By the way, the phrase "can we get a copy of the codebase to maintain our own version" should be heard as "now is a good time to update your resume"

My guess is that there are several IT departments where I work scrambling to find a replacement. I can already hear a director asking, "Is there any way we can get a copy of the codebase to maintain our own internal version of ICQ?"

Who has to die at Microsoft to get "co-pilot" removed permanently from my browser? I hate AI with a white-hot passion - it is garbage and waiting for the UI to "type out" messages makes me crazy. The web just keeps getting worse.

Permanent. License. Revoked.

An upset employee can do just about anything and there isn't much anyone can do about it.

Last week I spent over 20 minutes trying to recover my father's Steam account. Does the concept of bike include Vespas? Is the picture of the handlebar in the upper right also considered a bike picture? How about the crosswalk, does the red illuminated sign in the distance count or am I only looking for lines on the street? We abandoned Steam and bought the game via the Microsoft store - we were able to find the product, download it, and start playing in less time than I'd spent playing Captcha roulette. Captcha cost Steam a customer.

Thank you, that is sound advice. I think those teachable moments are found in personal relationships and probably less so on social media where things are shouted down by morons.

That reminds me, we need to develop a way to send electrical shocks to other people's keyboards.

If you try to introduce critical thought into a conversation you're immediately plastered with the worst caricatures of the opposition and labeled a 'hater'. News: "So Eric enjoys sticking nails up his nose." Me: "That seems like that might hurt." News: "What are you, some kind of Nazi?" Eric's Mother (crying): "My god, how long will the hate continue?" If people want to believe a nose full of iron is good then I say have at it. I no longer care. Chew on arsenic tablets, surf naked in shark filled waters with a ham around your neck, believe an alien mothership is monitoring your every more - I no longer elephanting care because when you try to help you just get kicked in the head. Did that come across as bitter?

Anymore when I see an article my initial response is: That didn't happen. I'm that way with politics/sports/weather - all of it. Who won the 2023 Super Bowl? I don't even know if the game was even played because I cannot trust a single elephanting thing I see on TV.

When I first started in development work, I had a little fear rattlin' around in the back of my mind. I was worried that efficiency might eventually cause me to run out of work. Sometimes a great big new vended product would launch - the one application to rule them all - and it would seem, for a time, that the queue was getting a bit short. Not anymore. I've argued until I'm blue in the face: for-the-love-of-code-use-the-free-version to no avail. I've seen new mega-system put into place that killed four of my applications but spawned the need for a dozen more. They'd rather pay me six figures to write something custom because, on the free version of some product in use by a million people, the description field on a tab nobody uses sits off to the side kind of funny. You cannot talk yourself out of work in the coding biz.

Wouldn't IMonkey be better? Just to be safe. :-D

I think the opposite situation is even worse. You get some abstraction/interface monkey at the keyboard and you may find yourself jumping through a dozen different 5 line files to get to the actual code that adds X + Y. Tons and tons of code written to handle the unlikely event that your boss is going to walk into your office one day and say, "Hey, let switch from Oracle to SQL". I understand some vended products feel the need to support that, but they don't.

I don't code because I love it. I code because it is better than roofing a house in July.

For some reason you keep moving the conversation to weird extremes. For example:

MSBassSinger wrote:

No production program remains unchanged for 20 years.

I never made that claim. I've been more than clear - when you want to have a discussion with me and not weird caricatures of what I'm posting I'll re-engage. Until then, good-day.

MSBassSinger wrote:

If you think it is “upending” to go from .NET 5 to 6 to 7, then you don’t understand .NET.

I'm talking about decades of stability and somehow you believe migrating an application from .NET 5 (2020) to .NET 6 (2021) is a reasonable comparison? Okay.

If you've been maintaining it for 22 years you've either replaced the underlying framework a couple of times or you're running insecure code. Regardless, I think technology churn is a huge driver for code quality problems.

I'm not sure AI is the issue here. Initially, the university where I work had a mainframe that handled student billing for many thousands of students and that system worked very well for 25+. It made sense to really invest in making the code right because the time you put in was rewarded with 2 decades of service. The system was replaced with some difficulty in 2018 and yet five years later they're shopping for a replacement. Coding as an engineering exercise makes sense when you're building something with hardware and software that will be around for two decades but it doesn't make sense to put the thought and effort into something that gets used for 6 months before being replaced by the latest framework/fotm language/cloud next best thing. Look at the .NET framework - how does a 3 year support window for a version compare to two decades? If you start writing for .NET 6 right now and do a real quality job - on a complex system you may not even been completed before the framework is out of support. Why take all the extra time to produce good code when it will be obsolete security hazard before you can even get it out the door? I'll worry about being an engineer when I get an environment that isn't completely upended every 24 months.

No no.... he eats gummy bears. Ah well, I've got nothing.

Why does the column name in my code have to match the column name in the database? It just feels so.... restrictive.