spaetzleesser

That’s actually very good

The previous generations didn’t exactly set a good example for healthy, impersonal and professional argument.

Are there any communities that are really based on merit?

“Do these people not realize how annoying their process is and how talented people don’t have to put up with crap like this?”

Easy. They select for compliance, not skill.

“ Qualities like duty, loyalty, initiative and industriousness are deemed weaknesses.”

Wherever you look, loyalty is for suckers. Be it as employee, car insurance or cell phone plans. Only the new guy gets respect.

The current implementation of Agile in most cases is pretty much the opposite of agile as described in the agile manifesto.

In my team we have reduced the process to having a simple backlog which we work through. But I have seen other teams where you spend enormous amounts of time on planning but it’s frowned upon if you think any further than the next sprint. Just check off tasks without any thoughts about long term architecture or strategy. Basically just a sweatshop with replaceable “resources” (the company doesn’t hire “people” anymore but “resources”)

I have been to New York and I have also seen Paris during a strike of garbage collectors. It gets ugly very quickly once collection stops.

The number one thing I have noticed in New York was they seem to make trash collection as loud as possible ideally at 3 in the morning :)

“I used to wonder how on earth nazis and communists and the like were able to seize power and control of a population, and now I've seen it”

That’s how the US has worked for a long time. See the war on drugs and mass incarceration, laws against black people and extreme political polarization. There was always a group of “others” that people wanted to get punished.

I bet if Trump had been a little smarter he would have got away with a lot more while people cheering him on. But it seems a lot of political institutions are eroding so maybe the next strongman will be able to go way further.

A small hardware store in town went out of business because they were forced to close. Same for a lot of other small stores. I could understand reducing number of people in the store but closing totally while keeping others open simply didn’t make sense. I think the exceptions had more to do with successful lobbying than with health reasons.

“ That said, companies are often wrong to hire externally as they misattribute their problems to their employees instead of to their own leadership. It is easier for them to blame others instead of themselves.”

After talking to a lot of managers it really seems that a lot of them are deeply skeptical of the people they themselves have hired.

The same happened in CA with some stores being open and others closed. Why was Home Depot open? It made no sense in terms of spreading the disease . It was just arbitrary BS.

Closing the beaches was stupid too. If there ever was a safe place then it was the beach or state park wheee uou are in the open and the window blows.

Why do firefighters have no effect on tourism? Without them you can not run a city. Same for many other jobs like garbage collection.

I enjoyed programming in the 90s and early 2000s but I feel it’s turning again into tedious grunt work with scrum, agile, yaml configuration files and needlessly complex systems.

You need to nail one use case really, really, really well and impress people. When they ask about other things you can then state that they are in development.

There was a thing on NPR a while ago. It basically claimed that plastic recycling was invented as PR strategy by the oil/plastic industry. When you look at the facts it makes sense.