fabianholzer

In corporations no good deed ever goes unpunished.

> I think we, very naively, thought that some hypothetical life of zero-thought pure-leisure was not only achievable, but desirable.

May I recommend Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" to you?

The reason for the existence of bloated bureaucracy is political will not the technical inability to automate processes before the advent of the current wave of AI.

Capable is the loadbearing word, the directors were all PhDs in math, science and engineering fields.

I dont subscribe to the strawman argument that engineers would naturally strive on their own, but neither does simply any form of management automatically add value.

I agree also that hero type devs are an indicator of problems

Bell Labs is an outlier in basically every aspect. Mr Kernighan lists stability of the environment with regard to funding, structure, mission as well as technical competence of the management as main drivers of the culture. This is just not the reality in companies that look for financial results on a quarterly basis and where the executives are MBA types.

I did not yet have a positive "oh shit" moment, but when the corporate manager types that could not deliver a "Hello world" if their live would depend on and would have had a sour look on their face when asked to pay license fees for a proper IDE a 10 to 15 years ago started pushing it hard, way before any but the resume-driven engineers: that has flipped a bit in me.

> What we don't need to do is to give everybody a Fisher Price toy with a "make it sound awesome" button.

A sincere thank you for this metaphor.

> I'm picturing Germany as Sideshow Bob walking right into another rake.

Speaking as a German with children: Completely apt image. Yet I would name several dozen of policies that are more serious "rakes in your face" than this. This is merely squeezing a little bit more out of the working population. Everyone knows that social security in the current state is a Ponzi scheme and what ever is collected is immediately redistributed.

This is nothing particularly new. People above a certain age without kids are paying a higher percentage from their income into the social security since 2005 when Gerhard Schröder was chancellor, and that's more than twenty years ago.

What this proposal would change is the concrete percentage. Currently 4.2%, 4.7% if it were enacted.

I use IntelliJ at work on a daily basis, and I assume that holds for a significant chunk of folks, who use Java in a professional capacity.

Be that as it may, the jurisdiction I am living in has an explicit right to refuse to testify against a spouse. It is wild to me that one can construct a crime out of that, let alone one that warrants a decade of incarceration.

Probably to be a high-church Anglican/episcopalian?

I do not want to distract from the content of the article, which is highly relevant for folks who built UIs with frameworks that are conceptually based on signals, but the way that the reading experience is designed really great, in particular the guided reading flow through the instructive code path is something that I rarely have seen done at all, and this even works pretty well on mobile. It's a delightful reminder on how a dynamic medium can be more than the simulation of print on screens.