irishloop

I think commenter is drawing a parallel, with leadership demanding both high security and high speed, and then putting pressure on engineers to not be "losers" if they can't do both, leading to exactly this scenario.

Is this true? Every place I DoorDash from is a place I know and have been to

I don't think there's any particularly good evidence of this other than blind optimism.

Too many abstractions are bad. Too many code duplication is bad.

Part of being a good engineer is finding the right balance.

I know engineers who would gladly duplicate code all over the code base to avoid creating a new abstraction.

I know engineers who create polymorphic abstractions for a single caller with a very obvious set of parameters.

So much of wisdom is in finding balance and not being dogmatic about rules.

I think there are a few things that make it "worthy" of literary consideration:

1. Read a straight horror story, it's quite a surprising twist at the end

2. A critique on the senselessness of following tradition just for the sake of it -- the way a society can just go along with something without really understanding why

3. The banality of evil, and how it can often look like something totally ordinary, rather than some nefarious demon

I loved it when I first read it -- it truly shocked it in middle school and I still have a visceral feeling when thinking about it many years later

> with a pre-built you're at the very least paying for someone to assemble it for you, so it's always going to be more expensive as a baseline

Except isn't it possible that pre-built companies actually get better deals on hardware bought in bulk, and therefore could offset the labor costs with cheaper materials?

Ruby has "undoubtedly" been dead for at least a decade now, or so I've heard. Glad to hear Python is undoubtedly joining the party.

Surely nothing has ever done wrong with this limitless source of clean energy to give people pause? There's no uninhabitable areas of the Earth due to this?

Looking through this list makes me feel as if I am not a terribly good programmer, as these all feel well beyond my capabilities.

Or maybe their actual problems are caused by automation, tax cuts on the rich, and a lack of social safety net that lets people live in dignity, but the media they consume mostly blames immigration and crime.

Political "reality" is rarely objective.

Yes. But also, all technologies will eventually be used as weapons. And so its important for us to understand how they can be weaponized and to consider the social cost of that weaponization.

> If you don't own your infra, you are dependent.

You're dependent regardless. You are dependent on your service provider, your hardware, your UPS battery backup, your RAID drives being easily replaced, your backups.

It reminds me of people who raise their own chickens and think they're living off the grid. But they need the materials to build the coop, the chicken feed, fencing, etc.

Do you think there's a way to train focus?

I think I'm at a stage in my life where I can accept that I am not, nor will I ever be, one of the best programmers