My bank used to require internet banking passwords to be exactly 6 alphanumeric characters. Turned out that the reason for that was that they used the same password for internet and phone banking, and by implication the passwords were actually just 6 numbers.

This was in the 2010s, mind you.

Works for a small company. If everyone in a large company is allowed the same leeway nothing could ever ship

Oh for sure. I’ve been lucky enough that I’ve only ever worked for places with at most a few hundred employees, so my experiences of larger companies have been at best second-hand — but it was enough to know that I’d never want to work somewhere like that.

This is something I really love about my job. It’s a small company, and we don’t have any of these kinds of process overheads.

It’s accepted that people fuck up (and in most cases that’re relevant to me, I’m the people in question) but if I can reproduce the problem, I can often get the fix in the users’ hands the next day. Generally the positive effects of a quick turnaround and feeling like they matter outweigh the negatives of the problem being there in the first place.

Not to say I don’t have stuff in the “tech debt” bucket, but having the autonomy to just fix the low-hanging fruit makes for a satisfying work environment.

Is there a “go woke, go broke” but for nazis?

I just wish there were a legal way to stream BBC content (i.e. iPlayer) outside the UK. I’d gladly pay the licence fee (as a non-resident) or more, to be able to watch all their content without having to grub around on a million different services.

Whether there’d be enough people in the same boat to be able to make up a $200M shortfall, I don’t know, but it seems like it could be a pretty big untapped market.