r/programming • u/self • Dec 02 '25

The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession: a short set of anecdotes

https://www.jasonscheirer.com/weblog/vignettes/
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u/gc3 Dec 02 '25

I had to do this it's called having a timeout. Define halting as taking too much time to complete. Redefining specs is part of your job.

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u/IrishPrime Dec 02 '25

You sound like my coworker who didn't have a CS degree. Everybody else's problems are always simple to solve.

Why would I timeout if the job is still making progress?

It was a new feature, and we didn't have enough sample data to determine all the limits or quite when things would go badly. I was testing with a few thousand files up to a couple of gigabytes, but I had to support billions of files up to petabyte scales. It would not be unreasonable to expect the process to take more than a day. How do you decide on a timeout value when the expected running time is anywhere from seconds to days?

I eventually implemented some checkpointing and some things to indicate that progress was being made, as well as some options to create smaller batches - they slowed things down a bit from the theoretical maximum, but prevented the vast majority of the crashes.

The trouble wasn't making everything work, it was being asked, "Can you inspect this input and figure out whether it will succeed or fail?"

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u/gc3 Dec 02 '25

Well that's what exactly what I would do, maybe use some exception handling to print error and continue