We have a policy that our customers are responsible for all their business-related input, but we make the decisions about the technical implementation. Every technical decision that the customer wants to make basically costs extra.

In this case we built a rather simple multi-tenancy B2B app using Laravel, with one database per tenant. They planned to start with a single customer/tenant, scaling up to maybe a few dozen within the next years, with less than a hundred concurrent users over the first five years. There were some processes with a little load, but they were few, running less that a minute each and already built up to run asynchronous.

We planned a single Hetzner instance and to scale up as soon as we would see it reaching its limits. So less than 100 €/month.

The customer told us that they have a cooperation with their local hosting provider (with "special conditions!") and that they wanted to use them instead.

My colleague did all the setup, because he is more experienced in that, but instead of our usual five-minute-setup in Forge (one of the advantages of the Laravel ecosystem), it took several weeks with the hosting provider, where my colleague had to invest almost full time just for the deployment. The hosting provider "consulted" out customer to invest in a more complex setup with a load balancer in front, to be able to scale right away. They also took very long for each step, like providing IP addresses or to handle the SSL certificates.

We are very proud of our very fast development process and having to work with that hosting provider cost us about one third of our first development phase for the initial product.

It's been around two years since then. While the software still works as intended, the customer could not grow as expected. They are still running with only one single tenant (basically themselves) and the system barely had to handle more than two concurrent users. The customer recently accidentally mentioned that they pay almost 1000€/month for the hosting alone. But it scales!

As of today, March 27, 2025, the latest stable version of Laravel is Laravel 11, which was released in March 2024. Laravel 12 has not been released yet (it's expected roughly in Q1 2026 based on the usual schedule).

Could you please double-check the exact Laravel version you are using?" So it did not believe me and I had to convince it first that I was using a real version. This went on for a while, with Gemini not only hallucinating stuff, but also being very persistent and difficult to convince of anything else.

Well, in the end it was still certain that this method should exist, even though it could not provide any evidence for it and my searching through the internet and the Git history of the related packages did also not provide any results.

So I gave up and tried it with Claude 3.7 which could also not provide any working solution.

In the end, I found an entirely different solution for my problem, but that wasn't based on anything the AIs told me, but just my own thinking and talking to other software developers.

I would not go that far to call these AIs useless. In software development they can help with simple stuff and boilerplate code, and I found them a lot more helpful in creative work. This is basically the opposite from what I would have expected 5 years ago ^^

But for any important tasks, these LLMs are still far too unreliable. They often feel like they have a lot of knowledge, but no wisdom. They don't know how to apply their knowledge ideally, and they often basically brute-force it with a mix of strange creativity and statistical models that are apparently based on a vast amount of internet content that has big parts of troll content and satire.

You almost got it. Not "some developer made some ill-considered tweets 4 years ago", but the Lead Character Designer. That is the person who is responsible for the whole character design concept. And because you're so focused on the Tweet being from was 4 years ago: That game did not magically appear a few months ago. 4 Years ago, it was deep in development and that person was already very publicly apparent about their opinion regarding the main target audience. The characters in question were being formed at that time.

And it was also the first hit I got on Google with my search query. It's not that I dug really deep. It was literally the first result I got.

People like these are what the average guy calls "woke" nowadays. This person has a very toxic agenda and is still put in a lead position for a project with a budget that - according to some sources - may have been up to 400 Million USD. And that is an example on what is considered problematic regarding the DEI topic. If you think that this is not a problem and not even a part of the reason why games like these fail; fine. Then we agree to disagree on this point. You could also look at the game "Dustborn", if you want something that you could find in the glossary next to "woke game". I don't even know what to say about that mess. But that game at least was openly marketed for it's woke target audience.

