rprospero

That's interesting, because I had the opposite experience. I started getting into Lisp around 2004, but bounced off of the community because the culture I was experiencing hewed heavily toward imperative code and global variables in the name of efficiency.

I specifically remember the breaking point being third-party library where none of the functions had any parameters. Instead, everything was controlled by using dynamic binding to adjust the variables within the functions. Various forum members kept praising its beauty and elegance, but I found it needlessly confusing.

I have a soft spot for the Lisp family of languages. I've been using Emacs for almost thirty years and have used both Scheme and Clojure in production. However, my experiences back in 2006 have left me with a permanent bias against Common Lisp.

It's been an odd running theme for me today that I've misinterpreted posts. Up until your final sentence, I thought that the thesis of your post was:

The standard document may say one thing, but what people do in the real world is the real standard. If your software has issues with the world's most popular IMAP server, you need to adjust your software to be compliant with the standard.

I'm personally more sympathetic to your actual conclusion, but it's odd how often a single argument can be used to support two conflicting beliefs.

When I was in the Boy Scouts, a local judge came to speak with us about the legal system. I asked a similar question and he admonished me that innocent people never wind up in court. He explained that every person who is in a trial (criminal or civil) is guilty of something. A judge's job was merely to determine if the prosecution or plantiff was correct about what the defendant was guilty of. He was very annoyed that ignorant people, who had never been to law school, kept spreading this nonsense that some defendants were innocent.

The truth is that, if a candidate competent enough to work for us, then they can get hired by a firm thirty miles down the road who pays way better than we do. Thus, one line of questioning during the interview process is figuring out why the candidate wants to work for US instead. Usually it's because they want more exciting work or are interested in the work we are specifically doing. If someone just wants ANY job, it's a red flag that they've applied to the wrong place.

I also find this thread interesting from the opposite direction as someone not in the Bay Area. In the past ten years, the longest job interview I had was two hours long. Honestly, most of the interviews I've been in (on both sides of the table) have been closer to half an hour.

Many things about that company were not idea - the founder left his CEO position in handcuffs. However, the policy was not communicated to new and future hires in any manner. So why would anyone stay?

The founder was very public with other companies in the area about both his policy of firing 10x developers and hiring any warm body that could put a resume in his hand. He told stories at local business meetings of the various people he hired who couldn't find a computer and were fired on the same day. So, when you found out what the corporate culture was like after about a month on the job, you had two options.

1. Stay on for a year. This cemented to every hiring manager that you were a 1x developer (because you kept the job), but absolutely not a 10x developer. You might get a junior developer position somewhere else, but never more than that. 2. Immediately quit the job. You now had a one month stint at the firm on your resume. Every hiring manager in town knew that 5% of people with a short stint were good developers and the remaining 95% were people who just finished "COBOL for Dummies". You'd best just leave the gap in your resume if you didn't want your resume in the trash.

I happen to work at a government job partially because I saw how my father was treated by the private sector. However, our institution is failing at the requirements that you put forth. The government ministers complained back in 2015 that the independent quantitative measurements weren't accurately capturing employee productivity. As you would expect from Goodhart's law, there certainly were certain employees being underpaid and overpaid, respectively. Thus, the measurements were scraped. However, the bureaucracy has prevented a new set of metrics from being put into place. As a result, I've been working for eight years on what I was told would be a six-month probationary salary because there is literally no mechanism for anyone to receive a raise. Thankfully, recent events are looking like this might change to something sane in a year or two, but the last proposal I saw for someone moving out of the bottom of a salary bracket was: "candidate has won awards from professional bodies in at least three countries across at least two continents".

When I was young, my father worked for a place where asking for a raise was a fireable offence. The founder had been a pioneer in the modern cattle-not-pets attitude toward servers, except he applied it to developers. When an employee asked for a raise, it meant on of two things:

1. The employee was a vain troublemaker who had over-value what they were worth in the market. Firing them would not only remove an inefficiency from the system (as they were likely not to work as hard if they believed that they were underpaid), but it would also helpfully remind the other developers that they were all expendable.

2. The employee was a 10x developer who was vital to the company processes and could command a much higher salary somewhere else. Even if you gave them a raise today, they could be hit by a bus tomorrow. The best course of action was to simply rip off the band aid. Fire the employee, have security immediately escort them from the building, and begin triage to ensure that the critical systems that they wrote/managed could be handled by the next resume in HR's pile.

The line I will always remember is: Developer are like eggs. They are heavily undervalued, but also will crack under too much pressure. Thankfully, like eggs, you can buy them for cheap in packs of twelve, so it doesn't matter if you break a few.

> It's impossible to plan without an internal monologue

I once had a teacher claim that people who claimed to have aphantasia were lying, because those people have read books and it is impossible to read a book without picture the scene in your mind's eye. Are you citing the same source that she was?

Even more self-explanatory is "Duck into the bathroom. Cover the toilet seat with toilet paper. Hold your bladder until you're on the toilet."

I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to be holding onto. Do I briefly cover my head with my arms, then stop covering my head to hold onto the table? Do I hold onto my head while I cover it? Do I cover my loved one's head and they cover mine, sharing our last moments in a loving hold?

Now I'm beginning to wonder if I made a massive assumption that I would be covering my head with my hands. That's what I would do during a tornado, but maybe I'm supposed to be covering my head with a blanket so my hands are free for the hold on part?

Honestly, my facetious hold my bladder advice seems more apropos than anything I've managed to come up with for part three.

What I find extra-annoying about the tracking is that it stopped pretending to be helpful. I remember chatting with my spouse on Google Messenger around 2012. We were discussing what to have for dinner when whatever the google assistant was called at the time popped up a message

"Traffic is unusually heavy right now due to an accident on Kirkwood. If you want to pick up a pizza from Avers and be home by six, you should leave work in the next seven minutes."

Was it creepy? Hell yes, but at least it was useful. The companies haven't cut back on spying on me, but, in an effort to pretend that they aren't, they've stopped sharing the useful information with me. Instead, they keep it to themselves to mine for the perfect car advertisement to send to a guy who doesn't have a license.

You're right that this place is ridiculous. However, as I mentioned in a cousin comment, I don't see the stigma and you haven't done a good job of explaining it.

Is it because the word "pig" implies that the victim hasn't kept Kosher and that the scam is god's punishment for that? Is there a general consensus that people who are "butchered" deserve to be murdered? This stigma was obvious and immediate for you, but I'm not picking it up. I don't wish to perpetuate the stigma, but you haven't shared what it is.