chandmk

So now the newly minted CTOs, get the same authority, credit, compensation, recognition as the real CTO for managing the hearless agents?

I am thinking about,

All those parents who are forced to work but always wanted to stay back and provide best care for their kids but couldn't do so.. feeling a gut punch.

Parents who chose career path and gets the slap in the face moments every time they realized that they could have spent more time with the kids instead of the work.

Is it possible to eat the cake and have it too?

I am wondering what would have happened if the committee chooses another idea instead of Compton's. Would Compton leave the committee? Would Feynman resent the decision? Or they wouldn't do that that is why they are called "great men"?

Over the years, I am convinced that agile process falls into the bullshit jobs category. At one point of time I stared asking a routine question, if we finish all of this work by next week, how long it would take for this to go to production? There is always several weeks of gap (unless it is really critical, then there is no agile process anyway).

At the end it is very inspiring to learn that Andre chose tennis on his own to become the number one on his own terms. But somehow it feels very ironic that he chose what he was already good at! Perhaps his father saved him a lot of time by choosing for him and using that time to make him skilled at tennis. It just feels like a perspective change. He could have simply said now I understood what my father was trying to do. Because no one really knows what Andre would have chosen and done by himself.

>If you want a fulfilling career as an engineer, don't work in a cost center.

By that definition, I guess the above article is not a help to a whole class of engineers out there. Now I really doubt if they even be called engineers?

Try strategizing in a mid-sized non technical mid-sized company. Here is where engineers are treated like mechanics at pep boys. You are either ignored or put to your place about the kind of work your are supposed to do, with the exception of crisis scenarios or 'no-one is interested in the outcome' scenarios.

In large companies strategy is mostly about helping power brokers to do their bullshit jobs.

In my experience, only opportunity for engineers to contribute to a meaningful strategy is in a small team with business person as CEO/Owner and they really want to listen to the engineer's opinion.

Maybe in tech companies engineers might have different experience.

The idea that one can 'manage' another seems very primitive to me. Every one that did good job for me did so because they genuinely wanted to do a good job, not because I 'managed' them somehow. All I did was to steer the work towards the goal. If they didn't like the work to begin with or didn't have enough skills and inclination to learn, no amount of 'management' would have corrected that situation.

I am wondering if Aditya didn't respond the way he did (using corporate lawyer's langauge), Greg would have not reached to this conclusion? I am a bit surprised by the entitlement he was showing. Why would anyone use those words despite sending a nonsense patch! What kind of defence he was thinking he had among a group of seasoned developers other than being honest about intentions? I wouldn't be surprised if his professor doesn't even know what he was doing!

One questions I ask myself to bring clarity is,

If I am the one paying bills, would I really pay another developer for this refactoring? Yes: Technical debt it is. No: just busy work.

Joining a new company is like starting a new life, which doesn't seem to happen many times in a life time. It is like you are being given another opportunity to start fresh. First thing then to do is gain respect, learn the culture. It is going to be uncomfortable for a while, so it is important to keep the opinions under check. Let the actions speak more than words. Remember that every design issue is a choice made by someone else to the best of their abilities. Finding a way to move forward without making too much splash automatically unlocks the doors. There will be lot of things to implement and you will find a way and while doing so you will learn a lot.

As a side note, Microsoft login echo system sucks big time in the context of office. You have no idea which URL to use to login to office 365. Between login/logout/timeout/other office apps/personal accounts/business accounts/forgot password workflows browser redirects to various URLs at least a dozen times. And you keep seeing new URLs I am wondering how less tech savvy people are coping with their authentication workflow.

Depending on how you are authenticating you will see URLs with various words in them.

loginlive office.com outlook.office.com office365 outlook.com account.live products.office.com login.microsoftonline.com

and this list goes on and on... I am wondering if they made an announcement that they are fixing their messy authentication workflow instead spending resources in rewriting office in JavaScript, that would have gotten this much attention on hacker news.

I used to work in a factory floor. Having a job at this factory used to be one of the nice things in the town. For the fear of being driven to work too much, workers refused to increase the thru-put beyond a union limit. They used that as a tool for bargaining for more pay. Observing bathroom breaks became the responsibility of supervisor. There were many missed daily targets, which became a regular discussion point. But in the end the entire thing was pushed too far. This, coupled with the top management inability to run the factory at a reasonably profitable state, finally lead the shut down. Ultimately it ended up hurting the workers more than the top management. Majority of top management found jobs elsewhere, and most of the workers ended up not having any jobs. This story merely reflects the constant struggle we are witnessing for generations.