smurph

I agree that male friendship has suffered a lot over the past few decades, and the decline of overtly exclusively male organisations for adults probably has something to do with that. The only real exceptions I can think of are athletic leagues and religious activities. Basically you can play in a men's soccer league or go to a men's bible study and nobody will think it's odd or sinister, but joining an overtly male only social club will probably be viewed differently. I wonder if the guys in this article would have just joined a local lodge of some kind 50 years ago and been happy with that.

The Detroit that existed for most of the 20th Century likely can't exist again in the US unless the whole nation's economy changes. You'll never have a large population of low (formal) skilled workers making good money because their experience and a general shortage of reliable labor. The corporation has figured out for the most part how to move the know-how from the worker's brain to a corporate training manual, and unskilled labor is no longer scarce anywhere for long since relocation is a lot easier than it was 50 years ago. If Detroit is going to turn around, it is going to look like most of the other American cities. Lots of young creatives move in, followed by trendy bars & restaurants, followed by young white collar workers who want to live in the new trendy area. The white collar workers price everyone else out, and the process starts again in a new neighborhood. The white collar workers could come from startups, but the area already has plenty of them working for established businesses like the auto companies. Downtown Detroit at that point would just be a bigger Royal Oak or Ferndale with some high rises and old money sprinkled in.

His direct boss probably has little or no say in how much he gets paid, and the person who does influence that has probably never met him or even heard of him. Welcome to corporate America for the working class.

I've noticed the same thing. Management tends to be older white men with MBAs and there's a big culture divide between them and the developers who control their destiny. So what do they do? They go hire a guy about their age with a CS degree and an MBA to be the trusted representative and they pay him more than any developer. It doesn't just happen in software either, I've seen the same thing with biologists at bio tech companies. Some brand new white baby boomer ends up in charge of the biology team that's been there for years all because the white baby boomer boss doesn't want to handle the mostly female and non-white employees.

That sounds like a regular lead developer, but I agree a good lead dev is worth more than any software architect.

They don't say anything is illegal, they say it is 'prohibited'. They don't say who it is prohibited by, and since it's clearly not the federal government you have to assume it's just prohibited by the NFL itself. Of course nobody has to listen to a goddamn thing the NFL says, so why include the message? It's likely a CYA thing on their part, since it gives them the power to essentially disown any event or analysis that is related to their broadcast. Also worth noting is how the NFL is obsessed with law enforcement culture. Lots of the league employees are former police and FBI, so there is a good chance they actually think they have some kind of authority over what a person does or says in relation to the NFL.

Am I the only one who thinks it's insane that someone can go from an undergrad CS degree to a failed startup and then directly into (presumably well paid) consulting gigs? I'd be pretty wary of a consultant who's only work experience was starting their own company and failing.

Merge commits from pulls really bothered me at first, but as I've used git more I've realized that the hoops you jump through to always rebase and avoid them aren't always worth it. A merge commit might clutter up your git log, but it does more accurately describe what happened.

Big defense contractors have a yearly VRIF (Voluntary Reduction In Force), which is when they offer slightly better than average retirement packages to expendable older employees. Young people would never get the offer (because they couldn't retire) and important older engineers would also never get the offer, even though many of them wanted it. This is a big improvement over that since it can be used by younger employees and the employee decides unilaterally if they want the package.

A lot of kids are attending college because it's a status symbol for their parents, and I think it's been that way since the 90s. I remember being in high school and hearing about my friends getting in big fights with their parents because they did not want to go to college, which of course was unacceptable in white upper middle class suburbia.

I actually really like the Zune music player that you could (still can?) download from Microsoft. I never even owned a Zune, but the player software is a lightweight WMP with better design. Sure the Zune Marketplace/pass links were all there, but they are easy enough to ignore.

I've had federal employees tell me with a straight face that waterfall development is the only model that works, and that is why 'all of the tech companies use it'. These people have often gone and gotten certifications for stuff like six sigma and CMMI. They will never change their tune. You basically have to wait for all of them to retire. The average government tech worker is so different from the commercial tech worker that they may as well be a different industry all together.

The bevel is pointless. You won't be able to notice it in on smaller versions of the logo, which it most of them.

In my last job I had to lead a team of people and I had one developer in his 50s and one in his early 60s. They were fine, I loved working with them. The guy in his 50s was just a awesome engineer who could code circles around me and everyone else on the team and was still getting better every year. The guys in his 60s wasn't as good, but he was on his second career after going back to school for CS. So his technical knowledge level was about the same as a 26 year old.

Now I work with an engineer in his 50s who did not know what a VM was before working with me and still writes everything in procedural C. Our product still has a serial port on it because of this guy. So it goes both ways.

I would say hiring a bad older engineer is actually more harmful than hiring a bad younger engineer because your team might subconsciously give the older person more benefit of doubt, and go along with more of their bad decisions. The solution is to not hire bad engineers or to fire them quickly.

Joel said it best: Smart and gets things done. That's really all you need. They don't need to be rock stars or 10xers or top 1%. You just need to be able to give them something to do and have confidence that it will get done in a timely manner and the code won't end up on Daily WTF. They need to have enough passion to bring some new knowledge to the table once in a while without you explicitly telling them to go learn about X. They need to get along with their teams. I think if you just push hard for those simple things, you will end up with some top tier developers anyway.