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by bmitc 1079 days ago
I highly doubt that a mining operation finds it acceptable that tools that they have purchased show up broken, undocumented, and unsupported.
3 comments

Your job as a developer is to write code and piece code together to make your life easier. That includes taking the work that others have done and make it work to suit your code base.

On a mine site, the job is to mine and process minerals. That includes engineering a mine using products that eventually fail over time and need fixing. As part of that process an automotive electrician may need to fix the electronics on a vehicle that have become faulty or damaged.

Mechanics and engineers need to inspect, rebuild, and fix the tools they are given to do their job. The difference is that yours may not work up front, whereas these tools need maintenance over time.

When I was doing enterprise work with closed-source libraries, any defect required them fixing it. We've found some issues with AWS and they fixed it too.

The difference between most professions and programming is that we have open source. The equivalent of that in the real world is getting blueprints to build our tools and then building them ourselves, with no guarantees.

You'd be surprised how common it is.
I've worked in many industries, and none of them put up with the poor state of tools and treat it as a given like the software industry does.
Hmm again I think mining are pretty good at making do with the poor tools they have

Very different situation

I've also found that the software industry obsesses over tools more than any other industry