Originally stream of conscioused on social media and reposted here with minor edits and formatting.


I’m still trying to recover from a friend telling me about the “tech lead” at their security job who wouldn’t merge my friend’s Merge Request because “why does it have all these functions? i can’t read it, just make it flat and put it in one big try catch? here I redid it for you, see with out the function definitions its 8 lines shorter so it’s more efficient”. Audience, it was 4 functions. The lead demanded an 8am meeting to have my friend walk them through it line by line because they couldn’t read it or understand it.

Also they maintain an internal tools library that is like 3000 lines of flat functionless code in one big try catch.

Also separately when my friend had another MR for deploying some automation to their fleet, it was blocked cus they had a one liner that dumped data to CSV files and the lead said “ah my library has a function for that, use that instead”. And then it failed to work, because, would you believe it, if you could parse their code that my friend suggested was so deeply nested and functionless it stretched to the far side of their widescreen monitor, the tech lead’s save to CSV function had a UI prompt, so the entire fleet was paused waiting for UI input to save.

It’s been a minute since I’ve heard of someone so incompetent failing up enough to manage other people. Students in entry level programming classes are subject to industry standard linters and yet this work place and lead is not. And the claim is somehow I guess that their work is security and not dev so … somehow that’s ok?

I really… despair. No shock there’s been some churn there. Told my friend to try and get their brand newest manager to adopt decade old industry best practices of linting code and that might just… solve this otherwise maybe impassible problem, other wise enjoy not getting work done or moving on.

And this dovetails with my learned philosophy that honestly many big corporations are unserious about doing any work. management will scream till they have ulcers they want work done, but then leave you in impossible situations. like this where the lead in charge of approving code has the comprehension and understanding of less than any first year student, less than.. nothing. actively code illiterate and labouring under a bunch of misapprehensions like “functions are inefficient” and “less lines of code is efficient”.

Or like some of my experiences where the designs we were given were impossible based on the reality we were in, all the teams we needed support told us to fuck off till next year, and over time, the churn of upper management politics and decisions resulted in perpetually monthly scrapping of plans before we could launch a thing and new plans being assigned that it was clear that weather we worked at all or not the results were now identical, so we just, didn’t. Came in late, long coffees, long lunches, long afternoon coffees and taking off early.

But being in an unserious work environment is still sadly very draining cus everyone above you and often most of your peers are all play acting like everything is the most serious and expecting you to play along too.

I read books on computer team management from different decades:

and as a bonus

And basically we were doing chapter 1 stuff wrong across the board, across all the books, across all the decades.

How can any place that operates against the collected knowledge and studies and research of decades really be serious? about doing anything?

But then the question comes: what does an individual do when this is most work places and most of society?

We have decades of research on how to organize well to produce optimal results in so many levels, ways, places, with such a variety of goals. And yet most of society ignores it all and pursues paths, methodologies and strategies known well to be suboptimal if not down right guaranteed to fail.

We have a bad society, and I don’t really know how to live in it or what I’d have to do if I had to live in it more.

But that sort of is the answer, find little pockets of slighter sanity out side it.

I left big corporate life to start my own nonprofit, and now am in my second tech nonprofit run by folks a little more idealistic and in some ways grounded and not committed to management styles that are obvious paths to failure and misery.

But I’m lucky. And weird. I’m in privacy and security, but still a dev (so kind of a the weirdo at a lot of the security events I’ve found myself attending in the last year), and I’m now approaching the point where half and shortly over half my career in tech will have been at privacy focused nonprofits, and not at for profit companies.

So I’ve somewhat found my immediate answer and am living it as long as I can, but even from here the broader question remains, what does anyone do when it’s most of society, and the peak of this is centred in a country where we’re starting to really see some, unoptimal results now breaking out everywhere. One can get a little distance, but full escape? on this small planet? that’s a harder question.

Perhaps I’m in a mood. I’ve just finished two books, Exordia, and The Light Brigade, and they are both asking Some Questions. and the answers I am seeing them lean towards seems to be “you can’t save a system doomed and committed to failure”, you can just try and get outside the blast radius, try and survive, try and help those close to you survive, and mourn all the rest. And that’s pretty grim, but also still more than anything else I’ve seen, which has mostly been just “and die trapped inside futilely trying to change a system from within that can’t and won’t be changed and is terminal”