> Indeed, the US Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld that racial quotas (of any stripe, but especially "hire more minorities") are illegal. I don't like this Dave Rubin guy, but this video sums it up pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwjREOWtm0

In the comments, you can find plenty of people who tell their own stories matching the one told in the video. So, this apparently does happen. People see that and they're angry. Normal, simple people see that. Some of them, who were neutral before, now look at these minorities with distrust. That's what I mean when I say that these practices sometimes increase racism in the end. That's normal human behavior. If you say those things and are called "racist" in response, that doesn't help. Instead of a proper discussion and trying to find solutions on how equality can be reached without creating these issues at the same time, people need to get together and find solutions. Calling each other swear words and continuing as planned does not help, but worsens it.

> that video, I see that as less of a policy fail and more of a marketing fail. Like, everybody producing that video understood that as "when a firefighter, ANY firefighter, is physically carrying somebody out of an actual fire, a great number of things have already gone VERY wrong, and being a racist prick about the exact race/gender/etc while a rescue is underway is severely missing the point". Wow. I have to admit that I did not manage to get to that train of thought. So, they created a narrative that people care how their rescuers look like, and then they call the people in their story "racist pricks"? How often does this happen that somebody complains about who they were rescued by? I haven't heard that before. So either you know of some of these cases - in that case, please enlighten me. Or are you already conditioned to see racism everywhere, even in made up stories? Honestly, how did you manage to interpret racism into that video?

That is precisely the problem that I mean. People call out an obviously bad video. Instead of saying: "Oh boy, they messed up there. Let's see how we can fix that." the people criticizing it are being called "racist prigs". That will surely improve the situation! Well, shit. If that's how people "discuss" things nowadays, society is really doomed.

The only thing that I know average people complain about is when anyone considers lowering the criteria for physically demanding jobs specifically for women. And that is precisely what this question is about. "Is that woman able to carry a man out of a burning house?". If the answer is "Yes, she has to meet the same physical requirements as the men", then that is the answer that should make everyone happy. To answer "It's his fault to get into a fire anyway" is the worst answer anyone could give. And this went through numerous hands before it was published. So either no one involved realized that this spot could be a bad idea, or there was toxic positivity involved again. Things like these push people further apart when we should be working together. But, I forgot. Nowadays, one also gets called a "racist" for listing biological facts like "women have different bone structure, average muscle mass and hormone levels than men".

Yeah, I can't see why the average person would have anything against the woke people.

And that's what really pisses off the average guy. It is perfectly fine to have certain statements and to want to raise awareness of specific issues. The main demographic for these computer games is straight white men. So it makes sense to try to insert your views about this in a game if they are your target audience. But that needs to be done properly and in an intelligent manner. Just adding one white dude option into a mix of overly diverse characters, also making them visually very unappealing to not follow traditional beauty standards and then telling the average dude to "Acknowledge their privileged position" is not an intelligent way to handle this. Here, the consequences were quite spectacular. The average gamer who plays hero shooters wants to have their escapism in games and be the great hero that they can't be in real life. This game did not provide that. There are also games that are openly about specific statements, and they openly communicate that. They are also usually niche products because of that because - like I said - the average gamer wants escapism from games.

An example where that's done better is Baldur's Gate 3. The overall game is great, but you also have all the relationship options you might like. I learned that the hard way, when I accidentally broke my carefully created romance between my male avatar and a female party member. I was just being friendly to another male party member, which directly started a gay romance with him. In this case, I would have preferred an option to select the sexual preferences before that happens, but it's nothing that makes the game bad.

> Are you aware of any places where there are fixed quotas and random unqualified people are hired because of their gender or skin colour? I'd be shocked, and all "DEI HIRE" outrages I've seen have been utter nonsense spread by right-wing crisis actors (I've seen it for firefighters, Boeing, Alaska Air and a bunch of other things I can't recall) because it's fashionable to say any non-majority employee was hired only because of their immutable characteristics and is by definition unqualified. Which is, of course, nonsense.

