Speaking as a UX designer, probably because some "product manager" decided it was too expensive to override the auto- sort that was applied before the designer was brought in to "pretty things up."
There is no tone of bitterness in my comment, honestly there isn't.
Yeah, I was going to say they just left a default alphabetical sort to their global droplist component and called it a day. Probably works fine in most contexts, but this one - not so much.
Or shitty SQL.
SELECT MAX(day_of_month), month
FROM why_does_this_table_exist
GROUP BY month
Im sorry. Im a front end dev, i wish i could make everything pretty, but theres just too many meetings and too much process for everything to get much done.
Haha! Exactly! I do some coding, too, but I can't think like a UXer and a dev at the same time.
It's the "making it pretty" part that makes me bitter. That is the LEAST part of what we do.
It's like asking an architect to come in and fix the building after it's already mostly built. Bad PMs insist on seeing us like interior decorators, but we are primarily architects.
They don't want to pay architect salary to do decorating work and I fully agree. Problem is that stuff like this are often overlooked until someone makes a fuss about it, costing PR. The other 90 % of the overlooked stuff is never found though so it's still a good decision to skip stuff like this.
I'd believe that, if they weren't already paying the architect salary to have us do interior design. They hire us, then shackle us.
Everyone is saying this was impossible to solve without fixing the underlying tool, but just writing a prefixes from 01 to 12 would have been my solution.
Now you don’t even need to remember the months to select the correct one.
Obviously it’s a an act of protest so the months are officially remade to be alphabetically ordered.
Computers sometimes sort in this logic: "1" is the first digit so everything that starts with "1" comes first. Alphabetical in this sense, not the names of the numbers written out as done in another comment under this post.
I once got a user requirement that specifically say all drop down lists must be sorted alphabetically
They are probably reusing a component that happens to sort its entries alphabetically, since that is most commonly the expected behaviour. If the form is configured in a CMS, whoever built it might not even know it's happening and has entered the data properly, but it gets resorted in the presentation layer. It's also not impossible that the behaviour of the component has changed at some point and this particular case didn't have test coverage or wasn't actually part of the specification.
They probably store the months as strings rather than integers or enums with string representations/localizations
Months are an unnecessary and leaky abstraction, they don't need to be taken seriously.
I agree with this programmer.