Honestly this applies to a lot of people in civic service. Not rich politicians, but the people trying to run your local or state government. Often the races are uncontested, because they literally can’t find even one other person who wants the job. Some of them are incompetent or pursue these jobs for power-seeking reasons, but many of them have their hearts in the right place and want to give back to their community, often while fighting ridiculous red tape at one end while contending with threats and harassment from citizens at the other. And the pay is often terrible. My local city council positions would qualify you for food stamps/EBT.
We pay our city councilmen $6,000/yr. The “big” city of which we’re a suburb pays them $27,000.
I think the logic behind this is that it is supposed to be a part-time job, but in reality it’s not.
The logic behind it is that it’s a
bribe“tip”-based system. The “tips” often provide more than a living wage, so it really works out better this way!
We have a compliance manager role at my site, which includes responsibilities to conduct internal audits and host external audits. When the audits have findings, they make sure appropriate owners correct the problems. It can be very thankless. My direct boss is amazing at it but she kinda hates it and bowed out after two years doing it.
Checklists suck, especially to go through repeatedly but they realistically save more lives than any of the more dramatic heroics.
I’d wager what sucks most with that job is dealing with people. Chasing different teams and having to nag to get them to do something that they think is a nuisance to their work can be draining.
Yep, people owning that there is a problem that needs to be fixed and not getting bogged down in blaming. She is really good at getting the team to focus on process breakdown instead of blaming a person, which translates into “let’s fix the process” instead of “Bob fucked up, he should get retrained or fired”.
My peer at my last-last shop moved from devops to security; but to the checklist part of security. Making lists, validating lists, reviewing lists, checking compliance; she was a-fucking-mazing. A joy to work with because she was just a joy anyway - I’m sure everyone had a bro-crush on her - and outstanding at her job. She needs to get paid even more.
I’ve heard tell from a primary source that sailed with him that there was a Marine Engineer on a Greek passenger ship that was drunk all the time and basically completely useless except for one task.
Due to an unfortunate design flaw if one of the sewerage tanks overflowed it filled up the compartment that held the isolation valves to the tanks.
His only job was to swim into the raw sewage and dive down to the valves and shut off the overflowing tank so it could be pumped out.
I think I understand why he was drunk all the time
My mom, she was better at being a mom than I might’ve thought when I was younger.
There’s a huge opening here to tell mom jokes about her skills. Thank you for this.
Yeah I can confirm her huge opening
Apparently no-one wants to write unit tests, but I enjoy it, do it well, and even find it relaxing.
I’m always confused by my peer’s reluctance and grumbling thereabout, and horrified to see the incomprehensible mess of (often useless) tests they produce in the end.
Wish we had more like you in the industry. It’s a skill to write non-brittle non-trivial tests but surely it’s not actually as difficult as the results indicate?
I think it rubs people the wrong way because (though it looks like code) in some sense it is not programming… it’s like the negative image of a program… like a mold or specification-box that contains and fits around the code, which reverses several key principles.
It also can highlight if the code needs to be moved or reorganized, and let me tell you… the LAST thing that devs want is to interpret the struggle to write a unit test as a sign the code needs rework, they would MUCH rather keep unit tests as an after-thought; like some kind of mandated torture-ritual that produces a thing of no value.
Speaking of not valuing tests… I’ve literally seen devs blithely invert test assertions (that where clearly valid), those that made sense in context, and even some that were PART OF THE TEST’S NAME… just to brush the “meaningless failures” out of their way… as if they could not be bothered to even read one sentence to understand the “why”… uggh.
Anyway, I digress and ramble. If you really want more of me in the industry, I can provide one more! If you happen to know of any teams that need a professional-unit-testing-developer, I’m recently on the market! :)
Pre-merge code review should stop that kind of thing. I honestly haven’t seen anything like this in years.
Many code-reviewers likewise devalue tests, giving only a cursory skim over the unit-test section of PRs, if they examine them at all, and sometimes code-review itself is devalued to the point of a rubber-stamp (e.g. “great, we need someone from team X to approve it too… doesn’t matter who, though…”).
If I could tell you, you would be SHOCKED at how high-profile and recent this sordid project was; it’s literally in the news and discussed in my podcasts.
Do you have any high quality resources on testing you would mind sharing? I’m mostly a self taught programmer who loves TDD, because I’m shit at writing code.
I would whole-heartedly recommend Robert Martin’s clean coding lecture series. It may be many hours of your life, but it is free on youtube and well worth the time. I don’t exactly recall what he says about testing in his lectures, but it’s probably pretty close. If nothing else, it will teach you to critically consider programming structure in the abstract (instead of following formulae), and to write code with the intent for it to be read and maintained by humans.
I think he also has a series that includes “structured programming” (like early return vs deep nesting), but was unable to find it last time I looked for it. I recall having a shocked epiphany when he (i THINK it was Martin) demonstrated the exact way to clean up a function, that started out ugly, and ended up being reduced to literally nothing (the function was removed).
Awesome thank you!
I don’t know if nobody wants the job but I knew a guy who did stucco and absolutely loved doing it. Standing outside and wiping stucco onto walls was his joy.
Me.
My org used to use label printers that would often fail because of one cheap plastic cog that got worn down over time. Replacing the cog meant taking the whole printer apart. My co-workers would send them back to the vendor to have it done, but I enjoyed the work and used to disassemble printers myself to swap the cog.
I used to rebuild laser printer fusers for the same reason
