thrower123

Joined 8 years ago

Karma
4,136
Submissions
2,870
Member since
Sep 18
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Recent submissions

Comment · 4 years ago
Did I miss something in the Framework -> Core transition where strings aren't UTF-16 internally anymore?
Comment · 4 years ago
I welcome anything related to programming and especially the history of programming that pops up on here.

There's an incredible amount of ignorance of what has been done before and why things are the way they are, that I encounter continually

Comment · 4 years ago
I've got about three meetings in me on an average day before my batteries are exhausted and I am effectively done for the day.

When agile-ish processes use up on of those lives every day, that leaves very little slack before recurring customer statusing, actual troubleshooting, or an honest-to-god productive planning meeting wipes the counter out.

I suspect you could waste a lot less time if meetings required agendas distributed beforehand and minutes distributed afterwards, but absolutely no one does that, or would read such material if it was produced.

Comment · 4 years ago
This may be false memory, but I'm almost certain Beevis or Butthead introduced me to asshat heckling 90s metal videos
Comment · 4 years ago
The people I know who call themselves effective altruists seem to have gone beyond any actual philanthropy at this point and just go on tirades about AI risk and the singularity.
Comment · 4 years ago
We seem to be very worked up over a virtually unknown new C-replacement language that's more likely than not to fizzle and become yet another 0.1% also-ran.
Comment · 4 years ago
Nothing in all the years I worked offline in offices convinced me that whiteboards were particularly useful.

At least we eventually had high-resolution cameras in our smartphones so we could photograph them when people insisted on doing planning on whiteboards - more than once I've seen software architects lose days of work because the janitors were overzealous with their dusting.

Comment · 4 years ago
I've never gotten burned out because I had a lot of work to do. Those are the good times.

Mostly I've gotten burned out because I couldn't bring myself to care and because I was bored.

Comment · 4 years ago
Working remotely is better than all of those things, iff you commit to doing things correctly and writing things down.

Doing things correctly would help if you were in the office too, but you can paper over the inefficiencies of doing things incorrectly by wasting more time on the backchannel communication face-to-face.

Comment · 4 years ago
I very much think that the "give me money" model is a really good one.

There's this very odd strain of infantilization that runs through a lot of corporate office management, like they are trying to reward second-graders with a choice from the prize box if they collect enough gold stars, rather than dealing with fully-grown adults that have their own children.

Comment · 4 years ago
I really dislike this when it feels forced and artificial.

Also there's a strong risk of doing some little employee-appreciation gesture that backfires and pisses people off. Most of them do, because it feels like the company has cheaped out, or worse, spent a shit-load of money on something that you hate and then expects you to be grateful about it.

Comment · 4 years ago
All I can say is thank god most of the stuff I work against has the source published on Github, and most of the rest is in decompiler-friendly languages.

This leaves the completely inscrutable and mostly undocumented REST apis that I've got to trial-and-error at, and always ask whether I did something wrong, the other party made a breaking change, or its just a Tuesday and the infrastructure is derped up.

Comment · 4 years ago
That sounds reasonable, but the requirements you've sketched out as the secondary role there require a top decile programmer.

The median level of skill and conscientiousness (particularly) is just so low.

Comment · 4 years ago
No, this is just not how developing software works.

Throwing more lower-skilled people at a project just makes it move slower and reduces quality.

Comment · 4 years ago
There's always alpha in anything that provides enough signal to flip the bozo bit to off.

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