Bull. Bald faced lies.
As in "Bull in a china shop", not ball. And yes, "BALD" faced lies, not bold. Common mistakes. At least you didn't talk about military units going rouge.
Welcome aboard, you're more than welcome here. I edited out the names as it's bad enough to air dirty laundry without divulging details that, well... I'm not even legally able to discuss.
You work for a federal agency, you might want to show some agency in deciding what you should and should not say. YES I realize said agency isn't the typical alphabet soup, but it's still the fed. Be careful what you say. ESPECIALLY NOW!
Thing is he's the sixth person I've gotten fired in five years. It's becoming a more and more frequent occurrence as these framework fanboys -- most of whom couldn't code a single line of HTML properly without the crutches -- dig in their heels with the lies and lame excuses.
We were in trouble and we didn't even know it with the lawsuit most of us hadn't heard about until you were involved.
Technically it's not a lawsuit YET. The AG office contacted your director about the possibility of a suit, and to remind him of the changes to act III. This isn't uncommon even non-government cases as the benefit of a doubt is oft given by prosecutors. The problem is that was six months ago, and it wasn't until a civil suit was threatened (still not filed) that a fire was lit under your agency's backside.
As a boss
Entirely the correct word, he was a boss, not a leader. He didn't give you folks any guidance, he just said "do it this way" even when he wasn't qualified to determine how things should be done. In speaking privately with a number of you there was a general gist that if you guys tried to do something better or different from what he "demanded" you felt at risk of getting sacked.
He also seemed to have not bothered teaching any of you anything, which is why most of you couldn't even explain the most rudimentary functioning of the software you had in place. This even includes your little in-house crapplets that ANY one of you could do a better job of recreating solo without his interference. I have in fact told your director exactly that.
He created an "ecosystem" where to do anything, you had to try, fail, and then have him do it. This gave him job security and left him holding all the keys. When he "finally" did anything or "cleaned up" after you at no point did he take the time to tell you where you went wrong, why it was wrong, or why he was doing things the way he was. That's not leadership.
This is why his to-do list was sky high and why requests from above for changes and improvements went largely ignored. If it were not for the threat of legal action, he would still be driving everything into the ground.
And over the past three weeks I gave him EVERY chance to turn it around. I know I come in barking orders, but that's because you guys were in trouble, and you needed to fix it fast. I'm not there to say please, I'm there because there's a list of problems that need fixing ASAP. Problems he parroted the same lame excuses I hear at every one of these contract sites, refused to accept responsibility, spewed up the same propaganda faced lies I hear every flipping day, and then flat out refused to do any of the work or to even "allow" the required changes to take place.
I hate getting people fired, but he had it coming in spades.
Getting <snip> fired is probably the best thing to happen for any of us at the office. He was making us as you said "create a class for every line of code" and insisting on react.
That is because -- like every one of these poseurs who fail upwards into middle-management -- he is utterly unqualified to work in the underlying vanilla languages. Like most every other framework fanboy he swallowed the propaganda hook, line, sinker, and a bit of the rod. At no point did he ask "how" because in all likelihood when he learned React, he didn't know enough about HTML, CSS, or JavaScript to no any better. That's not really his fault, but deprogramming him of this nonsense is above my pay grade, particularly when yesterday was our flipping deadline!
I couldn't beleive the hissy he threw in tuesdays zoom about how we were all worthless without him and his guidance. That in front of the director he actually said we should just pay whatever fine the court levies and how the disabled person complaining was... well, less than human? You acted like you knew he was going to say that too.
Not my first rodeo. I've dealt with his type in at least half the contracts I've done the past decade. He pulled the same stunt my first day, spewing the same nonsensical rhetoric about how "without React nobody would ever be able to replace me" and then when I called him on that saying if he didn't change his attitude he was out, he said "They can't afford to replace me, I'm the only one who knows how anything works".
Which is it? Do these frameworks ease collaboration and make it so others can work with it, or does it create a system by which HE can't be replaced? I mean if React was making it so "great" for others to come in and work on it, and so "easy" to keep updated, why was it so hard to change or fix anything, why were people like YOU being left out in the cold at doing your job, and why did EVERYTHING have to revolve around him to the point of being "irreplaceable"?!?
This idiotic notion that working with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript directly will result in "code that nobody else can understand" says more about the person making said statement, than the "quality" of these frameworks. Again it all stems from those so deluded not knowing enough about those languages to even form an informed rational opinion on the topic.
And it's an attitude that I'll probably see at the next job, and the next. I see it on forums ALL the flipping time. Typically in combination with someone complaining that by pointing out what nonsense these asshats are spewing, I'm being "too confrontational". Wah wah, somebody used teh harsh words, nots thatz!!!
Shocked at how simple and small the code you have us using is. We had a full stack of react, react-ui, nextJS, and you threw it all away. I thought it would be months before the new site was ready and you had us there in just two weeks. That is a third the time it took for us to build the original.
By the time I got into working with you and your co-workers upper management had pissed away the bettter part of six months. We only had two weeks to get it done! If we used those frameworks we would still be working at it!
You basically only had a six page website, despite the thousands of separate indexed pages. 90% of that content was static, and that's why after a week of my re-teaching you guys basic HTML and CSS, we were able to have most of the existing site converted in just three days. All that left was the dynamic maps, and since it was all just line-draws from USGS mapping data it didn't even take 8k of JS canvas and ajax code to implement that. What's easier? 8k of vanilla code, or 300k+ of endless pointless objects and classes for nothing that relied on a 500k library to function?
It's the lie about these off the shelf answers. Even if they were simpler to learn (they usually are not) they are more work to implement and harder to maintain. Anyone new coming into that office would take weeks or even months to have been brought up to speed. You yourself said -- once you opened up -- that you were struggling to understand all of it.
Now there's a fraction as much for you to need to understand. And it's not just the client-side savings. In two weeks flat -- half that spent with me teaching you folks to re-think your ink -- we took a 290 megabyte back end spread out over 483 separate files, and replaced it with 583k of code in 28 files. Which is going to be easier for the next poor sods to come along to deal with? Which is going to be easier to maintain?
Don't even get me started about the custom low level C code we pulled that replicated at the system level with no protections what PHP functions do out of box, or how you folks were using that derpy "ourMySQL" wrapper to make mysqli pretend to be the old mysql_ functions. Security? What's that?!?
Just more proof that my home wireless has more security than most Federal Agencies.My question is how did I not learn this in school, in my apprenticeship, or my previous job. I have been working in web for six years and never once come across these "separations" you have taught us
That's because most books on the topic are a decade and a half out of date -- even when they're brand new this year. It's because most people TEACHING this stuff still have their head wedged up 1997's backside. It's because all these systems CLAIM to magically be somehow "easier" despite being more to learn, making you write as much if not more code, and resulting in larger more complex codebases.
But the power of propaganda and the mob mentality, never underestimate it. People will continue to use these bloated train wreck laundry-lists of how NOT to build websites
It's actually why I dislike the term "semantic markup". I hate euphemisms... and that's all it is, a sick euphemism for "using HTML properly" designed to not offend the people who have their craniums permanently wedged up 1997's rectum. Maybe if we called it "using HTML properly" less people would get suckered into thinking that react, vue, bootstrap, tailwind, and all those other tripe is worth using.
No... that wouldn't work. That would involve comprehension and understanding.
