stiglitz

My theory is that it’s an intuitive rate limiting scheme devised to cope with the corporate fire hose. There’s no limit on the amount of text coming into an office worker’s inbox in a unit of time. But if one focuses on verbal communication, there’s always going to be a single stream.

Personally, I don’t do this; instead I deal with the stress of the fire hose by grinding my teeth to stubs at night. And for the messages I don’t get to, instead of “let’s discuss”, the sender gets nothing at all.

I’ll never forget seeing a girl in a cafe highlight, line by line, nearly an entire page of a textbook. Watching the page curl from the wetness, almost as if writhing in pain.

It's a Skinner box of productivity. Of course it's polarizing.

My own enthusiasm varies wildly day to day. I've been sick of squinting at punctuation marks and opening sequences of of tabs to trace through annoying abstraction layers for a long time; so I'm really excited to see those activities effectively automated away. But the same tools enable some really bad behavior (in myself and others), which really gets me down.

Kudos to the lucky few artisans that the modern economy will support, but becoming a stocker at Ikea will probably be more lucrative than picking up a saw and plane.

Facebook is widely thought to cause significant societal damage; anyone who thinks so, would probably consider employees of Meta to be the ones lacking empathy.

I think the two concepts are not easy to disentangle. It isn’t the craftsman who decides the chairs should be built in an assembly line- it’s the owner, who wants to maximize the number or consistency of chairs. And the abstraction of that assembly line is what keeps the craftsman from saying, “that is the chair that I built.”

Described by Marx (in too many words, unfortunately) as “alienation”

As someone with a EE degree followed by 12 years of SWE work, that pivot is quite daunting. A degree is just a piece of paper to get you an entry level job to do some real learning IMO

In the Windows team (back before the test org was decimated) I saw the described "class divide". Anybody who was good enough would switch from SDET to SDE [disclaimer: obviously there were some isolated exceptions]. The test team produced reams of crappy test frameworks, each of which seemed like a "proving project" for its creators to show they could be competent SDEs. After the Great Decimation my dev team took ownership of many such frameworks and it was a total boondoggle; we wasted years trying (and mostly failing) to sort through the crappy test code.

This was all unfortunate, and I agree in principle with having a separate test org, but in Windows the culture unfortunately seemed to be built around testers as second-class software developers.

I’ve always been bothered by instances of your first example, and I mostly use “XD” instead of “:)” to sidestep the issue in my own writing.

That doesn’t seem like an accurate synopsis of the article at all.

As a Windows driver developer: LOL

Another possibility: your teams are working less now.

Speaking of paying close attention to the mundane, it’s an escalator.