Moo 🌸

@Moo

lesbrarian goat gal

she/her
mooeena.site/

Online, I do a little bit of art and a little bit of web design. Offline, I'm a children's librarian!
Art credit: pfp
No kids, no racists, etc.

Feed so it's in the data export

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Moo 🌸@Moo1/12/2023, 11:14 PM

Obspogon @obspogon

Shel @shel1/12/2023, 10:20 PM

I think maybe techies are particularly prone to endless exhausting discourse because they work jobs where if a single person messes up a single semicolon anywhere it breaks absolutely everything that you've all been working on for however long so it's very important to them that everyone do everything correctly lest someone ruin it for everyone. You have to have complete control.

By contrast, librarians have a job that requires doing everything correctly according to a system but we have absolutely no control over the chaos of patrons putting shit in the wrong place endlessly and even when we make everything work they all still borrow James Patterson and David Koontz novels anyway so we just have to sit down and go sure, okay, fine, I mean I put in all this work to create this wonderful browsable collection but sure, fine, James Patterson. And I think that just promotes a kind of radical acceptance about it being okay for other people to be wrong.

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in reply to @shel's post:

frankie boyle's beanbag chair of death @micolithe1/12/2023, 10:27 PM

i have alot of very complicated thoughts after working in Computers for this long but the gist of it is essentially correct, with alot of sub-problems within that make it so there's no good single solution.

Anyway you haven't lived until you've had to attend a postmortem because someone else force completed the job that failed at 3 AM without your team's knowledge and allowed bad data to flow downstream

Natalie @nex31/12/2023, 11:12 PM

For me, the real fear in tech is that it's a massive network of butterfly effects. Writing the wrong semicolon and having things not compile is the smallest instance of "things going wrong because you made one small mistake" I encounter. I made a few small design decisions that were only 90% thought through 15 years ago that I'm still paying for today, because I also have patrons who exist in a state of absolute chaos but if I ever change any decision I made in the past it will ruin their entire year.

I'm tempted to say "tech never forgets", but that's pithier than it is true. It's possible to undo poor decisions in the past, but doing so is expensive and requires a tremendous amount of dedication and pain both for yourself and for everyone who touches what you work on. So doing it as well as possible the first time becomes an imperative, and even more so for people who empathize with users enough not to want them to suffer through those changes.

Nire Bryce @NireBryce1/12/2023, 11:24 PM

plus some of why people talk about things is to try and prevent small but profound mistakes from becoming "common sense" after countless times of it happening in other cases in the last 3 decades (which would be less important were the field not changing so fast that even the university graduates are self teaching on the job continually)

think engineering disasters but people just forgot they happened or never learned instead of it being taught as a lesson

it's just, often spiraled as every party misreads each other, as is also extremely common in tech spaces

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