Oh I tell them, they just say "That's not my reality". Twats.

But, but... what colour should it be?

I've worked at places where you just want to scream at the ineptitude of the seniors. They ask how long it will take to code. You tell them 3 months. They say do it in 2. You try and cut all sorts of corners, some dangerous, no room left for contingency then suddenly at week 6 you get told it's now 7 weeks not 8. Code goes to test and not surprisingly, it's crap. They then go nuts over code quality and say you must do better next time and faster again too. Dear seniors. The reason the code is crap is because it was rushed because you wouldn't accept reality or lacked the balls to tell your boss that reality was different to what they wanted it to be.

Exactly. What is supposed to happen is the business describe a need. A Business Analyst spends some time with them (weeks if needed) discussing it, teasing out what they really want (business people are very good at putting forward a solution disguised as a requirement and often, it's the wrong solution) and liasing with techies to see what can be done. That's your business requirements and rules. The architect then maps that to the systems available and decides at a high level how it all hangs together. Then designers work out the finer detail (often referring back to the business guys) and pass that on to devs.

What I struggle with is translating badly worded/badly thought through/incomplete business requirements into program logic. All too often something which seems straight forward to a business person is a can of worms when it comes to implementing it.

GNU Mailman, likely the most popular mailing list manager in use today

Evidence?

That when someone dies who was key to one of the greatest achievements of man to date, all we can muster is a bunch of snide comments and jokes. Oh, the Facebook generation...

SpaceX Lands Launches Load to ISS

WTF?

It was a very old and very complex system that was midway through having its replacement built. The system was not something you could easily add resource too. Yes, it was a disaster waiting to happen (although it had DR) but as is often the case, trying to persuade the suits that they needed to spend millions on a system so that they'd get a new one that did the same thing, isn't very easy.

Heck, we have a CR process for anything that touches a live server. I even had to go through the process to get details of a file as it would have resulted in an unexpected file write. By way of background, the server used to fill up during the day's processing and empty out overnight. It got very tight sometimes and when someone made a copy of a file without checking the size, it filled the filesystem and the server fell over. That particular outage cost several million given what the server did.

But here at least, the amount of people who are either self employed, do free lance on the side, or have some kind of investments, is a pretty damn large portion

But at least with the UK system, the bulk of your tax is already covered. I used to submit a self-assessment return online here as I bought/sold shares and had a second job writing magazine articles. I just had o add the details plus expenses I was claiming to offset these, online and the system works out what you have to pay (and takes into account your existing tax from your primary job). You then have a choice to pay it in a lump sum or change your tax code so you pay it off each month (there must be limits to this, not sure, never used this option). The online system is great, loads of information, a clear step by step process and it does all the calculations for you. You can do it bit by bit and it remembers all your details to date. When you finally submit it you get a downloadable PDF that looks just like the paper version but nicely filled in.

And before tools existed to automate it, cut/pasting the various alt.binaries files (1/6, 2/6 etc) together prior to feeding it to your uudecoder.

This situation is far from uncommon. I work in a big UK bank and until very recently we were paying MS for NT4 support because it was a hell of a lot cheaper than migrating the NT4 based systems. We had maybe 100 systems, each of which was coming up with estimates of £1-2m each to move to a modern platform. MS wanted 3.5m to support NT4 for another year. No brainer. Then MS got fed up with that and said next year it will be 7 and the year after that 14 etc which focused people's attention.We did eventually get everything off NT4 but it was a lot of pain. The system I work on ended up costing £4-5m on it's own, no idea on the others.

Yeah, right. They never go bad. Archival grade ones kept in the dark, maybe. Most just give up after a few years.

If you disagree with this, at least say why. Don't just mod it down. I'd welcome others perspectives on this point.