Scubabear68

> I've always felt that hierarchical, subservient thinking is strange, and I honestly never considered my former bosses to be "better" than me.

It is generally always about politics. I have been through many re-orgs, various people go up and down in esteem like the tides based on whatever the prevailing sentiment is this year. Position in the hierarchy reflects that along with personal relationships with the right people, and a big dollop of luck.

There is little correlation of ability to your level, of course. Success often depends on who is under you, and how you can spin their output (good and bad).

I don’t think most jobs need a comparison to a military hierarchy. In general, lives are not on the line.

It is entirely possible to be friends with employees. You are not a king, or a despot, or a colonel in the armed forces. The first big mistake new managers make is to try to still act like a single contributor. The second one is taking the management part of the job too seriously.

My cousin is a toxicologist and he was talking about this in the 1980s - that the public had no idea how incredibly toxic Tylenol is and how easy it is to over dose on it and cause significant damage to your liver and other organs.

I only meant that specifically in regards to this topic, “finding a mate”. The era was fairly repressive on the topic and so many euphemisms and religious over tones to everything. This was refreshingly straight forward.

There obvious historical issues with this book that make it hard to apply to today, but I was still surprised at how well written this was for it’s time.

This also shows the importance of birth control in women’s lives. In 1946, sex was a roll of the dice to being pregnant. The odds are now massively improved to avoid pregnancy by using modern birth control methods.

My version of “dead” here means rarely used for new development. I relied on it for years, and even I finally gave up and do script level work in Python instead. Particularly because the many CPAN dependencies are aging and starting to rot from neglect.

I think we are actually mostly in agreement there then.

Perl was invented because the gap from shell to more capable languages was (and is) really big. Languages like Python and Ruby didn’t exist yet, and Perl had a really, really strong sweet spot in text processing.

I don’t think you’ve seen the kind of scripts the person you are responding to is talking about.

I have, and mentioned one lower down in the comments. Unix philosophy was great but does not scale well in terms of maintainability or efficiency. Invoking processes over and over again loops is godawful slow. And the horror of complicated shell scripts is legendary.

I know people dump on Perl all the time, I know I do.

But it was a critical part of computing history. Perl did a tremendous job of bridging the gap between shell commands and shell scripts and “big languages”. Way back in the early 90’s I took a complicated shell script that took about 2 hours to run this huge text processing job , rewrote it in Perl and it took about 20 seconds, and was more maintainable to boot.

It really helped boost software development in the 90s, even pre-CGI script.

The Perl source itself was also very interesting, with numerous optimizations to make it fast (again, for its time).

What killed it were the never ending eccentricities you ran into, endless foot guns, and of course Perl 6 never being delivered.

But it really was the weird shit that did it in.

You need a reality check, dude. The fact that you think you can judge people’s children better than their parents based on a few sentences on HN lays bare your poor assumptions.

I’m sorry, are you indicating you know my kids better than I do?

The kids got “B”s because everyone who showed up got Bs. It was social promotion.

This became painfully obvious when the first marking period scores in many classes was F and D in the private school. And was backed up by equally bad standardized testing scores.

My kids aren’t top students at all. They both have learning disabilities. My son is highly sports oriented, my daughter is very musical. They both have trouble with traditional subjects.

They both got “B”s in public school, despite their standardized tests showing them in the 15-20th percentile.

They both struggled with their knowledge deficit transitioning into the private school.

They are doing very well now. Not straight A’s, but they are learning what they need to learn and flourishing as people.

I have seen this repeated for many other families. A lot of public schools are simply awful.

My post wasn’t contradictory, because you missed the part about status.

Our private school teachers are treasured, and are honored to be part of the long tradition of this particular school.

My children are also the same children they were in public school, but they are learning more now because they have better teachers. The knowledge gap of them transitioning from public to private school was considerable.

Intrinsic motivation is a factor, I agree with that. But it is more than that. Public schools (as a rule) are not getting our best and brightest, they’re more getting those who are settling for it for their job.

* Editing to add I agree on lack of unions in private schools. Our public school teachers in NJ at least have no real accountability at all.

Teaching is not nearly as hard as you lay it out to be.

The problem is teaching is los pay and low status in most places, and as such mostly attracts people who are terrible teachers.

Our kids are in private school now because our public school is a dumpster fire of bad teachers and admins. The private school teachers don’t get paid a lot but they are valued and highly motivated to actually reach kids. The difference is astounding.

And the private school teachers aren’t doing anything exotic or difficult. They are teaching just like kids were taught decades ago. Heck, my fifth grader is learning Latin.

This is an interesting article, but I think it is heavily skewed toward the author’s goals in life and who they innately are. A guide for a more introverted person, or sports-oriented person, or highly social person would be vastly different.

In particular, I think the author makes the mistake of believing everyone must be a creator. The reality is most people aren’t good at it, don’t like it and don’t pursue it. And that is OK.

