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^ and this is why technical managers are so problematic.

a manager who worked as a developer for 3 years some 10-15 years ago is not in a better position to estimate the work than an actual developer with the same 10-15 years of experience. But they think they are.

And it's not just managers that have this unfortunate attitude, I see it in a lot of PM's and PO's as well.

> There are several times where, after discussing some estimates with my developers, it turns out that the overall approach was inefficient. By pointing them in the direction of a more efficient approach to the problem, and leaving them to work out the details, and making them feel free to discuss other alternatives, we have been able to get stuff done in reasonable time.

I doubt it. What I've seen is corner cutting get called efficiency only for the system to devolve over time.

What's worse is this is exactly what I meant about trust (or lack thereof). If your team is recommending an approach, take it. Believe it or not, they're aware of time.

There are always going to be times when corner cutting is needed, but if you ignore the technical needs your system will eventually be mired in shit. And your developers don't want it to be mired in shit. That you think you know better than them is telling.

I'm trying to understand what that quote means.

Is it that they feed themselves first and only give what they don't need and that amount grows as their own income/wealth grows?

I wonder if that was Apple's CSAM stuff.

Funnily enough, after transferring everything to the new phone, the first thing I did was go through all my photo's and start deleting a lot of photos. I didn't realize it, but any time a photo is texted to you it saves it (makes sense, I just never thought about it), so I ended up deleting random photos going back years.

The charge port had gotten so finicky I couldn't get it to charge half the time and it was really a matter of economics. Spend $200-300 (or more) asking someone to fix it or spend a bit more and get a new one, so I decided to spend a bit more and get guaranteed good hardware.

I just really lament the form factor change.

and that's a large part of what I meant by trust.

Even something as simple as believing when a developer says 3 weeks for something.

Is it your supposition that managers should be doing things like code reviews to ensure quality?

If they're not working at that level, why isn't the output enough? Developer X's solutions are solid, developer Y's solutions tend to need bug fixes for the next 2 months, who is performing better? Why can't a non-technical manager do that too?

> Would you say I don't "trust" the team by not allowing them to work in a silo?

Yes, this means you don't trust them.

As I've already said, I've been doing this for roughly 25 years now. I can tell the difference between a technical decision and a business decision.

Even the wording ... "by not allowing them" implies both that you don't trust them and you don't have enough respect for the authority you wield to avoid using it cavalierly. I mean "by not allowing them to kick kittens". Sure, if they're about to start kicking kittens, #savethekittens. Otherwise, let them work.

Because here's the thing. Shitty managers don't know they're shitty, if they did, they would stop being shitty because recognition is the first step to becoming a non-shitty manager.

Because it's one thing to tell me all of the developers are inexperienced and don't have these skills so you don't trust them. It's another to claim you DO trust them and treat them as if they're inexperienced developers.

> and I'm not sure why you're confusing the two.

pegged you correctly.

> So many competing things

certainly, I just wonder about IQ. Of course IQ is itself an inexact proxy for things such as processing speed but the correlation does exist so something is going on there. Whether it's causation or not, who can tell.

I just think the idea is interesting. People often think of the body's ability to maintain itself as sort of set in stone based upon DNA, and of course there's truth to that. But we also know the body can learn, that's literally what vaccines do. So the question becomes, if the unconscious mind can strategize it implies better or worse outcomes based upon "decisions" and learning. Peanut Allergies are less likely to exist in populations that are around peanuts than those without. We know this, but I'm not sure I've seen anyone explain the mechanism that causes this to be true.

I'm also not a biologist so it's probably completely ignorant, but that doesn't stop it from being fun to think about.

I'll add one to the list just because it's been on my mind the last few weeks.

There's a correlation between IQ and general health, and most of your "processing" is subconscious.

Could this correlation be due to high IQ brains being better at strategizing and organizing the autonomic systems in the body?

That jumped out at me too, but I decided to let it go :)

> Were they a great manager simply because they let you do what you wanted, without any deeper guidance or feedback?

Why do I get the feeling you're a technical manager trying to rationalize why you don't trust your developers?

The entirety of your second paragraph speaks to a belief that developers can't manage themselves. That without a manager, no work would get done and no software written.

But having been in this game for roughly 25 years now, I promise you I know how to get software written successfully. What I need is the manager to __believe and trust__ me when I tell them something. There's a vast difference between a negotiation to figure out what can be done in the next 2 weeks and arguing with a fuckwit who thinks they know better than you despite moving into management after 2-3 years of software development.

Why do I feel like this thread is giving the word emergency an existential crisis :)

To be an emergency or not to be an emergency, that is the question!

This sounds so familiar.

I've seen so many problems caused by not having clear direction from leaders. I once pointed out to the president of a small/mid-sized company that he was acting CTO and it was hurting the company. All department heads reported to him, but he's non-technical so it was a matter of convincing him what the best thing to do was.

What ended up happening is political shenanigans from these department heads (2 of the departments were technical) because there COULD NOT BE clear direction due to the non-technical nature of the CTO. I recommended he hire an actual technical CTO who could call the technical department heads on their bullshit and actually get a meaningful direction going between the two.

I've seen variations of the headless leadership too many times over the years.

The single best manager I've ever had was completely non-technical. Some of the worst I've had were very technical.

The difference between them is who treats me with trust and who doesn't, the technical/non-technical divide doesn't matter.

Agreed.

There are only two windows machines in my house.

1. work laptop

2. gaming machine

I tried converting the gaming machine over to Linux, but it's just not there yet. It's making huge strides and I'm super happy about it, but claiming that most or all games run on Linux is waaaaay overstating the reality.

Thank you for saying so.

