https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

Nope, 65th place, slightly behind the US and the country of old men: Albania.

It’s the same in China.

Had to work with a fixed string format years ago. Absolute hell.

Something like 200 variables, all encoded in fixed length strings concatenated together. The output was the same.

…and some genius before me used + instead of stringbuilders or anything dignified, so it ran about as good as lt. Dan.

And there are some truly magic tools.

XSDs are far from perfect, but waaay more powerful than json schema.

XSLT has its problems, but completely transforming a document to a completely different structure with just a bit of text is awesome. I had to rewrite a relatively simple XSLT in Java and it was something like 10 times more lines.

And DBAs. I’m currently working on a project where I said from the very start, I can set up this DB in k8s and I can get it to work decently, but I have neither the knowledge nor the time to get it right. Please give me someone who knows how this works.

No, don’t worry, it’ll be fine, we don’t need that, this kuverneles thing I keep hearing about handles that!!!

Six months of hard contact with the enemy on production later:

Well, we’re currently looking for someone who actually knows how DBs work, because we have one of those issues that would cost a proper DBA 5min and me 5 months.

To be fair, a lot of roles simply disappeared over the years.

Developers today are much more productive than 30 years ago, mostly because someone automated the boring parts away.

A modern developer can spin up a simple crud app including infrastructure in a day or so. That’s much much more productive than 1995. We just cram a lot more of the world into software, so we need 20x the amount of developers we needed back then.

It’s really weird, though, that nobody really created a language/tool to bridge these two world. It’s always just generating one representation from the other, mostly in a bad way.

I’d argue, that for many problems, a graphical view of the system can help reasoning. But there simply is nothing in that regard.

One of our customers does that. It happened multiple times already that one dev fixed an issue in production, and the next regular deployment overwrote everything.

But fortunately, it’s just critical infrastructure and nothing important.

Real professionals eat during meetings.

Nuclear power was never a significant power source in Germany and most of the reactors were scheduled to be shut down anyway.

These companies will cry about anything. If they have to pay 5% above minimum wage, they’ll cry about abject worker’s shortage, if they have to pay a minimum wage at all (only introduced in 2015), they’ll cry that this will definitely destroy the entire economy, despite the lowest unemployment in decades following the introduction.

“oh no, I had to do literal rocket science”

Assembly is hard, because you need to understand your problem on multiple levels and get absolute zero guidance by compilers.

Even C guides you a tiny bit and takes away some of the low level details, so you have more mental capacity to actually solve your problem.

Oh, and you have a standard library. Assembly seems to involve solving everything yourself. No simple function call to truncate a string or turn a char array to uppercase.

Think of it as an investment. If you die of AIDS, you can never get high blood pressure, which means you can never buy drugs against high blood pressure!