Adutude

In the real world, in quite a few companies, in order to accomplish X, you must sit through many meetings with others that have nothing to do with accomplishing X.

There are also many other logistical hurdles that you must overcome to accomplish X. The problem is that often, I do not need to attend the meetings, nor do I need to overcome the logistical/political) hurdles to accomplish X, and more often than not these are impediments to accomplishing X.

It really varies from company to company, my point is, I want to get paid for the time, because I can never be certain how much I will have to waste in meetings and other un-related tasks before I can complete a given accomplishment, due to dependencies on others.

Add to all of that the litmus test of a completed "accomplishment" can be very subjective, e.g. something one person thinks is done, is not seen that way by someone else, and you don't get paid until everyone agrees it is done?

There's also the old scope creep monster, that rears it's ugly head. What you had to accomplish at the beginning of the project changed half way through and now you have do twice the work to complete the "accomplishment".

My time is the most valuable thing I have and the older I get the move valuable it becomes. I'm not going to roll the dice that whoever is writing the checks will have the same perception that something was accomplished as I do. I don't want to have to spend more time to "accomplish" something, just because someone "moved the goal-post".

On the other hand if you are a consultant and it's a vendor/customer relationship, then it's up to you as the vendor to define the "accomplishment" and build in a way that both vendor and customer can agree on when an "accomplishment" is finished. Scope creep is handled by additional statements of work, etc.

When there are contracts and potentially lawyers involved, paying for accomplishments is a little more tenable, in an employer employee relationship, where as the employee if you don't like it you can find another job, not so much.

Imagine if every time you got paid you had to have a meeting with your manager to determine exactly what you had accomplished, with the manager making the final decision on whether it was done or not? Suppose they decide that program you wrote needs more testing to be "accomplished", or an extra feature that was not originally scoped needs to be added and until such time, they aren't going to pay you? That sounds like the stuff of nightmares to me.

I've used what I learned in this course more than any learning I've done. IMHO This should be a required course before a student graduates high school (or sooner).

We should all just be on GMT. In software development on Pacific time, I always feel bad for the guys offshore that have to stay up late at night to make our morning meetings. It sure would make things a lot more easy from a coding perspective.

But to the point DST only adds complexity to the already complex task of converting time to GMT and back so that you can synchronize events in different time-zones, I fully support this effort.

So this appears to be, the very old, software that was pushed to production before it was ready story. I have to wonder if there wasn't some Marketing/PR/Mgmt person(s) that pushed the engineers to release the software before it was ready or was it the result of lack of due diligence on the part of the engineers, who couldn't wait to get their code running in the real world.

>We did implement checks for what seemed to us as more common failure scenarios, but the devil here was that this one first appeared during the run and we did not cover it at the analytical analysis stage.

I little more time in testing for the edge cases could have helped avoid this expensive fail.

You have to test for much more than just the "common failure scenarios", when you engineer solutions where failure could be very expensive in terms of money and lives.

Someone just needs to create a swiss army knife headless browser streaming file saver/converter and leave out any text about how to download youtube videos with it.

Then the community can be like Popcorn time and say, ahem, no copyright infringing code here.

Or a version could even be released w/out the test cases and or README files that make any reference to any type of "illegal" activities.

From my perspective it kind of seems like YouTube-dl is like a knife, it can cut your food, but it can also be used to kill someone. In the case of YouTube-dl the knife was included with instructions on how to kill someone, so it was deemed a potential "murder weapon".

  What if someone sold a car and included instructions on how to run over pedestrians?  Should the car no longer be sold, or should the instructions be removed?

My point here is that banning all of something based on the fact that the something could be used to commit illegal acts, when that same something also has legitimate legal uses, is a slippery slope. These days the RIAA pretty much lives on that slippery slope.

I agree completely. Steve Ballmer put all of Microsoft eggs in the Office Basket that let mobile die on the vine. He pushed licensing and marketing and left developers and new tech to languish. It's why to this day, Microsoft doesn't have a place in the mobile space, it's iOS or Android. I also aggree that pushing MS in a more Open source direction has helped make them more palatable to developers.

In the article it references a Gallup poll and says, "Nearly two-thirds of employees who have been working remotely would like to continue to do so"

So the Majority of people want to continue to work remote, I would put out there that the only people that want to go back into the office are are busy bodies and control freaks. (Lookin' at you Satya)

IMHO Working from home solves the problem of, "Stop the chitty chatty and get back to work", and it partially solves the problem of "Hey man, stop riding me like a rented mule".

So spending less time polluting the planet travelling in shiny metal boxes to go to giant concrete boxes to sit in tiny metal and fabric cubes is a bad thing?

I'm going next level on remote. Got a sail boat and I'm going full water world. I'll say hi to Kevin Costner for ya.

Here we are again, discussing politics in our tech forum. Why? Because we invented brain washing machines. Social media married w/ Algorithms and AI.

The bigger story here is that these brainwashing machines are susceptible to being manipulated by their owners to meet their own subjective needs.

It gets even worse, because these are for-profit companies, the brain washing machines are being rented out to the highest bidder.

Even worse than that the owners of these machines are being pressured and manipulated by others, in power, to affect outcomes that, as it turns out, are probably not in the best interest of the public at large.