I have so many car stories from when I was young. Cars that had no floor (you could literally see the street as you drove), to cars that needed 2 people to start (solenoid bolt was stripped so it required someone holding it in place).

I've been driving my current vehicle since 2004 (a corolla, actually) and I plan on driving it for another 15-20 years if I can. The one thing that would convince me to get rid of it is if it started leaking oil. I've just seen too much of that when I was young, constantly putting oil in because it's leaking and it's too expensive to fix.

To this day it feels magical to have a reliable vehicle I know will start when I turn the key. That stuff sticks with you.

I blame the landlords.

For example, they bitch about how hard it is to get tenants out of the house due to existing laws.

That's absolutely true, but what do they think the laws were put into place for? On the whole, they cannot be trusted to be fair. They did it to themselves.

You still get protection from a debit card but the bank will cancel and re-issue since it's considered a point-of-sale. I've had to do it twice. Banks are required to do this due to consumer protection laws. I actually think the CC protection leads to more fraud, I've seen over and over people on this very website say things such as I'm being silly for how careful I am with my debit card because the CC company will just pay the fraud. I think it creates more risky behavior. It would be akin to wrecking into people out of spite because you have car insurance.

As for renting a vehicle, their requirements are usually a bit more stringent, things such as showing more documentation that I live where I say I live, they'll put a hold on a larger amount, but I've never been outright denied from renting a vehicle for having a debit card.

Of course, having said that, I was denied the last time I tried to rent a vehicle because they had started running credit checks and I have no credit. This despite the fact that I had been renting regularly from them for 7 or 8 years (a few times a year). Can you imagine thinking credit was a better proxy than your own records for determining someone's trustworthiness?

I've never liked rental car companies, they're all shitty in 1 way or another, but that for me was the last straw. It will be a cold day in hell before I ever rent a vehicle again.

Instead I went out and purchased a vehicle to do exactly what I was trying to do with the rental, I posted about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34099429#34114741

I'm not even sure it's faster.

I flew out very early one morning and put my toothbrush, etc, in a small plastic bag and stuffed it into my duffel.

The scanner detected the liquid so they pulled me to the side. As soon as the TSA agent saw the bag with the toothbrush she made a "ugh" sound, had an annoyed look on her face, then closed everything back up and let me through.

Which tells me this is a very common occurrence.

I was in a conversation on HN the other day where I pointed out certain behavior was unconstitutional. The person replied that it was legal.

Sure, it's legal, but due to the interpretation issue you mentioned, I fully believe it's unconstitutional.

here's the link to that conversation if anyone is interested.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34053704#34055711

this year I purchased a low-milage 99 Ford Explorer XLT for $650 and put a couple thousand into it (guy thought he was taking advantage of me). I didn't have to put nearly that much, but I did for the purpose of long-term maintenance as I want to have this vehicle for years.

The back is big enough to fit a twin mattress, so I did exactly that. I then purchased one of those bags you can strap onto the top. I can now do things like drive down to water that's 4 or 5 hours away and stay for the weekend before coming back (gf loves fishing).

w/i the last month I took it on a 9 hour drive down and back (so 18 hours total) and it ran extremely well for a vehicle that old.

I'm super happy with it and it's one of those things that rolls around in your head until you finally commit and you wish you had done it sooner. So for me, now, unless there's a time reason I wouldn't fly even outside of a 10 hour drive.

And a large part of that is, as you said, the way you're treated like a criminal.

Just thinking about it, I can't wait for summer to show up :)

The ensuing shit storm wouldn't be worth it for them, not for something like this.

> I think it also indicates that we’ll see a price stagnating base-model phone and an ever increasing top-tier model as the companies explore how much people are willing to spend (a Corolla vs a Mercedes).

I don't think so.

A Mercedes will get you laid, the latest iphone won't and likely never will.

cell phones stopped being status symbols long before smart phones were created by apple and I don't see them going back to that.

As a counter-point I went from an original iphone SE to the 3rd gen iphone SE this year because it started having major problems holding a charge for any length of time.

I much preferred the old form factor and would readily give up the faster processor, etc, for it.

I love when you google for something and in order to stretch the content out 80% of it is completely unuseful, barely relevant, content.

"How do you change the sandpaper in a sander" and most of the article is explaining why sander X is the best sander on the market.

> I see low-quality scraper domains which have ranked highly in their search results for years but never seem to be de-ranked despite just displaying content from GitHub or Stack Overflow.

I flat don't even bother doing "X vs Y" type searches anymore when looking for a compare/contrast with two things. It's just not useful anymore for exactly the reasons you've stated.

I think you're getting downvoted but I agree with everything you've said.

So many tech people think that if there's an explanation it legitimizes the end behavior, but I emphatically disagree with that.

It doesn't matter WHY the browser is popping up a window that is indistinguishable from the surrounding website, it's shitty, compromising, behavior. Any series of decisions that end up with that as the result is mistaken somewhere in the chain, even if the mistake is the lack of the decision "this will make it confusing to users so we can't do it".

I don't use the in-built payment stuff and had no idea it popped up a modal, but when reading the article I absolutely had the same thought you did. Why the fuck would you do that?

And the answer is going to be "user experience" as if allowing a website to style that payment modal comes anywhere near allowing a site to style an inline video player. If you don't think user safety wrt payments isn't more important than "user experience" then what the hell is? Your head isn't on right.

I experienced this once with my mother, jesus H ... Good luck getting her to stop installing random "cat cursors" for windows.

This attitude is why a poor person will effectively be put in debtors prison and no one bats an eye. It requires "someone important" before people think maybe it actually happens.

wut?

he was arrested in the bahamas, the bail terms came AFTER the arrest. How the hell does someone breach bail terms before they're arrested?