Its nice to be both secure in your job and confident in your work. Changing positions is exhausting, both in the job-hunting process and the re-training process once you land a new gig. Then you’re back at the bottom of the “knows what I’m doing here” totem pole.
One big reason I’m at 6 years and counting in my current gig is the enjoyment I’ve had in building a system and maintaining it consistently. Its nice to know the folks in the business appreciate my work. And if I have to wave another company’s job offer under my boss’s nose from time to time in order to keep my salary competitive, I think that’s more just a disconnect between management and staff I’m obligated to make for them every couple of years. At least they’re receptive and responsive to my demands, which is more than I can say of prior employers.
Sounds like organizational failures all over the place, not the fault of contractors.
You’re not wrong. This falls on the managers heads as much as it falls anywhere.
I’m not blaming contractors for being contractors. A lot of these folks are straight out of college and new to their respective fields. It isn’t there fault that Deloitte or Accenture or whomever spent six weeks teaching them to make power point presentations rather than giving them a proper six month seasoning in proper standard business practices. Even less so when the folks running my own company never bothered to learn how to do things properly themselves and don’t appear to know who to ask.
But the consequences of the practice of hiring a flood of pricey contractors to do implementation and then leaving the maintenance to a bare-bones staff is misery for everyone involved.
So management and current team let in garbage code
Management doesn’t know shit for shit about coding. The current team doesn’t get to vet and approve the code that’s released (as if we’ve got the time given our existing maintenance roles). They only get to handle the final product that’s delivered. That is a central problem with the business model. Trust is invested in contractors that isn’t earned or deserved. Meanwhile, the expectations of functionality are transferred to the skeleton crew staff once they leave.
I don’t think adding another employee to an environment with broken communication and no code reviews will improve anything.
I think you can’t get to an environment of effective communication and consistent code dev/review standards if half your workforce evaporates at the end of the contract period. As it stands, we’ve got managers stacked six roles high while the actual applications have maybe 1-1.5 employees assigned to each. So who knows the systems well enough to review the other guy’s code?
Having a mentor-mentee relationship on each app would be much preferable to a contractor-for-a-year/single-support-specialist-for-a-lifetime situation we’re dealing with now.
I’ve been on both sides of the contracting game. While I certainly have broad skills and a speedy comprehension, I’ve never been on a job site where the guy handling the software for the last 10 years understood it worse than I did after the first six months.
I also can’t help notice the deplorable state of documentation, at least in my corner of the O&G accounting software field. So there are plenty of instances in which a contractor will roll in, throw something patchwork together, dump it on the client, and then leave me to support the rickety piece of crap for the next five years. I get to play Inspector Gadget as I parse through miles of spagetti code, trying to run down why some obscure command has decided to produce a vague error.
Did the contractors know more about some niche javascript package than I did when the project started? Absolutely. Do the contractors care that I’m going to be the one shoring up this antiquated, sloppily implemented code injection until we retire the system? They do not. Would the $300/hr for a year of fussy support been more valuable if applied to a $40-$80/hr on-site tech who stays with the firm for the next five years? Yes.
Insane that a company will pay you a 20% premium to hire someone that they’ll spend 6-months training just to watch said person fly off to another firm.
Contracting is even worse. Bring someone on to do menial piecework at 2x-5x the median company salary, then kick them out so you can bring on another person who has no idea how your company operates to do the same entry-level jobs. All so you don’t have to tell investors how many people are actually on your payroll.
No wonder the business failure rate is so fucking high.
(4) Protestants doing an unholy amalgamation of Catholic spirituality and Rational Scientific Inquiry to reach absurdist conclusions at their intersection.
What if these are primary places where user generated content lives now?
Plenty of high quality user generated content live on Discord, Slack, and other semi-private information exchanges that aren’t as easy to parse and scrape. Places like Reddit and Stack Exchange and DeviantArt are just the prior-gen iteration of hosting for those conversations. But they’re being overwhelmed with bots, marketing teams, special interest mods, and ideologues to the point that they can only deliver a very niche set of content catering to whomever “owns” the space.
You can float in and out of rehab in a drug-fueled haze for a lot less than a billion dollars. The industry is horrifically abusive, particularly to young people. And for every Mary Kate and Ashley, there’s a legion of kids who endure all that abuse for nothing.
I wouldn’t place any degree of trust in my own logical conclusions
Okay, but then why use .jpeg?
The burden of proof should never be on the accuser when it comes to safety
How does the .webp protocol demonstrate itself at least as safe as any other standard format? There’s no established safety standard for image protocols that I’m aware of.
All I’m hearing is that “its not safe” without further details. And given the utility relative to .jpeg, I’d like more on the table than just “Don’t do it! Unsafe!”
it has a ton of vulnerabilities because it’s not a safe file format
Its a high compression image file, ffs. If someone sends you a 10 mb .webp file, that should be setting off alarm bells right off the bat. Even then, I have to ask what the hell your Windows Viewer app thinks it should be allowed to do with the file shy of rendering it into pixels on the screen.
My god, yes. The .webp file format is consistently half the size of .jpeg and improves load times considerably.
Also, just use paint.net like a normal person. Or GIMP. Practically any image editor worth the name will let you save in .webp format and every browser can handle it.