At my org the CIO knows fuck all about computers. Great guy on a personal level but wouldn't be able to quit Vim even if the lives of his 3 kids depended on it.

He was put there because he was with the company for years before and he led other departments fine.

Since he can't evaluate anything IT related himself he relies on 'advice' from the people beneath him who try to get the most budget for their departments by overstating how important they are.

This layer beneath him is mostly product managers, RTEs etc... (We are SAFE Agile! Developer Velocity, Woohoo!).

They also don't know much about computer and if they do it's very domain specific, such as SAP or so.

These people try to fight for budget by overstating their importance. They demonstrate this by having more apps and more people relying on them.

"Look we handled 2000 support tickets, the company would grind to a halt without us!".

Never mind that having 2000 support tickets is a bad thing. And also mostly caused by their shitty apps.

This keeps going on and on. I have 10 years experience as engineer and wanted to see "the other side" but it's so exhausting.

A few months back a 'privacy officer' asked why the first and last names of our employees were in the Active Directory and ordered them to reduce the privacy risks.

They failed to specify what risks. Couldn't articulate them even when asked. They also didn't say when the risk would've been reduced 'enough'.

The team was panicking as they were now 'non-compliant' with company policy.

I had to intervene personally to make sure this single directive didn't derail our entire company.

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sgarland 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Never mind that having 2000 support tickets is a bad thing. And also mostly caused by their shitty apps.

I’m constantly having to fight people to not add new, inactionable alerts as knee-jerk reactions to incidents. I swear the thought process is “an incident happened, we added a new alert - look, we’re proactive!” instead of, you know, fixing the root causes.

	▲	apexalpha 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When WeTransfer suddenty changed it's policy for AI training last summer the entire CISO department panicked and had the entire website blocked. In traffic we could see that 12% of the company used the site daily, transferring gigabytes of data between our engineers and contractors. I asked why we didn't just start paying WeTransfer since it's so widely used and this would solve the problem, too. They said they should just use the internal SharePoint file sharing tool. I asked how this would work since most of WeTransfer use was us receiving docs, not sharing them. They said the contractors should just update their policy, and that was the end of the debate. Last time I spoke to a field engineer he said they mostly use private mailboxes now mostly since they "can't even copy something in Outlook anymore" on company laptops. I decided not to report this to CISO and these docs are workorders and pictures demonstrating workorders have been completed. They're irrelevant one day later.

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Quarrelsome 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

tbf quitting vim is extremely unintuitive to someone that opened it by accident for the first time.

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budman1 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

quitting vi is a basic competency test.

would you listen to a doctor that could not suture a cut? how about a mechanic that could not remove a socket from a ratchet?

simple file editing. vi has been around for every. if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?

(personal anecdote: once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..)

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ericd 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’d been developing with emacs for years before I learned how to quit vi. Just means he’s never had to change the config on a remote server with a barebones setup :-)

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vovavili 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's more of a cheap gotcha than a valid test. If we take somebody like me, I learned to code in IDEA/PyCharm, these days mostly code with either Zed or OpenCode, and occasionally drop into nano and Positron. I wouldn't be able to do anything in Neovim without looking it up simply because I had no reason to learn it. A doctor who learned practices appropriate in the 20th century might now necessarily be hired for knowledge of these practices today.

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hnthrow0287345 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm certainly not listening to someone who thinks vi is used by every developer

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budman1 an hour ago | parent [-]

used. maybe not. but cognizant of it. sure. and having used it once or twice.

come on! you are a software expert and you never had to edit a file on a machine where claude was not available?

	▲	budman1 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		what would you say about a EE that could not use a scope?

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Quarrelsome 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> quitting vi is a basic competency test.

no, its pop quiz bullshit. Oh you know about ":wq"? Well done! But if you don't know, you do it a few times and now you know. It does nothing, outside of teaching you a bit about poor UX.

> if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?

using one of the other available ides?

> once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..

That's not a sign of good judgement, that's a sign of being technically fashionable. It's hipster shit, akin to rejecting a candidate because they're a fan of Taylor Swift and don't know who the band Tool are.

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johnisgood 4 hours ago | parent [-]

What distinguishes knowing about vim from knowing about virtually anything else? If you apply to a job in tech, you should know that by long-pressing the power button, your PC turns off. Is this pop quiz shit, too? The bar is ridiculously low these days, apparently.

	▲	Quarrelsome 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

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marssaxman 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I used `killall vi` from another terminal for years before I finally memorized the proper way to do it.

	▲	thaumasiotes 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		How did you save the edits you made in vi?

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SilasX 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Funny/informative story about this: There was a project, OpenHatch.org c. 2011 that tried to get people to be comfortable enough with programming to contribute to open source projects. In one of the tutorials (I think introducing command-line git?), if you followed the instructions, it would dump you into vim. It hadn't introduced to you vim by that point or explained that's what was happening, so you wouldn't even know enough to google the error. And this was a project that was supposed to be primarily focused on being newbie-friendly!