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This old food court stand at the mall had digital menus, but used stickers when the prices changed.
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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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Mildly Interesting
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This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
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As a developer, users doing dumb shit like this really makes me question why I’m trying to help make life easier for them in the first place.
I have a shipping web application with fields that every shipment should have, for example “tracking number.” These people will prefix the value with “PRO#” or “#” as if the field isn’t already labeled correctly. I’ve fought for years with validation, sanitizing, etc. because having this junk data causes issues further down the line.
The same goes for other similar fields (reference numbers for example); they’ll also do everything they can to fuck up the address as much as possible so that it can’t be validated (unit number first, completely mismatched city and postal code, putting the street in a field that doesn’t belong to the address, etc).
I always try to give them the benefit of the doubt—they’re not developers. But is this something like, hard to understand for normal people? I’ve talked to them several times yet they can’t be fucked with to change their ways.
Dev here - this is something everybody who works with users has to come to grips with. It's like a cartoon where teachers in their break room say, "This place would be great if it weren't for all the students!" Truth is, we're here for them, and that's the job.
The web application I described is my side business (that I own) so realistically I could simply choose to not be there for them.
Well yes, I've been a self-employed contractor myself. You can always choose not to do what a customer wants. The risk that they'll drop you and find somebody else is yours to take.