ellius

I wasn't imagining a full rewrite, more like a "holding area" that could defer some of the load. Again I may be totally wrong about this—I have never written a COBOL system, and if there is some plausible way to make it effective for this problem in a reasonable timeframe, then I understand why that would make sense. I understand all of your reasoning and agree with it in general. I know rewrites are very expensive and often ineffective. I'm just skeptical that the system can be modified quickly to deal with this new load. But again I am not an expert and could be totally wrong, and I'm open to being convinced.

I'm a younger engineer, so I say this with a degree of humility, but is trying to modify these monstrous legacy systems on the fly during a worldwide catastrophe really the most responsible or intelligent solution? Is there no way to authorize some kind of emergency system built with modern tooling to offload the system burden and then process it later through the system of record? If I were trying to deal with this problem, my approach would be the following:

- Organize the legislature(s) to pass some kind of emergency act that gives protection around PCI compliance and that sort of thing to new engineering teams

- Hire business and technical experts, fast

- Build a system on AWS that can handle massive scale and start offloading the most important business functionality to that system (things like registering for aid, fraud prevention)

- when things begin to return to normal, start processing requests through the original system, deal with problems, whatever

I know all of this is not easy. Legal and compliance stuff is tough, and I know the domain itself must not exactly be simple. But this is an emergency, and it calls for emergency measures. Trying to hack your way through an ancient code base on the fly seems like it might be doomed to failure.

If that's the case, that's what should have been made clear. OP clearly doesn't think that's what happened.

Yeah whatever happened here, the communication from this person's leadership was bad. I'm not trying to vilify them—maybe they had their reasons—but OP is clearly confused about why they were laid off and how (if) it could have been avoided. If I were going to fire someone with 15 years' experience, I would really try to give several clear warnings and actions leading up to it, assuming that was my actual reasoning.

This is the thesis of Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies." He argues, correctly I think, that you can find intellectual strands going back to Heraclitus and Plato which revolve around the idea of some "central force" or "law of history" that enables a thinker to predict the future. He says that the alternative and preferable society is a skeptical one that views history as a series of experiments and tries to infer what amount to rules of thumb rather than grand "world historical" theories or forces.

"East of Eden." Steinbeck draws beautiful vignettes of human life and emotion, and I think the book's main idea about human motivation is largely correct and explains a wide variety of behavior. It helped me see both myself and others with more clarity.

Seconded, this is a really excellent book.

I think that's a good example because it shows individual objects instead of curves on a graph, which for many people doesn't translate to reality.

I think that's exactly the issue. People can't picture it. You can show them a curve on a graph, but that doesn't translate for people without a mathematical/scientific background into "a shitload of people will get ill very quickly." Our brains seem not to be very well wired to make the connection between mathematical abstractions and reality, and aside from the minority of people who seem to just "get it," people don't understand without a good explanation from a very good teacher.

If there are two "mental tools" I wish we could teach every person, they are exponential growth and statistical thinking. Neither is intuitive, but they would help people understand this whole situation (and many others) a lot better.

You're right, this is really the deeper principle. I'm talking more "useful rules of thumb" as people are trying to build intuition for why passive voice might be useful. But at the end of the day it gives you more options about how to structure information. I think like a lot of tools it's easy to turn into a foot gun, so having some ideas about when and why it may be useful is good.

He also freely admits at the end of the essay that he's sure he committed many of the sins he's preaching against. I suspect he'd also freely admit that there are reasons to use the passive voice. But I think his primary complaints, especially his egregious examples of academic and political writing, were right on the money.

This is a great example of where to use the passive voice. Austen reverses the sentence structure to pack the punch at the end.

In general, 2 good principles are:

1. Put the punch at the end of a sentence.

2. Put familiar information at the beginning of a sentence and new information toward the end.

The passive voice can help you with both of these design goals.

Orwell talked about where the passive voice is most dangerous/bad. It mainly comes down to thoughtlessness or insincerity. The passive voice removes or hides the actor, so it's useful for people trying to cloak their beliefs or hide assumptions.

"Politics and the English Language" is a great read, as is the book "Style."