Im my defense, I did test it. It was working for me.
But then someone else touched it without understanding it or flipped the truth value returned by one of the functions used by my code without properly fixing the call sites.
Edit: or they had a merge conflict and they don’t know how to correctly resolve those.
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Until you write a compiler error in some deeply templated C++ code, in which case just reading every word takes all day
/s but not too much
As a dev, I had to fix an O( n! ) algorithm once because the outsourced developer that wrote it had no clue about anything. This algorithm was making database queries. To an on-device database, granted, so no network requests, but jesus christ man. I questioned the sanity of the world that time, and haven’t stopped since.
Thank you for the explanation, now I understand the context on the original message. It’s definitely an entirely different environment, especially the kind of software that runs on a bunch of servers.
I have built business programs before being a game dev, still the kinds that runs on device rather than on a server. Even then, I always strived to write the most correct and performant code. Of course, I still wrote bugs like that time that a release broke the app for a subset of users because one of the database migrations didn’t apply to some real-world use case. Unfortunately, that one was due to us not having access to real world databases pr good enough surrogates due to customer policy (we were writing an unification software of sorts, up until this project every customer could give different meanings to each database column as they were just freeform text fields. Some customers even changed the schema). The migrations ran perfectly on each one of the test databases that we did have access to, but even then I did the obvious: roll the release back, add another test database that replicated the failing real world use case, fixed the failing migrations, and re released.
So yeah, from your post it sounds that either the company is bad at hiring, bad at teaching new hires, or simply has the culture of “lol who cares someone else will fix it”. You should probably talk to management. It probably won’t do anything in the majority of cases, but it’s the only way change can actually happen.
Try to schedule one on one session with your manager every 2 to 3 weeks to assess which systematic errors in the company are causing issues. 30 minutes sessions, just to make them aware of which parts of the company need fixing.
Sorry, this comment is causing me mental whiplash so I am either ignorant, am subject to non-standard circumstances, or both.
My personal experience is that developers (the decent ones at least) know hardware better than IT people. But maybe we mean different things by “hardware”?
You see, I work as a game dev so a good chunk of the technical part of my job is thinking about things like memory layout, cache locality, memory access patterns, branch predictor behavior, cache lines, false sharing, and so on and so forth. I know very little about hardware, and yet all of the above are things I need to keep in mind and consider and know to at least some usable extent to do my job.
While IT are mostly concerned on how to keep the idiots from shooting the company in the foot, by having to roll out software that allows them to diagnose, reset, install or uninstall things on, etc, to entire fleets of computers at once. It also just so happens that this software is often buggy and uses 99% of your cpu taking it for spin loops (they had to roll that back of course) or the antivirus rules don’t apply on your system for whatever reason causing the antivirus to scan all the object files generated by the compiler even if they are generated in a whitelisted directory, causing a rebuild to take an hour rather than 10 minutes.
They are also the ones that force me to change my (already unique and internal) password every few months for “security”.
So yeah, when you say that developers often have no idea how the hardware works, the chief questions that come to mind are
Meh. Been developing professionally with C++ for 10 years at this point. I’m one of the weird people that kinda likes C++ and its pragmatism despite all its warts.
I’d like C++ better if it didn’t have inheritance. There are better solutions to model interfaces, and without inheritance people can’t write class hierarchies that are 10 levels deep with a different set of virtual functions overridden (and new virtual functions added) at each level.
And yes, that is not hypothetical. Real codebases in the real world shipping working products do that, and it’s about as nice as you can imagine.
You do have a terminology mismatch. In C++, an abstract class is a class with at least one pure virtual method.
Such classes cannot be instantiated, so they are useful only as base classes.
An interface is more of a concept than a thing.
Sure you can say that Iterable is an interface that provides the Next() and Prev() methods and you can say that Array is an Iterable because it inherits from Iterable (and then you override those methods to do the correct thing), and that’s one way to implement an interface in C++.
But you can also say that Iterable<T> is a class template that provides a Next() and Prev() methods that call the methods of the same name on the type that they wrap (CRTP aka static polymorphism).
Or you can say that an algorithm that scans a collection T forward requires the collection to have a Next() method by calling Next() on it.
And I can think of at least 2 other ways to define an interface that isn’t using abstract classes.
And even if using abstract classes, inheriting from them is definitely the least flexible way to use them to define an interface, because it doesn’t allow one to do something like mocking functionality in tests, because it’s not possible to redefine the class to be tested to inherit from the test interface implementation with mocked functionality, so one still needs something to the effect of dependency injection anyway.
So yeah, abstract class is very different from inheritance, and it’s also very different from interface, even though it relates to both.
Regarding that part of the second edit: a very wise colleague of mine with managerial duties once told me that he expects people to give 50 to 70% every day. First, it’s unsustainable to give 100% all the time, and burnout has far worse direct and indirect consequences than simply scaling the operation up to allow more slack time. Second, when shit actually hits the fan and you need all hands on deck, there’s no more that can be given if you were already giving it 100%
Huh