Re:Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every...
by ryandrake on Friday February 08, 2019 @03:34PM
(#19118376)
It can be demoralizing to work on anything that’s against the end user’s satisfaction, regardless of whether it’s actually evil.
I remember working as a junior developer on a desktop app that had so many fatal bugs that it crashed very often. Instead of being given the time needed to fix the crashes, I was told to build this watchdog ‘launcher’ EXE that would simply re-run the application every time it crashed, restoring its state, in the hopes of fooling the user into believing it doesn’t crash so much.
Was it technically interesting for a freshly minted engineer? Yea! Was it soul crushing to be working on an obviously half-assed attempt to mollify angry users instead of making them happy? Yes.
I was also asked to write code that cheated benchmarks. Definitely had a “what-am-I-doing-with-my-life” moment.
I remember working as a junior developer on a desktop app that had so many fatal bugs that it crashed very often. Instead of being given the time needed to fix the crashes, I was told to build this watchdog ‘launcher’ EXE that would simply re-run the application every time it crashed, restoring its state, in the hopes of fooling the user into believing it doesn’t crash so much.
Was it technically interesting for a freshly minted engineer? Yea! Was it soul crushing to be working on an obviously half-assed attempt to mollify angry users instead of making them happy? Yes.
I was also asked to write code that cheated benchmarks. Definitely had a “what-am-I-doing-with-my-life” moment.