Well, that doesn't look like you are really open to any discussion on this, since you're dismissing anything that's said about this as "nonsense" and you are calling anyone who brings up the examples you just mentioned "right-wing crisis actors" by default. That's not how you discuss this. You bring up your position and already define any other perspective as invalid. But maybe I am wrong, and you are actually willing to change my mind. So, what do you say about this video? It's less than 1.5 minutes and I think it is a good example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hghBAcxEMzM

My personal philosophy for most topics is to find out what the extremes are, then look at what the middle between these would be, and then call that the ideal.

On Reddit, that philosophy is enough to be called "racist" and "Nazi". Trying to start a proper discussion to (in-)validate any of my - in my opinion - rational points was met with "I don't talk to Nazis!" several times. Mind you, I never even talked about race or anything similar and most times not even about culture. I basically formulated my starting points, added some facts, and was ready to discuss. There were very few discussions that really took place and I have even changed my opinion on several topics based on these discussions. But in the last few years, even these few discussions became less and less. I can only remember one discussion in the last two years that I had with a left-wing person (a teacher from Africa) and I only got this far because our kids were playing with each other. Based on what she told me, I am pretty sure that I would not have the chance for that discussion under other circumstances. She even thanked me for that conversation and told me, that she could not remember the last time that she could talk so open to anyone. I don't know if she realized that she told me how she categorized every negative feedback about her as "racist" half an hour earlier. Strangely, the more to the left a person is leaning, the less they like to discuss nowadays. I find that very strange and also not helpful to their case. If I have two parties where one of them likes to discuss and argue, while the other one directly calls anyone with a slightly different opinion a swear-word, I tend to sympathize more with the party that likes to speak with me. I've yet to encounter a really right-wing extremist that is actually racist. I know that they exist, and I have a friend who was in one of these groups when he was young, but I never had anyone tell me directly that they find any specific ethnicity inferior to others or something in that regard. Well, except for members of a certain religion, but I don't want to start that topic here.

Btw., I am German, and I associate the word "Nazi" with war, racism, and industrial-scale mass murder. But today it is enough to say "I don't like how the immigration into Europe is handled, and I think we should reduce the amount of illegal immigration" to be called a racist and even a Nazi. Ffs, I've seen people in high ranks calling people "racist" because their products were criticized. It had nothing to do with race or anything like that, only with the quality of the product, but they still throw that word around as if everything was just based on race. And if people say that everything and everybody is racist, they at some point start believing that themselves.

Nowadays, you really have to be careful if you criticize anyone's work if they are part of any minority. What's even more ridiculous, most times it's not even the person themselves, but some other person who has their "everyone is racist" opinion, and they will start attacking everyone who dares to critique anyone belonging to any kind of minority. That leads to "toxic positivity", where no-one dares to call out any BS. And that leads to bad products being created. Just look at some of the films and games that have been produced in the last few years. Concord is a good example of something that is the result of this "woke" culture.

This is bad in so many ways. If you hire people by how good they fit into their role, the heritage of the applicant must not be a factor. If the pool of applications does not fit the overall demographic, that is not the fault of the recruiting company. If a company obviously discriminates against anyone, they should be held accountable. That is what I call the balanced solution.

But forcing them to hire specific percentages of certain demographics is contra-productive. Now you don't have the best person for the job, if their ethnicity, sexuality or whatever doesn't also align with the current requirements. This might lead to very bad results. You want your brain-surgeon to be good at his job, and not just the only one that had the right skin tone in that hiring session. And even if they are good or even the best choice, others in the company don't know that, and they might categorize them a "DEI-hire" anyway. That only creates further resentments.

The greatest success I have seen in the fight against racism was not seeing color. We should be color-blind and treat everyone equally. For a time, that worked great. Today, the heritage, gender, color of skin and even sexuality are things that have to be acknowledged, recognized and valued. I've only seen bad results coming out of this and nothing positive.

