IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

TJT said:

One of the junior engineers asked me for help on something. I noticed that he was cloning the repo over and over. I asked him why he isn't just branching.

Dude tells me that he doesn't like "branch clutter." He clones the repo every single time so he only sees one branch and master. We have 7 repos we regularly contribute to on this team so I I imagine this has accumulated a lot. I tell him that this is really not how you are supposed to be using git at all. He just tells me "this works."

Kid graduated computer science in 2022.

I am losing hope here.

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I work with a much older person that does the same thing. Also any time anything goes wrong in his repo he re-clones. He re-clones once or twice a week and has tons of copies of the repo for stuff he wants to keep around. Very stubborn person too.

He was blown away that I haven't recloned in years and I have local/remote branches with everything I need. I mean that's just what git is for ...

I actually did have to reclone recently because my build stopped working and no one could figure out exactly why. I reset hard to remote, deleted some build folders, everything... But it still failed. It failed in a way that there was some stale artifact somewhere in my repo that just wasn't getting cleaned up. Spent a couple days and finally succumbed to a fresh clone which fixed it.

I just can't understand not trying to be as efficient as possible at your job..

Kuro said:

Yeah, I was like "This sounds like something where I never get another job even remotely close to it/audit/security"

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Probably the most "lmaocontractor sayswat" moment i have had was this project that just would not die, eventually leads to virtualization.

finally get administrator rights.

(immediately tap the 3rd party real expert with realvnc)




another time i was at home catching up on work later on a friday and deployed this project to begin working on the finer details (dotting is and crossing t bullshit, stuff i enjoy being high for). I saw the success and was just kind of fucking around cooking dinner and I'm seeing a bunch of green on my workstation. main issue is, this system is not live...so i make the realization the shell I just deployed must have networks routed (I used an older project for the shell, old IP schema) and I freak the fuck out thinking I just made a bunch of IP conflicts. Stop/fix and realize there was never any issue but definitely scared the hell out of me. One of those moments you start to look at your phone waiting for it to ring.


was pretty green to my current job and i was put infront of a big coast to coast system to patch. i had no support at all and my supporting documentation seemed like it went to the ceiling, called in a lifeline phone a friend ticket. the retarded that ended up linking with me was just as impressively blind as i was confident. at some point we stopped because i was consoled into an ESXI server and i could not really explain why.

like i consoled into the ESXI physical server. with a cable. i remember trying to figure what domain i was on and being like /? / ? /help ? /HELP //HELPPPPPPPP. I had to google what OS I was on because the commands did not make sense. Eventually figured it out, but looking back its like giving a toddler a loaded gun.



being a contractor is like getting getting to play carry every game. all the fun, never have to tank or support.

I am so sick of AI driven development. Looking forward to the day I get laid off now.

Every 3 months is ~400K usd.. sigh

Deathwing said:

My boss has continued ramping up usage of AI(Claude Code) on our team. He's rolling out a couple skills that have me a bit concerned about how many tokens I'm going be using daily and my coding skills atrophying.

He developed implementing and reviewing agents that will talk and iterate with each other after you kick them off. There are still things where I tell Claude "wait, what about..." or "no, don't do that". As hands off coding with AI already is, this seems like an extreme amount of hands off. And chugs an obscene amount of tokens. I can do one iteration of plan, implement, test, review. Review is usually the most expensive part by far. By the end of sequence, I'm anywhere from 50% to almost 100% of my 5-hour session's tokens(Pro plan).

Our org recently let AI talk to its github repo, which seems like a security risk. Even if it's a false sense of security, it probably helps new users trust AI, knowing they can undo fuckups from remote. So, now he's implementing a skill that will review and post to MRs for him. He's then hoping you'll point your agent at the posts and they can use the MR as a form of communication.

I understand his motivation, this allows him to be handsoff and focus on other tasks. But, seems a bit much.

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We are doing spec driven development now. You want to talk about skills atrophying....

