"And I added: 'This is your design. The system you want is inside the black box,' hoping this shitty answer would have him leave me alone. But I was surprised to hear back:
'That is exactly the way I wanted it!'
And that is how I made the acquaintance of the little printf."
I feel like I've met the archetypes of people who reply to my Stack Overflow threads. Overall, though, this is a beautiful story. Thank you for posting it :) Favorite quote:"The games people play, the roles and reputations they chase and entertain, the fleeting pleasure they derive from solving intricate problems, is all fun for a while. Ultimately though, if you do not solve anything worthwhile, if you forget about the people involved, it's never gonna be truly fulfilling. And that may be fine, and it might not be, and you may or may not get that from somewhere else than your workplace when you grow up. Work can be work; it can be for the money, it can be for the fun of it. That's okay. As long as you manage to get that fulfillment somewhere in your life."
Quite charming. I've always liked The Little Prince, and I think this was a well done take on it. I won't pretend to have met or been any of the people portrayed in the story, though. Maybe because the type of programming I do is so different, or due to my rather limited (two year) experience? I'm in embedded software, so I've pretty much only written C professionally. I've never done any "Software Engineer" stuff, using all the latest technologies, or databases or web, or anything like that. I feel like most of the people I've worked with were helpful and communicative. The nature of embedded software (at least that I've seen so far) is that a lot of what we used had been written by someone working at the company. There wasn't a lot of new fangled (and by extension poorly understood) software that we relied on. To be honest, I might be wrong, I'm still quite fresh.
My role right now is pretty much front-end developer for the more difficult projects at my agency- I provide a lot of solutions in projects without knowing what I'd do if something were to go wrong. I've expressed all of these archtypes in some way or another, but I feel mostly like a mix of the woman in chapter 8 and the guy in chapter 6, where all of our websites are shit and I spend all of my time pulling small miracles out of my ass. The nature of my work definitely dictates this role, though- our company is young, and I have no one above or before me to look for help.