This. I hate it. It feels like a modern day factory worker job.

When I first graduated I was all caring about design, mainability, etc.

Nope. All that shit is pointless in a large company. Took me too long to notice that Cisco was essentially just throwing as many code monkeys at the problems until things work.

“Fix” a bug in a hacky way that creates 10 more bugs that won’t be found for weeks and be another teams problem because they can’t directly point to your hacky code anyway? That engineer is getting promoted. They fix so many bugs. So many commits!

Take the time to understand the bug and do a rewrite to ensure other platforms are not effected and setup the design so it’s easier to debug in the future? Well, you spent all week on one bug you lazy engineer!

It took me too long to realize that I was the bad programmer. That this is actually what companies want and reward their employees for.

Sorry. Didn’t mean to rant. But your short comment triggered it I guess.

I fucking hate this field. I still love programming though.

I can’t live without VIM keybinds. Maybe I’m a boomer. I do use it as a note taking or “collect my thoughts” app. Or just a place to paste shit when I’m working. Very useful for that. Though only when I’m forced to be on Windows.

I’m convinced a lot of the “AI tools” in general are just the same old tool with data collection tacked onto it. I really hope some of the things I see labeled as “AI” in tech these days are not actually running some model on a GPU somewhere. I pray they aren’t at least.

If the file is just a class I usually put example usage with some default arguments in that block by itself. There is no reason for a “main” function. It’s a nice obvious block that doesn’t run when someone imports the class but if they’re looking at the class there is a really obvious place to see the class usage. No confusion about what “main()” is meant to do.

if __name__ == '__main__':
    # MyClass example Usage
    my_object = MyClass()
    my_object.my_method()

This sadly excludes the majority of bad UX decisions that are done entirely to maximize users time inside of the app as well as display advertising.

So many functional apps are destroyed by these incentives. There is literally a “skill issue” but in the opposite direction. The design is either purposely malicious in a subtle way with “dark patterns” (something Amazon is insanely guilty of. Literally just go try and return and item.) or is purposely annoying trying to ensure the user purchases the “free trial” to actually make the app functional. Knowing a lot of users will be charged at least once for the free trial.

I guess my point is that there is so so so so much wrong with UX design today. But for the majority of people that’s not because of a bad programmer with no design knowledge. It’s on purpose in most cases.

If we had one public social media platform that would be the best way. It would force people to filter and learn how to interact with technology. But in our world people are lazy and a platform that picks the best value of X automatically for the most people will win. Even if it’s not actually how people want to see things.