Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

Re:Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself by darepublic on Wednesday February 28, 2018 @09:54PM (#16489306)

I can't say for sure but your mention of 'CSS' makes me guess this is a web application, in which case you should be able to read the source code and figure out how to build it. If people aren't helping you then according to their cost benefit matrix it isn't worth it. Maybe they are supposed to be doing other work and they can't calculate how many hours they would have to spend helping you. Maybe they are just afraid of not knowing how to get it running either and will get entangled and implicated in what is currently YOUR ignorance alone. (I've worked with plenty of these crappy apps with undocumented dependencies where if you get the AUTHOR of the repo to try to build THEIR project on a machine other than their own it craps out on them in which case they fucking bail or defiantly say 'it works on my machine'. These same people will snort derisively if any junior tells them of problems building their project, with a line like 'its not rocket science you know' -- until you confront those mofos with the demand to actually build their own fucking project. At that point you discover that not only did they not document all their dependencies, but they can't even read a simple node error message complaining about how node-sass is not defined, because their project depends on node-sass being globally installed and they didn't realize it themselves.)

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Re:Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself by voltagex_ on Wednesday February 28, 2018 @11:59PM (#16489795)

>your mention of 'CSS' makes me guess this is a web application, in which case you should be able to read the source code and figure out how to build it

pfft. If it's a web app (from 2015-2018) I have even more sympathy for the OP than on any other platform.

Here's an example from last year-ish:

* Get repo from external contractor (let's ignore the 1+ weeks trying to get an install of Git approved)

* Try to get npm working - can't get through our firewall

* Figure out the right chaining proxy to use

* Spend a non-zero amount of time trying to work out all the right bits to flip to turn off ALL SSL verification from npm because interception proxy

* Hit the Windows MAX_PATH limit and have to spend ages trying to delete files that NPM's created (original developer used Linux)

* After npm starts downloading stuff correctly, suddenly it needs a binary dependency (and thus more build tools)

* Give up and check in said binary dependency from elsewhere

* Finally build all the CSS and minified Javascript and check it all into source control with a warning to other devs not to rebuild it unless absolutely necessary

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Re:Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself by darepublic on Thursday March 01, 2018 @08:10AM (#16491610)

Sounds like you're working in a bank or old school corporation.

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Re:Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself by wingerlang on Wednesday February 28, 2018 @10:51PM (#16489544)

> I can't say for sure but your mention of 'CSS' makes me guess this is a web application, in which case you should be able to read the source code and figure out how to build it.

Not necessarily. In my case, we have a web application where it eventually turned out that the variable was read from an environment variable. On a server where I didn't have access.

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