i got that once, except it was my exact question with no response at all, then i noticed it was me that posted the question 4 years earlier.

i used to use stack overflow a lot back in 2007/08 but i cant remember the last time i actually got an answer.

it can barely get single functions correct but we’re supposed to believe it can write entire systems from a single prompt? Either way our job at the moment is writing instructions for another piece of software (compiler) to turn into the code. This just adds another level of abstraction. High level programming languages already let us do more with fewer staff. It didn’t make coders redundant, it let to even more software.

edit: forgot to add, agree with your edit, that or just trying to inflate their stock prices.

Definitely. What I didn’t mention is all that took over a month!

Been there many times. Had one case where support had to through the reseller who sold licenses in our country. Actual people who knew what they were talking about was tier 3.

We had a bug and were trying to report it and get a fix or workaround. Just told no, we’re doing it wrong. After a lot of back and forth we had to pay for an “expert” to fly over and show us what we were doing wrong. Turns out he wasn’t an expert, he was a salesmen. Made a demo for us on the flight and the first time he ran it was in our meeting room on projector.

Failed in exactly the way we had been saying. It was very satisfying.

Finally he phoned the dev team who confirmed the docs were wrong and we couldn’t do what we were trying.

I think another key difference is everyone can use whatever tool they like and still work on the same codebase. They don’t have proprietary file formats that lock in you and your entire team forever.

Yeah, I think they were too niche, my point was that I was able to find answers for everything else before I had to resort to posting a question. One example was I had found a JS bug in Safari and was seeking a workaround. All I got was a couple of comments agreeing and then one a year later saying it was now fixed in the latest version.

I fell for it once, high school friend, seemed like a reasonable idea, I was early in my career and looking for experience. I did learn a lot but ultimately the business failed before it started and I got paid a few 100 for nearly as many hours work.

Totally agree, it’s not just toxic either. I don’t find it useful anymore. My account is from the first 6 months of the site’s existence, opened in early 2009. I still get upvotes on questions I asked back then.

For the past several years though it’s been a last resort for me to post something there, and nothing I’ve posted in the past 5 years even has a single answer on it. They’ve not been closed as duplicates or anything, just no answers.

I go chatgpt now, it’s often wrong with those kinds of questions but usually gets me close enough to fix my issue.

It would quickly get very annoying because one of those essential cookies is remembering that you rejected the rest.

The law doesn’t actually mention cookies at all. Its about tracking users, they need your explicit consent to track you or to share data about you with third parties. Cookies are the primary way of doing this but there are others and they need your consent too.

A client paid us for a bespoke platform for managing invoice payments. Probably 20 man years sunk into it, they wanted to sell it to their customers but no one wanted it. They’ve just given up trying and axed it.

And remember not all currencies are 2dp so get a list and use the appropriate exponent.

I had to update our currency database this week because there’s new currencies. It’s almost as bad as timezones.

Yeah I’ve been dropping not very subtle hints. We’re only a small company, about 25 people. We don’t have any dedicated database admins at all.

It’s on the list I think but we don’t have the people to spare to get it done.

We use SQL Server at work and I really don’t get why. It’s so expensive. We’re hosting it on AWS as well. I can’t remember the numbers but it’s several times more than a similarly specced postgres and we’re only using Standard edition.

I don’t think we’re really using any features that would stop us moving over, it’s really just inertia and in-house knowledge.

Maybe that’s normal in US but it’s way overpriced in UK. They want £75/mo and I’m paying £35 for 500Mb in a rural area and there’s several different providers to choose from. My sister is even more remote than me and they’re getting fibre this week.

I could also get unlimited 4G for about £20.

I don’t know anyone who is using starlink

I’m working on migrating a lot of old .Net Framework code right now, we’re generally going with a complete rewrite but that’s more to do with poor architectural decisions and the fact a lot of it is VB rather than C#.

It’s pretty impressive that code largely written up to 20 years ago is now running on a modern OS, and it’s using the latest Framework 4.8 with all the latest security updates and I can open VS2022 and hit run and it builds and runs fine. Our issues are the maintainability of the code and how it was written rather than the framework itself.

Meanwhile, a few years ago now, I had a web project written in typescript, it was only about a year out of date and npm install failed. Turns out one of dependencies needed to build something with python2, updating that needed a new version of webpack and that broke something else that never got an update to the newer webpack. Installing python2 didn’t work either I think but I can’t remember why.

There’s systems I wrote for .Net over a decade ago that I can guarantee are still running in production and haven’t been touched in all that time.

In short, I think I’m agreeing with you. It’s painful but it’s possible.