Well, Owners finally officially announced the Lincoln closure today, office has to be vacated by the 28th. Need to move a dozen workstations an hour from Lincoln to Gretna and make a dead side building habitable. Gretna GM hadn't even been told before this morning.

Will need to merge server racks since we couldn't get the owners to just approve an RDS server and each location has different user set ups and databases.

The Gretna GM had been renting out the parking space for the abandoned side building to adjacent businesses, so he'll have to get that unwound quickly.

Owner wants to have a progress report Friday and everyone involved has basically said fuck you

They aren't actively firing anyone, but half the employees are expected to find a different job or retire since they live an hour+ away.

I've taken a junior dev under my wing and have her using my custom Copilot workflow. The process I built is pull story -> investigate -> plan -> implement, with each step gated by human review. I keep stressing that she needs to actually read and understand what the agent writes (it dumps each phase into markdown files in its own user-story directory).

She’s clearly sharp and already has enough experience to follow what’s going on. She’s knocking out stories and putting a four-year veteran on the team to shame on pure output... someone who, for the record, has shown zero real interest in AI coding.

There’s a definite case that some people just aren’t that good at using these tools. Good as in getting solid results. Still not sure where the disconnect is for them.

ShakyJake said:

I've taken a junior dev under my wing and have her using my custom Copilot workflow. The process I built is pull story -> investigate -> plan -> implement, with each step gated by human review. I keep stressing that she needs to actually read and understand what the agent writes (it dumps each phase into markdown files in its own user-story directory).

She’s clearly sharp and already has enough experience to follow what’s going on. She’s knocking out stories and putting a four-year veteran on the team to shame on pure output... someone who, for the record, has shown zero real interest in AI coding.

There’s a definite case that some people just aren’t that good at using these tools. Good as in getting solid results. Still not sure where the disconnect is for them.

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I'm finding a lot of the older guys either don't use it at all or rely on it 100% with absolutely 0 in between

Koushirou said:

One thing I’m struggling with is since I’m new to the company and the code base still, a lot of the tickets I’m getting are for things I just don’t have any historical context for. If I go into it with just the AI, yeah it basically just quickly solves it for me, but I feel like I’m learning nothing. I can understand the basic premise of what it’s changing or maybe if it’s editing some component that I haven’t learned about (front end is written with Vue which I’ve never used before) I can kind of see what it’s doing, but I’m not figuring out myself how the component works, what the different properties of it do, how it relates elsewhere in the code, etc.

Basically I’m struggling to use it in a way where I can still learn new things and not just have it essentially vibe code for me, which I do not want.

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I have asked our senior director how he envisions us getting and retaining talent in the future. For someone like me it's awesome. But Junior engineers here have no idea what's going on

Koushirou said:

One thing I’m struggling with is since I’m new to the company and the code base still, a lot of the tickets I’m getting are for things I just don’t have any historical context for. If I go into it with just the AI, yeah it basically just quickly solves it for me, but I feel like I’m learning nothing. I can understand the basic premise of what it’s changing or maybe if it’s editing some component that I haven’t learned about (front end is written with Vue which I’ve never used before) I can kind of see what it’s doing, but I’m not figuring out myself how the component works, what the different properties of it do, how it relates elsewhere in the code, etc.

Basically I’m struggling to use it in a way where I can still learn new things and not just have it essentially vibe code for me, which I do not want.

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One thing I've done for the junior dev is add special instructions in the "investigation" workflow component. The agent looks at git commits, pulls story details from ADO, and so on, so it can gather more context on why things were implemented a certain way or why changes happened. The investigation output then doubles as a learning tool. It helps you understand *why* the code is the way it is. I think that's better than just handing someone the code and telling them to figure it out. Honestly, if your software is like ours, it's a tangled mess with years of stuff piled on top of business rules, and a lot of the real context is tribal knowledge, which makes it especially hard.

Kuro said:

Owner wants to have a progress report Friday

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Progress report? No problem!