The person that installed should have thought more carefully about it. But the person that printed it and sold it should face some legal repercussions. Totally irresponsible what they did.
This is super common in affluent school districts. Bulldozer parents with lots of time and resources eventually get their kid some diagnosis that confers benefits in their schooling. Be it additional time on assignments, one on one tutoring, or whatever. They carry these diagnoses, habits, and expectations to college.
To be clear I am not making light of or dismissing legitimate issues. Simply pointing out that there are some that take advantage of the systems that exist.
You actually are starting to see this in the corporate world. People with a laundry list of diagnoses and other statuses that make them very tricky to let go for performance reasons.
Or work with a random programmer at a random company for a bit. We had to do some audit/estimate for a company with huge tech issues (race conditions causing data corruption, huge slowdowns with just small usage spikes etc) costing them clients/money. The company runs around $50m/year or so selling software to enterprises. Anyway; software backend written with Java/Spring, deployed/updated on EC2 manually, no automated tests (zilch). Frontends with Vaadin. Almost no processes are used, just Jira + tasks and then 'start at the top every morning'. No one knows sql anymore (Hibernate), no one knows html/js (Vaadin) and, even though most people are senior and there since the beginning, no-one has done anything high level on the job in the past 20 years or so. They have just been inside this 'ecosystem' writing code and it works. Old Java with some modern updates just to satisfy the compiler/linter (but not fully understanding why that nonsense is needed). None of the core seniors I interviewed touches computers outside of work, they had 0 tech courses since working there etc. They are all 9-5 code producing robots. I want to bet they can mostly/all be replaced today by Claude Code, of which existence, of course, they are not aware (they did chatgpt but not Codex or Copilot). We have since found so many issues in the code. Yeah, I do feel very much uplifted about my own skills after encounters like this, and these are by no means rare, i would rather say; extremely common.
Unlike OP though, I cannot be as open about these companies as we would definitely not have any clients left after.
That sounds amazing, what you can get away with while still shipping a product and getting paid. In some way probably the engineers there are unwilling to do any automation in fear of becoming redundant, and the company is still fine with that.
Also, I am not sure how not touching computers after work is a bad thing; people can have families and other hobbies?
> computers after work is a bad thing; people can have families and other hobbies?
No not bad per se, but it did clearly show that, without on the job courses, why all of them are stuck in the early 2000s tech wise.
Some people start with a company and get lucky with early success and then get restricted because of that success: get new clients via existing, everyone likes it and asks for new features and without noticing it you might find yourself 15 years down the road with ancient tech and no one understanding anything current. Then you can still thrive if your clients like it... we have similar clients: a 1980s factory, another 1980s factory, a logistics app from the 1990s etc. Things deeply ingrained in some vertical, expensive but better priced than the SAPs etc of this world so it keeps going and going.
It is only briefly touched on in the article but most of the “best” engineers spend almost no time coding or engineering. I’ve worked at multiple Fortune 500 companies and many weeks I would be lucky to spend 4-8 hours coding. Often I would just work on things that interest me after hours or on the weekend since it would be unlikely to be bothered. Unless some other unfortunate soul happens to see you are online.
Point number two seems dubious at best. At least 50% of all offspring would need to be as fit or more fit than the parents to have any hope for the continuation of a species. And it’s probably a much higher percentage than that due to mortality before procreation.
A great tool for digging into obscure jar and class files. I used it many times to track down very obscure bugs in Java based products. Often you will have a vendor saying that your issue is not real or not reproducible on their end. But with this kind of tool you can peek behind the curtains and figure out how to trigger some condition 100% of the time.
Didn't Oracle drop support for Java 8 like six years ago? I'm sure there are plenty of companies still running it, but even Apple (a relatively conservative company in this regard) updated to Java 11 when I was there in ~2019.
Oracle is supporting Java 8 till 2030 as a paid binary if you download from them and free source code as part of the OpenJDK. Other OpenJDK vendors, like Adoptium, are providing free binaries till 2030 as well. Other folks may or may not provide free binaries. RHEL builds of the OpenJKD are free till November 2026, part of extended life support till 2030.
For us, the biggest driver for getting off Java 8 was SpringBoot dropping support for anything older than 17.
this isn't really the case. a lot of legacy code may still be running the version it was developed against, but java 17+ has a sizable share of the ecosystem now that all of the popular libraries require it. spring for example bumped their baseline to jdk 17 in 2022.
Doesn't really matter if you're using an old Spring version with the old Java version. Spring offers enterprise support for Spring framework 5 which still supports Java 8.
But organizations still using Java 8 will most likely use some kind of Java Enterprise application server with vendor support. IBM will support Websphere with Java 8 until at least 2030 and maybe longer if customers keep paying. I'd guess Oracle has a similar policy.
It used to but Oracle‘s licensing and probably more important security guidelines from the very top linking CVE scores to mandatory updates got things moving on the last years.
