Last week, we sent out an offer for 102k and then the customer asked us, if we can please lower it to 99k, so they don’t have to go to their boss to get clearance.
Logically speaking, that is not how any of this works. It’s still going to need the same amount of budget to complete the task. But no one asked us devs how long it’ll take anyways, so I guess, that’s not my problem after all.
If you’d like something LaTeX-like (best for transscribing rather than composing), then there’s LilyPond.
Yeah, that’s kind of my least favorite part about the existence of LLMs. Before, when someone wrote some code, there was a non-zero chance that they understood what they were doing and that the code is at least sane on a basic level. If they did some complex shit or even just wrote rather verbose code, you could be reasonably certain that they tried something simpler first.
Now, all of those assumptions are out the window. The biggest dumbass can generate code that looks alright at first glance and if you have to review it, you really don’t know how to interpret it or how much to explain when you find fairly obvious mistakes.
Here’s an example, I have looked up many times (like just now), which checks whether a string is empty:
var=""
if [ -z "$var" ]; then
echo "empty"
else
echo "not empty"
fi
Why -z? I have no idea. I will also routinely forget the ]; then part. I believe, if you write the then onto the next line, then you don’t need the semicolon. And then someone’s probably gonna tell me to use double-brackets [[ ]] instead, which probably does something.
Arguably, I never fully learned Bash syntax, but it also is just a stupid if-statement. There shouldn’t be that much complexity in it.
Alternatively, the less proper tool: Record your screen, cropped to the SVG.
GIF, MP4 and such, they’re just a bunch of pixel grids. They don’t care where those pixels came from.
Sure. If I knew what the scope of this offer even was, I might have suggested doing that.
To be fair, the contract has a statement in there, that we don’t actually have to complete the features written down, we just need to put in the amount of work that this money pays for. The customer is more or less within our own company, so it’s not like anyone’s going to sue the other side anyways. But yeah, it still just feels weird to hear management talking about fictitious features for a random amount of money.
Sometimes, I am worried that if the customer is dissatisfied one day, that management will be angry at us for giving such a bad estimate, even though we didn’t. For example, as far as I’m aware, the current offer contains the complete list of features from a meeting where we explicitly brainstormed what would still be required. We did not discuss how much of that we could complete within the budget we’re given. But if I now notice that management is offering the whole list for far too little money, am I supposed to intervene or are we doing the bullshit charade again?