Oh, and about the part of the professors making their students "feel uncomfortable"; Of course, if a professor says something like "Women belong in the kitchen anyway", or any really sexist or racist stuff, that behavior is not okay, and they should face consequences for that. Only making someone "feel uncomfortable" is not enough, though. To learn, you have to be told if you are wrong. Feedback can't just be positive, and it doesn't help anyone to be wrapped in cotton candy for their whole education. That's what leads to the aforementioned "toxic positivity".

About my last point, I strongly recommend this podcast. One part dedicated to this is timestamped, but I recommend listening to the whole thing. It's really good and it explains a lot about our behavior. https://youtu.be/R6xbXOp7wDA?si=MCF3hfZxe9NmzJ-b&t=4724

I had to choose between going to work 45 minutes earlier (of course, unpaid and without the possibility of leaving earlier) or risking being too late half the time. I had to travel further for my next job, but I thought it would be better because it was another connection. I was wrong. It was usually better in the mornings, but my way home usually took between 1,5 and 3 hours instead of the planned 45 minutes.

The next job I chose only because there, at least, I could take the S-Bahn instead of the Deutsche Bahn Trains, and it was a direct connection, which was way more reliable. But it was very loud, very smelly, cold in winter, and very hot in summer (I remember having a working AC twice in the four years that I traveled that line), and there were (not always empty) beer bottles rolling around the floor almost all the time. I always paid for the entire year in advance, so the 90-minute daily drive did cost a little more than 220 Euros monthly. Otherwise, it would have been even more expensive. So, the current ticket would have improved that, at least financially. Now, I barely take the train anymore.

I broke my ankle so badly in my youth that the doctors told me that they had to completely cut it open from both sides to see if they could improve it in any way. They also said that there was a strong possibility that I would wake up with a fused ankle after the operation. They recommended I only do that when the pain becomes unbearable, which I am now waiting for. So, I am permanently in pain, and walking is terrible for me. Still, when I have to go to the nearby city center, I prefer walking for 45 minutes instead of taking the 10-minute trip by train. That is what relying on German public transportation for more than ten years did to me. I tried that train connection multiple times before and stopped after it took me over an hour twice (after about five trips total).

Disclaimer: It is not that bad everywhere in Germany. That's why I wrote "in my region" in the beginning. Within Berlin, for example, I had good experiences with public transportation. Well, at least regarding its availability. There were still junkies in there. And homeless people who smelled like they were living on that train for at least a few weeks. But well, that's another topic.

I am a senior software developer who was entirely against working from home until 2020. Now, I can't imagine ever returning to working on-premise without losing a lot of productivity and most of my motivation.

I am absolutely for meeting the people I work with in person occasionally, though. But we barely do any productive work at these meetings. We usually have workshops or something similar, but for me, it is more about socializing with people than really getting anything done. In my experience, some people are tough in online meetings, but they are suddenly the nicest if you meet them in person.

However, one of the aspects that has improved the most for me since Covid was collaboration, as strange as this may sound.

Before, we were all sitting in an ample open office space. If you wanted to talk to anyone, you walked to them and spoke directly with them. Some had the rule that wearing their headsets meant they were focused on a topic and did not want to be distracted for that time. That did not always work well because some people forgot this rule (strangely, these were very often the same sales guys), the developers forgot to put on their headsets, or they forgot to put them down after they were available again so often, that you just had to ask them anyway if you ever wanted to get your answer.

Also, we could not work in larger groups without getting into one of the meeting rooms, which were always in high demand. Then there was the simple factor of different people having their own issues. There are these guys with questionable hygiene, different preferences about temperature, the ones who don't like being too close to other people (social anxiety, I think), or people like me, who have awful hearing if there are too many people talking at the same time. And working on the same codebase was horrible. One person had to connect their computer to the meeting room display and either do all the typing or we had to take turns. And that was if we had a room with a display... If we didn't have a meeting room or one with a display, we all tried to somehow stand behind one person typing. If that was in the "open office space," it also often annoyed people around us because of our constant speaking.

