He uses a pencil, paper and a mechanical calculator to tally up the bill, which I absolutely understand when your career is in IT.
When the alternative is either having to search, evaluate, compare, select and configure an application for that purpose that you’re never quite happy with, or to scope, design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, eternally find things you wish you’d done better, refactor, realise you’re spending your free time on doing more of your job, regret your life choices, resolve to only make this last improvement and then call it good enough, renege on that promise to yourself a week later, burn out, curse that damn app for ruining your hobby…
…yeah, using the most trivial low-tech solution possible does look rather sensible.
I’m thankful I don’t do software dev (I did two years as a working student, that was enough), but working in Data Engineering / Analytics* doesn’t make things better. I’ll overengineer the database, ETL and reporting, define a dozen measures I’ll never use, prepare a dozen ways to slice and view the data I’ll never look at and build a whole data warehouse I’ll never look at.
Eventually I remember that it exists, realise that I’ve answered all my questions by directly querying the database, except for “What am I running out of?”, which I answer by looking in the cabinet because I never update my inventory anyway.
*I don’t even know where the line is anymore and how much of my responsibilities is on either side of it
When the alternative is either having to search, evaluate, compare, select and configure an application for that purpose that you’re never quite happy with, or to scope, design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, eternally find things you wish you’d done better, refactor, realise you’re spending your free time on doing more of your job, regret your life choices, resolve to only make this last improvement and then call it good enough, renege on that promise to yourself a week later, burn out, curse that damn app for ruining your hobby…
…yeah, using the most trivial low-tech solution possible does look rather sensible.
Yeah the alternative would be to rely on POS software, which must be insanely frustrating to a dev.
The acronym works both ways.
I’m thankful I don’t do software dev (I did two years as a working student, that was enough), but working in Data Engineering / Analytics* doesn’t make things better. I’ll overengineer the database, ETL and reporting, define a dozen measures I’ll never use, prepare a dozen ways to slice and view the data I’ll never look at and build a whole data warehouse I’ll never look at.
Eventually I remember that it exists, realise that I’ve answered all my questions by directly querying the database, except for “What am I running out of?”, which I answer by looking in the cabinet because I never update my inventory anyway.
*I don’t even know where the line is anymore and how much of my responsibilities is on either side of it