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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

This started when companies decided that labor is fungible.

The moment you admit failure as an employee, you are out of the company. And no for most people it is not easy to find a job that will not disrupt their lives (aka move cities, change financial planning, even health insurance).

So employees do what they have to do. They will lie till the last moment and pretend that the initiatives they are working on are huge value add for the company.

In the past you knew you would retire from your company, also the compensation differential was not that huge across levels, so there was little incentive to BS.

Today everything is optimized with a horizon of a financial quarter. Then a pandemic hits, and we realize that we don't even know how to make freaking masks and don’t even have supplies of things for more than a week.

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Great points. I was also shocked to see on an example recently that even basic computer literacy is gone. We visited a couple of friends of ours recently. And as things go, at some point they (non-tech folks) asked me to help them with some printer settings on their new laptop - I am sure we all had experienced this many times over. So they pass me the notebook, not connected to power source. I noticed the battery was low and ask for the adapter to connect it. I proceed to tell them it was not a good idea to let the notebook battery go so low and that they should operate it on battery only when they don't really have access to power supply. The response - they had thought, they way you use a notebook was analogous to the mobile phone, i.e. you charge it up then use it all the way until the battery drops low, then rinse and repeat, etc. The smartphones have ruined our society in more ways than one.

> was also shocked to see on an example recently that even basic computer literacy is gone.

Even with people that work with/in software roles there's often shocking knowledge gaps in areas that they work in. I've worked with more than one front-end "engineer" that only understood React--they had no conception of DOM APIs or that React was an abstraction on top of that whole underlying environment.

Even creating a static page with a simple form was create-react-app for them.

I feel your pain, the quotation marks are spot on. It does not help that they are usually former political science or media graduates who decided they will make big bucks in "tech". Very hard to work with those people, just because they entire background is do damn orthogonal to a classic engineering background.

Which company is willing to develop employees in deep technology for the long run? All of the frameworks were built with the explicit goal of abstracting the engineering part and ensuring they are easy enough for someone with a bootcamp experience to start contributing. Aka chew employees till they burn out and spit them. Rinse and repeat.

From an employee perspective, lets say I am a computer scientist, why should I spend precious time to develop myself in the fundamentals of Web when my manager just wants me to pump out React and Express.js code 24/7?

And for my promo? Well I will just point out that the system became slow and unmaintainable, propose adopting a new set of frameworks, cash the checks and move on to other pastures.

All the incentives are wrong.

Well, that's the problem - too many people motivated only by the paycheck/career. It used to be different, people without deep technical background were largely doing things they are more competent in, and the software, for all it's troubles, without idealising the past, was a few notches higher quality than today. Myself and a lot of people I know, became engineers because we liked working with the machines. Not because someone offered us a lot of money, that came as a consequence. I couldn't imagine for example retraining myself e.g. to become a lawyer if I had a guaranteed 2x the income I have now. It must be horrible for people who force themselves like that. More than once I've heard frontend "engineers" complaining bitterly about supposed 'unpredictability' of computers, whenever they accidentally switched off some environment variable or something to that order. Just do what you enjoy, money will follow.

This was inevitable, now that people are growing up with touchscreens and app stores. 'Content consumption devices' rather than proper computers. And so much digital content competing for their attention.

To be fair, charging your notebook at 100 all day is going to degrade the battery pretty quick. Using it unplugged until it's low is actually the correct procedure.

I think most charging controllers have decided that holding charge around 70% while plugged in is best.

It is true that ~70% is a good idea, but most charging controllers are designed to give a full charge because they have no way of knowing when the user wants a 100% battery because they're about to go out or 70% because they're going to be plugged in for a while.

This can be changed in software, setting it to 70-80% or having a toggle is best for the battery.

If you were storing a laptop, it would best be at 50% or so. The battery is under less stress at that state of charge (SoC), so the battery will age more slowly.

If you have OSX, you can use Al Dente[1] to limit SoC to 70 or 80% while using it to reduce battery aging. There may be similar settings on Windows depending on your laptop's manufacturer.

If you can maintain a limited SoC rather than running the battery down, that's most preferable.

Otherwise, discharging lightly (but not below 20% or so) then charging to 80% or so would be a good usage pattern.

It's helpful to know that many chargers are designed to achieve 1C charge rate (this excludes "fast chargers"). That essentially means they go from 0 to 100% SoC in one hour. So start a 30 minute timer when you plug in electronics to charge, and you'll gain about 50% SoC.

[1] https://github.com/AppHouseKitchen/AlDente-Charge-Limiter

Well, no. It seems to be something that spilled over from the smartphone usage patterns. Because for notebooks which are plugged in, the notebook is supplied from the power network and the battery gets charged only if necessary, by applying intelligent logic. For example my Legion notebook only charges the battery when it's below a certain threshold. Think this is by now the case even with the most low-end notebooks. Plus the non-linear nature of consumption on a developer notebook makes the battery as power supply for serious work un-reliable. Try running a few database containers in your local environment while sitting in a one-hour conference pair-programming with video on and tell me how far you get with that 100% charged battery ;)

Your point is well taken, but I wouldn't call your anecdote a matter of "basic computer literacy". I've been using desktop computers regularly since the Apple ][ era, but I've never owned a laptop or had to worry about charging one.

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