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Our anonymous submitter, whom we'll call Craig, worked for GlobalCon. GlobalCon relied on an offshore team on the other side of the world for adding/removing users from the system, support calls, ticket tracking, and other client services. One day at work, an urgent escalated ticket from Martin, the offshore support team lead, fell into Craig's queue. Seated before his cubicle workstation, Craig opened the ticket right away:
…the average American, I think, has fewer than three friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it's like 15 friends or something, right?
- Mark Zuckerberg, presumably to one of his three friends
Since even the President of the United States is using ChatGPT to cheat on his homework and make bonkers social media posts these days, we need to have a talk about AI.
Fresh out of university, Remco accepted a job that allowed him to relocate to a different country. While entering the workforce for the first time, he was also adjusting to a new home and culture, which is probably why the red flags didn't look quite so red.
The trouble had actually begun during his interview. While being questioned about his own abilities, Remco learned about Conglomcorp's healthy financial position, backed by a large list of clients. Everything seemed perfect, but Remco had a bad gut feeling he could neither explain nor shake off. Being young and desperate for a job, he ignored his misgivings and accepted the position. He hadn't yet learned how scarily accurate intuition often proves to be.
It's a holiday weekend in the US, which means we dip back into the archives for a classic story. This one remembers the good old days, of greenbar paper and programs that can't handle large numbers because they don't have the memory for it. Original -- Remy
The daisy wheel stabbing at green-lined sheets could have been Satan’s fanfare, but Andy was long accustomed to tuning out ambient printer noise. It was 1982, and he spent most of his time before his Commodore PET 4032, churning out useful things in 6502 Assembly. Most of the code was for printing invoices, much like customer invoice currently printing and making all of that racket.
A sudden cloud formed over his desk. Once Andy clued in to the shadow overhead, he glanced up to find the new regional sales manager, Rick, accordion-folded printout in hand.
As per usual, we're looking back at some of the best articles of the year. This one's so good, we need to quote it twice. Original --Remy
Back in the 90s, Steve was the head (i.e. only) programmer and CEO of a small company. His pride and joy was a software package employed by many large businesses. One day, a client of Steve's named Winston called him concerning a critical, show-stopping bug.
ComCorp went through a rather lengthy process to rebuild its website. One of the many changes implemented was to stop using titles as part of customer names. The lead developer on the project decided that removing the titles from all the places where they appeared was simply too much work.
Alyssa worked in a shop building small runs of custom hardware. Recently, she tackled a project that involved an Arduino talking to an LCD screen. Since several programmers had just left their jobs, she was the last programmer standing and thus on her own for this assignment. One of the engineers who'd worked there before her had really liked a particular brand of programmable displays because they came with software that allowed non-programmers to design serial-driven user interfaces, and had its own onboard processor. That was what Alyssa wound up using for this project.
