“We’re a dynamic, multi-paradigm organization, and we do most of our new development in a blend of Ruby and Go. We’re not the kind of company that is dogmatic about tools though, we just want to deliver the best product for our customers.”

That’s what Delphia was told in the interview. She didn’t quite grasp why they were mixing those two techs in the first place, but the interview went well, and she took the job. It was then that she discovered that everything she’d been told was technically true.

Rita caught a weird bug. It was weird, in part, because there hadn’t been any code changes in their label printing application for ages. Yet, there was a sudden new bug. Labels were printing with what was obviously unicode garbage. Interestingly, the application definitely supported unicode- there had been a huge effort a few years back to move the C++ code from chars to wchars.

Rita started debugging, and confirmed that when the label text was populated, memory stored correct values. By the time the data was printed, it no longer did. Obviously, there was something wrong with memory management- something was touching the end of the string and throwing off the output. That was an easy enough bug to make in C++, but tracing through 7,000 lines of label printing code to figure out where things got thrown off was more of a chore, especially with the… “friendly” variable naming convention the original developer had used.

Printer jams are an unavoidable circumstance. Paper might not seem sticky, but static electricity and humidity can to horrible things, and all the protections in the world can't stop them. Printers are also objectively terrible, and always have been.

Years ago, when Coyne T was a fresh-faced youth, he supported an aging COBOL-based warehouse system. Their reports went to a noisy continuous feed line printer. The printer was a finicky beast, and no matter what sacrifices were made before printing, it had a tendency to devour pages, or have the gears slip and misprint lines. Because the report data came straight from a COBOL job, there was no cached output to reprint- the entire reporting process would need to be re-run every time the printer got angry.

“So, we have a problem. A… a big one.”

Andrea C worked for an insurance company. In terms of software development, a “problem” meant she’d misfiled one of her TPS coversheets or something like that. A big problem meant she’d accidentally checked in code that contained a comment with some profanity in it.

Carl works in research, and like most research organizations, half their code is carelessly glued together GUI tools, command line interfaces, and shell scripts. The other half, the half which does the real work, is Fortran. Sure, the code was written forty years ago, but the laws of physics haven’t changed, so it’s still good and it’s still fast.

Carl usually doesn’t have to touch the Fortran half. Instead, he usually looks at the other bit. Most things are run from shell scripts, and most of the work of the shell scripts is getting environment variables configured so that they Fotran code can actually run its model without having a heart attack.