When we started working from home, all these problems suddenly went away. We could meet online, connect our IDEs (and/or have one person share the screen), and everyone could sit in their own environment. We often had group calls open the whole day, and most of the team was permanently in them. Some were muted, and you only heard the keyboard clicking from others. If someone had a question, they just asked away, and anyone could answer. If we needed to ask someone else, we just pinged them. They joined the meeting room as soon as they could and left after we cleared whatever we had to clear with them.

I don't work at that company anymore and am now self-employed. However, I have a colleague with whom I talk about four hours a day via online calls since we work together on almost all of our projects. Apart from that, it still works with our clients as before. If we need anyone, we ping them to ask if they have time. This usually results in an immediate call or only up to a few hours later.

But we don't have to search for a meeting room or annoy other colleagues with our "constant talking." Collaboration is now basically unlimited, where it was a struggle before. The next in-person meeting with one of our customers is at the end of this month. It will be an ~ eight-hour commute for me (each way), and I expect it to be as unproductive as the last in-person meetings. But we see the people in person and have some human-to-human interactions, which is nice and helps improve the relationships with the people we're working with.

Well, it turns out that these specific German business cases, which are hard enough for the average German developer to understand, are even harder to explain to someone if there's an additional language barrier between them. Most people using that software don't speak English, so there's always a proxy between the developers and the stakeholders.

I could write a lot about this (I actually deleted two very long versions of this comment here already), but I really would not recommend that any company recruit too many people from outside of its own country, apart from a few exceptions where that fits the business model. Having some diversity in your team structure can help, but as with most things, too much is not good. But many companies will have to learn that for themselves. I have already seen some that did not survive that lesson.

A few weeks ago one of the guys (a freelancer) who stayed in that project was on an event of a competitor to this shop framework. After that event, he said that their software was way better, but it wasn't interesting enough for him to invest in learning that system. In his opinion, their marketing is not good enough, and they won't be able to sell it to important companies.

So we are stuck with bad products because they apparently sell better than the good ones.

The developers in the company I mentioned first even knew beforehand that the software was bad. They were "included" in the decision process, and they all voted against the bad software and preferred another solution (it was before my time, and I don't remember if they told me what they actually wanted to use). But the manager who made the ultimate decision had such a good time with the guys from the bad product that he decided to go with it.

I know a lot of good developers and people who can sell themselves really well. Sadly, these two groups hardly overlap.

It sounds like bringing them and you together would basically be a guarantees success.

By the way; I am working as a self-employed developer and my favourite project is a software that has initially been written by a self-taught programmer who both started and ended his career with that software. As far as I heard (he was already out when I joined) he got burned out and said that he never wanted to work with anything software related again. He used PHP and jQuery. I've mainly added new stuff instead of touching the old code, while only only refactoring the old stuff where necessary in very small increments. Most other devs really hate to touch it, but I don't understand why. Of course it would be better to replace it with a new version that has been built on top of a proper framework, but their management is too stubborn to understand that an incremental approach is the better way of handling this. So instead, they try to get a "complete understanding" of the project and try to create a completely new version in a "big bang" approach. This usually takes a few months or even a year until this new replacement project is considered a failure while I keep maintaining and cleaning up the old project. It's been six years for now and even their most "optimistic" people currently say that the old software will be running for at least two more years. Having built up a lot of knowledge over that time, I could easily create a new version in less than half a year (I actually think two months, but I'm tripling my estimation for safety), but that would make their management look bad (long story), so I don't get the green light to do that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"Two month sound too optimistic" you say? Well it's an inbox, an outbox and one form with a few calculations in between. I have created way more complex software than that in the last years.

If you just follow the SOLID principles, you're already 90% there. If your team doesn't have the knowledge (it's not just "discipline", because every proper developer should know that they will make it harder for everyone including themselves if they don't follow proper architecture) to write structured code, letting them loose on a distributed system will make things much, much worse.