I've been an actual janitor and a sysadmin... they're not dissimilar. You clean up other people's shit for a living.

You're probably not the biggest asshole in the room. In my experience, the person making decisions (and the most money) is never the most qualified, most competent, most efficient, or hardest working individual. They are just the biggest asshole in the room. They're willing to be loud and belligerently wrong, they're willing to take credit for the accomplishments of others, they're willing to shift blame onto someone else, they're willing to demand everyone else work harder than they do, and they're willing to demand far more than their fair share of the profit.

And they will be mollified by the rest because nobody is a bigger asshole. Most people just want to do their jobs, and don't want to rock the boat. Competent people see opportunity to ride in the wake of the biggest asshole in the room.

If you ever watch Shark Tank, you'll see they are masters of the craft.

You know what they do to old engineers don't you?

EDIT : https://youtu.be/fN-VAdAnoZ4?t=31

" you know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? they take them out and shoot them"

They do the same thing building architects do. They draw pretty pictures of the end product that may of may not be structurally sound, then rely on engineers to build it and make sure it doesn't collapse.

Wait, did you find out? Can you tell us?

I always saw architects roles in modern development being the person trying to find synergies between different teams andcoordinateing them working with each other.

Like if some team makes a sick project for managing streams of data streams the architect should be promoting it for other teams to leverage.

A good software engineer is also an architect. You don't need dedicated architects if you have good developers.

But on the other hand there are much more questionable and unnecessary jobs like product managers or managers of managers.

I tried to get a software architect to explain their job to me once, it was like a "lean startup", a libertarian, and a psychic had written an elevator pitch together.

The good ones: design and adjust software development processes, standards for cross-project functionality and reusability and in general try and improve at a high level the process of making, maintaining and improving software in a company.

The bad ones: junior/mid-level software design with a thick layer of bullshit on top to spin it as advanced stuff.

If you want to see bad software architecture, just look at most of Google's frameworks and libraries.

It's not as easy as it sounds, sometimes the screens are all wrong!! https://xkcd.com/722/

What did she think before?

But when your brain is fascinated by all that has to happen for those screens and meetings to happen, it can still be an interesting job.

Or contribute to society at all really

Half the time it's trying to figure out where to apply the next piece of duct tape to keep the entire house of cards (and duct tape) from collapsing.

In times past they got shit done, and now we see that what they've done is shit and we're stuck maintaining it.

Yup. Thats just enterprise software for you. Something was made requiremnts changed, and then changed again and then ypu have duct tape on top of a duct tape with a duct tape holding those duct tapes and a touch of super glu here and there. Also ducttapes are microscopic in size but the sheer quantity of them is unimaginable.

I draw the line at CSV ingestion.

No its microsofts database GUI program that's part of Microsoft Office . imagine software made for users who have a vague understanding of SQL and visual basic but then an exec. forced the designers and devs to make it accessible to everyone while giving them barely any teamembers causing a fuckton of technical debt and unintuitive quirks , making anyone who opens the software feel like they have just been placed in a highly equipped tank , in front of a wall of unlabeled levers and told to drive the tank , or at least that's how I view it.

(reposting from another account sorry if you see both comments)

No its another program, I've seen people make weird stuff with it like ticketing systems and notes apps. I've never seen it be a robust program though

No Microsoft Access is/was a GUI software actually meant to have databases instead of how everyone uses Excel/spreadsheets as databases. It is a part of the office suite. It works pretty much like traditional databases but has an easier to access GUI for non programmers I guess. I don't think it's used a ton nowadays except for legacy processes that haven't been updated.

It’s the actual database app by Microsoft

I assume it hasn’t existed for a number of years

We use it at work for it's actual intended purpose: as a small database that isn't customer facing. It's used and maintained by nontechnical staff to keep data about equipment (slot machines).

It would be too much info for excel, but it's not enough to really need anything more.

No, that's several abstraction layers down ... there's libraries for that.

No, just base-256 numbers that for some reason people call "binary"

I prefer my databases in Excel. /s

Explosion?

Explode

I disagree, if you aren't capable of contributing to a library you should be required to use it rather than roll your own solution.

Where'd you buy this brand of bait?

If you just knew how many libraries we use...