I once ran afoul of our UX guy for suggesting that we run our design past a focus group before implementing it. Dude literally said “users don’t know what they want”.

I had a job like that back in the day (circa 2000). I remember one stretch where for a solid month around 50 developers did nothing but call in to Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? to try to become a contestant. Ironically, one web app I wrote for them (with Visual Basic and “Classic” ASP) is still in use today – and it was a front end for a mainframe system that dated to the 1980s, which means that’s still up and running as well.

Yes: Features no original members.

This is technically true, but Yes does still have Steve Howe who was the guitarist on their first hit album (“The Yes Album” in 1971).

Yes for a couple of decades was like the anti-Ship of Theseus. They would go on tour with everybody who had ever been in the band at any point. They even had Peter Banks (guitarist on their first two largely unknown albums) and The Buggles with them.

Actually kind of a cool concept as their studio albums used a lot of overdubbing which was impossible for single musicians on stage to reproduce. Having 17 guitarists means you can do it all.

It would also be nice if it weren’t going to be used for the killer robots. When it very obviously is going to be used for the killer robots.

The Dune books had the “Butlerian jihad” where humanity banned all thinking machines. As a kid I was like “who would ever ban cool shit like that?” Now I’m all “where the fuck is this Butler dude?”

The shared open office thing is pretty much why I quit the profession. I don’t know what’s wrong with most people, but I need peace and fucking quiet in order to code effectively.

I used to work at the Comcast Center in Philly and I randomly ended up working on one of the higher floors where about three-quarters of all the offices were empty. I spent my days alone in a huge corner office that had a perfect view of a battleship. Somehow during this run Comcast was building a second office tower two blocks away because the Comcast Center was supposedly stuffed to the gills. The reality was that it was stuffed to the gills with Indian contractors down on the lower floors and the corporate leadership wanted them out.

At my first job as a programmer I had a full old-fashioned desk. Unfortunately it was in the server room which was kept at 58°F. The servers didn’t actually need to be at that temperature any more and I sure as fuck didn’t need to be at that temperature since I was writing desktop apps, but that was how that company had been doing things for literally decades. I had to wear a hat and motherfucking Oliver Twist fingerless gloves all day.

Well, I surprised myself by making it through the first video, at least. It was interesting to hear the guy ripping on the “hide the menus” concept as hard as I’ve always done. That shit drove me berserk when it came out.

You didn’t even mention the ribbon lol.

100% Ballmer is yakked out on coke.

I started working as a professional programmer in the mid-90s when three-tiered design was all the rage: a data access layer, a business logic layer, and a presentation layer. It seems that nobody actually knew what “business logic” was even supposed to be, because I kept inheriting projects where all the middle tier did was hand data objects from the data layer to the UI. In theory this prevented the UI from being fundamentally bound to the data access, but all three layers were always written in Visual Basic which got kicked to the curb in a few years anyway.

I wonder if my old app circa 2000 would actually run on Linux/Wine. One of my projects for this winter is to install Linux on one of my Windows laptops. I’ll have to give the old app a try.

It was originally written as a C DLL utilized by a Visual Basic front end. The C DLL used the Win95 API, though, so it wouldn’t have worked on anything but Windows 95 and onwards. I subsequently ported the entire thing to C# but still using the same API to do the actual playing of the audio (I experimented with using DirectSound instead but that was really not appropriate for an application doing its own audio mixing). Now I’m working on an iOS version and I couldn’t give two fucks about Windows at this point.

As a programmer, it’s pretty wild how much of Windows under the hood has remained completely unchanged. I started writing software synthesizer applications back in the late '90s, using a part of the Win95 API called “winOutX”. The functions are kind of clunky to use but they allow you to programmatically create your own audio buffer arrays filled with whatever sounds you’re up to creating and dump them into the playback stream for seamless audio. This shit has remained in place, working pretty much perfectly, for the last 30 years. It was even there in WinCE/Windows Mobile, which allowed me to write software synthesis applications for early smartphones circa 2005. And it’s still all there today.

I like to rip on MS as much as the next guy (not least for them completely dropping the fucking ball as far as smartphones were concerned), but sometimes their incredibly long-term conservatism can work to your benefit.

Escort carriers?

their company has refused to read or implement one or several of the fundamental principles

The companies I worked for just kept doing shit the same way they always had but renamed everything with terms borrowed from agile.

My favorite approach to team processes was to work entirely alone and do everything by myself.

At my last job I had to endure 2-hour daily standups involving 120 people. Yes, I know that that’s as far from actual agile as you can possibly get – we still called it “agile”.