain? Am I eccentric? Or maybe fake but really a non-conformist?

If I have such good ideas, why can't I run my own company? Am I blinded by having a steady paycheck? Do I not have what it takes to run a good company in a not-good society? Am I willing to sacrifice my dignity to take on a manipulative personality to sell or even get a better job?

Why I am not good?

I don't know...

Life: Why the 'd' in fridge but not refrigerator? Why I never thought of this before?

While trying to create an application to track why appliances, I wanted to build a list of common alternative spellings including misspellings of words to make it easier to find things. This brought me to search for alternative spellings for refrigerator.

The first article that came up was why is there a 'd' in fridge but not refrigerator. I already knew how to spell both but it has never occurred to me to ask why it is different. Of course once I thought about it, it made sense why it was that way.

I have always thought that I was pretty good at picking out these kinds of particularities. This experience has really grounded me more on my thought biases and how my mind over simplifies things.

For those who wanted to know the answer, this site does a pretty good job explaining: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/fridge-vs-frig-spelling-short-for-refrigerator.

Other pages seem a miss a point here and there.

Work Life: My git inexperience wasted so much of my time (Understanding EOL)

I was troubleshooting an issue where our developers are not consistent with their formats. For this case, their is an inconsistency to the usage of CRLF or LF. We have developers on both Windows and Mac for a solution built for Windows.

These developers are probably good examples one of the difference between a developer and a software engineer... in my opinion. In that, they just build whatever and however to do what they have been tasked to do. Create another connection string to the core database that has been used for 20+ years? Sure because I didn't know where the original connection string was. Drop an entire new JS library framework for an update to a page title? Sure because it looks cool. Add a parameter to an obviously generic function like ToString(string WhyDoesThisEvenNeedAnotherParameter, string HowDoesASecondParameterEvenMakeSense, string InCaseThatStillMadeSenseHereIsAnother) then expect it to not break everything else? Duh, I wasn't taked to make sure it passed regression test. (Of course, we don't do regression test... suddenly app support is up in flames because everything is burning except for that one new feature.) Yes if you were wondering how it even get that far, that is how "lean" we are because leadership needs to make that extra $20 buy cutting half the developers.

Sorry, story got away from me.

So, I was syncing files and realized a file has historically been CRLF for EOL. Suddenly, I see a wall of red because the file was suddenly LF. At first, I blamed the developer. Then I realized his branch was also CRLF. I tried to play around maybe it was GitHub or maybe Visual Studio. I had to go through backups to see if this happened earlier. This was not happening on all the files.

Then I noticed there was a period of time the git attributes was set to text=auto. Or rather, I was looking up the issue online and found someone reference this. I probably ignored this a couple times as it did not seem relevant. Clearly, I didn't know what this did but did not seem intuitive to me. Eventually I ran out of other options and just looked it up and found it was causing my issue. Somewhere in the history, the text=auto was removed...

So, I spent this whole time... I guess... understanding how different developers develop and what a pain it is to work with people who just don't care about their work. At least now I know what to look for.

Buggish: MS Excel (Web Version) Copy/Paste Issue with message "Retrieving data. Wait a few seconds and try to cut or copy again."

Some days, several brain cells just hate Microsoft. Is it MS' fault? Probably just another underpaid and overworked engineer. But still... why something as simple as copy/paste breaks?

I copy cells then I paste and I get:

"Retrieving data. Wait a few seconds and try to cut or copy again."

Copy something else (not in spreadsheet), paste, correct. Copy same cells again, paste, error message. Paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste, paste.... all error messages. Wait... paste... error message.

Sheet has 4700+ records, 9 columns of data.

Reduced record count to 4000+ records.

Now suddenly works.

Unrelated

Copy a cell, select into a cell (ie so that cursor appears in the cell), paste. In the Excel app, this will copy the value into the cell (instead of the equation or type).

This will work on the first cell. Select a second cell and suddenly doesn't work. This happens every time.

Somehow selecting into 1 cell won't delete the clipboard but the second one does. Or probably what is happening is when selecting out being inside of a cell deletes the clipboard. Whatever the case, why is moving cells impacting the clipboard at all?