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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1529 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 24, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I switched from doing Java Spring Boot microservice development at one company to doing the exact same thing at another company.

Well, not the exact same thing.

Old Job:

  • Provided a somewhat innovative software product/platform/service that helped private companies get a good deal on transport logistics.
  • Was an organizational mess that never got its goals straight.
  • Was a somewhat international affair with English as the lingua franca.
  • Did run-of-the-mill agile software development, and had fairly mature and functional processes.
  • I started out in a local team, but transitioned to an international one.
  • I did it all Working From Home, poorly.
  • Paid decently.

New job:

  • Provides an extremely specific financial product/in-house software platform/service that helps private individuals maximize their gains from government subsidies.
  • Is fairly well-organized overall, but is very set in its ways and responds glacially to any problems.
  • Is an extremely localized company, almost provincial in terms of who works here. Obviously German is the only language in use here. Even our code is in German!
  • Does "agile" software development, which should make any software dev laugh out loud but all the people here except me never worked anywhere else and don't know just how ludicrously not agile their practices are. It makes sense, of course - the company isn't in the business of going fast and breaking things; it needs to observe a million regulations and sell financial products that last a lifetime. Fun activities here include doing tons of manual testing, having reviews every step of the way, several layers of quality control and redundancy on everything, and needing manual authorization by this authority or that for things that devs would be expected to handle on their own anywhere else. I keep needing to explain why I want to even write unit tests, and I need to admit that given the slow pace of development and the very thorough manual testing they are not quite as essential here as I thought them elsewhere.
  • I work with a local team, and it's great because I actually get to know the people and we speak in dialect. Absolutely excellent.
  • I work in the office, which is also great because I actually get things done. At least as long as I keep my phone switched off so I can't receive messages from home.
  • I get paid somewhat generously. I also suspect that my experience and abilities were grossly overestimated in the hiring process (I deny responsibility here; I'm very certain I did not oversell myself), but it seems both sides are willing to make it work anyways.

Overall I'm happy with the change. I still ask myself sometimes whether I should've maybe taken a more technologically interesting job, but eh, everything else about it is pretty decent.

> Even our code is in German!

> Java Spring Boot

Must lead to some long class names...

Ex: AbstractAutomatischeKonfigurationsStrategieProxyFactoryBeanImplementierungDelegate

Hah! Yes it does, except for names that need to match those of our COBOL systems, which have something like a 32 character limit.

So we end up with names like AAutoKonfigStratPFacBImplDel.

Uncle Bob wouldn't survive a day here.

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