I was part of a stable of about 50 programmers working for a company that manufactured lubricants circa 2000. For about a month at one point, the entire roomful of programmers spent the entire day calling into Who Wants to be a Millionaire? to try and get on the show. Absolutely nothing happened to the company – lubricants kept getting manufactured and sent to customers on schedule. The entire operation ran on mainframe applications that dated to the 1970s. I’m not even sure what any of these programmers did other than myself, and all I did was write IE6-based web frontends that sat on top of the mainframe apps (and they’re still running to this day lol, which means the mainframe apps are still in use).
Security through obscurity lol. If the code is old enough it’s secure because no one is assuming it’s that old. Also 50 programmers is like a lot. Ten dudes can get a billion dollar company rolling.
I was part of a stable of about 50 programmers working for a company that manufactured lubricants circa 2000. For about a month at one point, the entire roomful of programmers spent the entire day calling into Who Wants to be a Millionaire? to try and get on the show. Absolutely nothing happened to the company – lubricants kept getting manufactured and sent to customers on schedule. The entire operation ran on mainframe applications that dated to the 1970s. I’m not even sure what any of these programmers did other than myself, and all I did was write IE6-based web frontends that sat on top of the mainframe apps (and they’re still running to this day lol, which means the mainframe apps are still in use).
I did not know that a group of programmers were called a stable, but it’s part of my vocabulary now thank you
It’s because we’re studs 😏
*gets message in ear*
oh, it’s because we’re workhorses or donkeys 😞
it’s because we’re fussy gas bags that need constant de-farting to function
And y’all are kept in cubicles because nobody trusts any of you to roam free
Security through obscurity lol. If the code is old enough it’s secure because no one is assuming it’s that old. Also 50 programmers is like a lot. Ten dudes can get a billion dollar company rolling.
50 programmers who all knew how to write one function that none of the other ones did.
which is pretty common with legacy applications.
and moving off legacy applications you’ve been on for decades… takes a decade typically, sometimes longer.
Hey, they won’t be getting hit with any ai slop coded vulnerabilities snuck into open source projects, so maybe if it ain’t broke don’t fix it?