It also underestimates how young 14 really is, and how much still needs to be learned in general, not just in school but in life.

The difference between 14 and 18 is a vast chasm.

I had the same reaction. Particularly on every commit being independent. Seems like a lot of work that will mostly be wasted.

I guess if your work approach is exceptionally chaotic, it makes sense. But I don’t think I would ever have the time to be as chaotic as the author seems indicate they are.

I think writing is a very unique area, so the lesson here may not be generally applicable. Writing fiction is incredibly time consuming, and there’s no where at all to hide - there your work product is, for all to see.

Plus, you can’t scale it with help. Sure, there are editors and some people collaborate, but pretty much it is all on the author to produce.

Other businesses you can hire people to take some of the load off.

So it is like two screens before the “real” interview? Weird. Sounds like a very lengthy process!

I like the writing on this article a lot more than I thought I would, some of the advice is sound - but the big caveat is most of this has nothing to do with a first round interview. What the author describes here are pieces that will come up in a typical interview process somewhere, but probably not a first round.

First round to me is typically a “bozo filter” - screen out individuals who are clearly unqualified or who are an obvious bad fit.

Any decent dev should get past round 1 without significant prep.

The issue isn’t “using lambda functions”.

The issue is using them poorly, and in particular stringing them together into a sort of pipeline.

It is almost ridiculously common anti-pattern these days to see teams stringing lambda functions together for no good reason other then “cuz serverless”, or “microservices”, for what really should be just function calls in a single process.

Developers are losing touch on what process boundaries mean, and the result is brittle and poor performing systems.

Nope. What Grease helps show is how boys are allowed to be covert about it, while girls are expected to be more, shall we say, circumspect.

Also, in captain obvious mode, the concept of "reputation" moves in opposite directions between the two sexes. At least in the 70s.

In the year 2023? I'm not so sure.

Grease’s songs are not innocent, only Sandy’s songs are, the men’s songs all about what teenage boys want out of teenage girls. Some of the lyrics are even cringeworthy now.

Note: I absolutely love Grease!

I also got 11%. I suspect foul play..

The differences are three fold:

- You can pick your private school. There is choice. Public school, you can’t (with some caveats). People who say you can just move so it’s not a monopoly are fooling themselves, moving with a family is a very large decision not taken lightly.

- Private schools are aware you picked them and are paying them directly with your hard earned dollars. This motivates them to provide superior service. If they don’t, people will send their kids elsewhere.

- Many (most) private schools do not have a teacher’s union. My kids’ teachers are very proud to be non-union.

These three facts make an enormous difference.

I am not sure what a “state k-12 network” is. I don’t think such a thing exists in NJ.

I have looked at our budgets, IT is almost a rounding error out of the $25 million/year.

Most of the “synergy” of combining schools is supposed to come out of reduced administrative personnel.

Except that never happen. Quite the opposite - administration swells and the combined regional district ends up costing more.

Private schools are acutely aware that you are paying them to educate your kid, and have mobility if you are unhappy. The result is higher efficiency.

Public schools are effectively a monopoly with a captive audience,and in NJ at least, no true accountability. The result is they spend money on all sorts of crap having little to nothing to do with education.

The myth of common infrastructure is a common theme in schools. Our own district “regionalized” across three towns to get those infrastructure savings.

They were non-existent.

The reality, in NJ at least, is that a school’s budget will balloon to the maximum size legally allowed, and expand from there forever. On occasions when stupid BOE’s back themselves into a corner, they rook the residents into a referendum to get a zillion dollar bond.

The common theme in public schools is: mandatory funding via taxation, and no accountability at all.

In our case, the school was OK but became progressively worse as a new Superintendent came in.

We do check our kids general knowledge, but we don’t grill them regularly or anything. We are all too busy for that, and given the amount of time they are at school, and how much it costs, it’s not unreasonable to assume a bit that it going well when the report cards look good.

Our first hint was when our daughter stopped having any homework. Her teacher said it “upset the children’s work-life balance” (really!). We started to see declining proficiency in reading and writing at home.

Then the standardized test scores started dropping precipitously. They are reported on by grade, and you can literally see which grades have the higher percentage of bad teachers from that.

It is crazy that our kids were in a legally required and tax payer funded school for 6-7 hours a day, 9 months a year, and weren’t being taught.

The problem here is we are required by law to pay taxes for schools, and the people running the schools have almost zero accountability on anything.

In our tiny regional district, the yearly school budget is $25 million a year, for less than a thousand students. Our combined municipal budgets, by comparison, are about $6 million.

For that $25 million a year, we are forced to pay, we get crap teachers and kids who can’t read or do math.

We are now in private school, for a total of $25,000 a year we pay ourselves, and we still have to pay the school taxes too.

It is absolutely outrageous.