I feel like this could be adopted for your homegrown "whatever" framework (eg: UI framework, Auth framework, …)

Congratulations on getting hired to this team! You probably count yourself lucky, but don't. We had been trying to fill this role for the past 5 months and every candidate would run away as soon as we showed them our homegrown auth framework. But don't run yet please, do give it a try.

So, you are still here? It must be a bad job market out there. Looks like you found the documentation for the project. Let me save you the trouble, it has not be updated since 3 years ago (about the time John quit). No worries, there are lots of usage examples in the Perforce repo. Perforce is like Git but that's for another day.

So you managed to checkout the code. Before you type "make", let me remind you to install this particular version of Python and set up your LD paths. Make sure you don't have anything else relying on Python because they will probably never work again.

If you hit the dreaded "std::vector<std::__cxx11::basic_string<char> > >'} is not derived from 'const char*'" error, ask Joe (if he is still around) to show you which header file you need to tweak. That's not checked in because it breaks the build on a legacy server we still have running for one of the customers.

… someone else please take over… :-)

> Make sure you don't have anything else relying on Python because they will probably never work again.

This is why when I see some clever open source tool discussed on HN and I go to the repo and see it's written in Python I close the browser window and pretend I never saw it.

Yes I know there are ways to protect yourself when using Python in much the same way that lead-lined glove boxes protect you when working with plutonium, but I can never remember the proper CLI incantation to make the lead-lined glove box appear.

These days, if I'm feeling generous I'll spend a minute or two to see if I can get a promising Python tool to install with uv. If it's not going to easily submit to a `uv tool install`, then I move on and forget about it.

Everybody else uses virtual environments and alternate installations of python instead of using and installing packages in the system python installation. It is not that hard.

UV has gone a long way to fix that issue with python.

This would be perfect if you replaced “Joe” as the bottom with John to illustrate that this document has been edited five times and not brought back to consistency. And also that only one articulate person ever understood it and he got scared off.

> 3 years ago (about the time John quit)

> ask John (if he is still around)

That’s funny. Yeah. I wrote this on the fly. It can use multiple passes to add layers of self reference / depth.

Some people think I’m just the right amount of cynical. Some people… do not agree.

Stop it!

... you'll need to refer to these pages on Confluence, but they haven't all yet migrated to the new Confluence documentation structure, which is here, so you'll need to search both. And then the really detailed documentation is in Sharepoint here, but when we update these documents we'll also need to convert them to PDF and publish them to our Customer-accessible ticketing system using this specific ticket number, which you'll need to remember because search on that system doesn't work very well.

...and keep in mind that our self-hosted Confluence instance is several years old and since someone finds a new Confluence vulnerability every three days the data you need may vector some malware to your machine so you probably should only look at the docs on a sandboxed VM. Atlassian has been bugging us to convert to cloud hosting for 5 years and management won't let us but that's another story.

> I feel like this could be adopted for your <organisation's management shenanigans>

Welcome to $org. Up to this point in the hiring process, you may have believed that we are a principled, well-structured meritocracy where all talent and hard work are appropriately awarded.

Well I find it necessary to inform you...