Scubabear68

This.

I know many teachers who absolutely crow about the total lack of metrics or accountability. They absolutely love it.

As a result, good teachers aren’t recognized, and bad ones proliferate.

The comparator group is every kid in the state at the same grade level.

It is very shocking to see an 8th grader with a 3.5 GPA come in at 9 percentile in multiple subjects.

It is all over the place. Some districts are great, some are terrible. There is a theoretical framework of accountability at the County and State level, but it is not enforced hardly at all.

So it is up to local school boards and superintendents, and the local municipal tax levy. Most medium and small districts’ BOE members are regular citizens who are elected with no qualifications at all, and lean on the Superintendent for everything. So if you get a bad one (and it is common), your district is screwed for many years.

In NJ, there is a severe deficiency in this in many schools, and federal funding does not come into play directly. Here, when your school can’t provide services, they can be forced to pay for another school that offers those services. Our district spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year paying for out of district schooling because they don’t have the resources themselves.

In our public school,the true tragedy is how the school union took advantage of Covid to push for teachers to have almost zero accountability or responsibility anymore.

Remote learning was an obvious disaster, but problems continued post-Covid. Some teachers stayed remote (!), requiring assistants in the classroom. Teachers rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them. Class is often little more than an email “read chapter 7 and do the problems”.

The icing on the cake was the grading system that gave kids a B for showing up.

Ourselves and many parents didn’t know how bad it was until standard testing came up and our kids were scoring in the single digits in percentile.

We have since moved to a private school for both. The first year was rough as they over came the Learning deficit and learned how to study again, but both are back as normal students with the kind of understanding in math, science, reading, etc they never would have gotten in public school.

I am shocked - I completely agree with the author on all points!

Sequence diagrams are awesome. The rest of UML (and all the crazy Rational Rose nonsense!) was so much angst over such petty things on notation.

And then there is the dumpster fire called Enterprise Architect…

I have lived this in contexts, it is absolutely true. Energetic dumb people get noticed and often promoted based on their energy and seeming ability to move fast. That quickness is usually due to the fact that they don’t do any proper due diligence or analysis, they just bull ahead.

The trick is to catch them early enough and get rid of them as quick as you can.

Seen this both in startups and big companies where a person was fired a year to the day they were hired (or whatever their contractual “safe period” was).

I have also seen orgs where they did not catch them in time. You do not want to work there.

This could be problematic if there’s an anvil in that cardboard box.

Just sayin’.

I disagree. Lost momentum is lost. Blowing up your life means you start from a low state, and have to start all over again.

It absolutely can be positive. But it is not at all guaranteed.

Sometime it all works out. And, sometimes, you throw away what seems to be “bad” in the moment, and find yourself much worse off with your new choice.

The flip side of blowing up your life regularly like this, is you are throwing away momentum you may have accumulated in your current life.

I gave up on this article about 1/3 of the way through. I could fill dozens of pages with my aimless years after I quit college, but I wouldn’t think to bore people with it.

It’s not FUD if you are making hundreds or thousands of calls. Many “chatty” apps slow down dramatically when the wrong network boundary is drawn in the code.

The difference between a function call and a network request is vast for even modern networks.

I’m in my 50’s in the North East in the US. I did a little college but it also was not for me. Interesting that you mention “actual job setting with stakes”, that was my exact problem with college - my brain doesn’t like to work on artificial problems that have no point.

I have worked as a senior dev, architect and technology strategist for over three decades. The lack of degree almost never has come up. I started in pure tech, then was in capital markets for many years, where ability matters a lot more than academics.

Note that you have to be an autodidact for this to work. You have to be able to learn a lot on your own. This is a big problem for many, many people who need a structured learning environment to understand a topic. It is also somewhat unique to software developers and related roles.

Of all the stupid tech terms in the world, for some reason “data lakehouse” grates horribly in my head every time I hear it.

It took us a long time as an industry to recognize that popularity of “design patterns” was due to problems with languages. And the best fix is to improve the language.

I started my first professional job in 1988. I remember when Ruby was first introduced in the early 90’s.

My post was not a criticism of Ruby, just the fact that its usage has been on the decline for quite awhile now. I work for a 10,000+ consulting firm and Ruby demand is very light.

The data in this article seems very inconsistent and not grounded in any kind of reality I see. Most likely because the sources are poor, as are the categorizations.

Ruby should not be the top of anything in 2023.

“Vice President” is a very loaded term. In finance nearly everyone in IT is a VP. In other industries, VPs are very high level powerful individuals.

C-Suite should always be carved out, not mixed in.

All the comp numbers appear too low, and it doesn’t say if this is total comp or just salary.

Biden had been a U.S. Senator for decades and chaired powerful committees.

Age may be an issue but I don’t think his experience should be in question.

I think a lot of it comes from the Spring framework. People saw those gigantic stack traces with all the crazy abstractions and huge names, and took it as the norm.

It doesn’t have to be that way (see also Guice).

But the Uncle Bob effect is sadly real.

My 11 and 15 year olds would like to have a word with you.

This filter may seem unfair, but I have found several short stints on a CV to be a strong signal that they may be short lived with us, too.

It depends on your personality.

Some people are “serial starters”. They have enormous creative fire, feel a burning need to create something new, and once it starts taking form and people start using it, they get bored and move on.

Others are better finishers. They will patiently build out the core until all the required bells and whistles and niceties are there.

It’s very rare to someone good at both, such as Linus Torvalds. Maybe that is a third category, someone who starts a few great things and sticks with them for life?

Headers and C style macros are probably the most unfortunate aspects of C (and by extension, C++).

So many hacks in compilers to try to work around this. A shame there is no language level fix for this nonsense.

Really wish there could be a C++—- that would improve on C in areas like this, and avoid all the incredible nonsense of C++. And no, not Rust or Go.

I stopped using Google Maps in my car with CarPlay, because the map would lag by about 5 seconds to reality, which is really bad at say 55 mph in a place where you’re not familiar.

Been using Apple Maps now for six months, and very happy with it. No lag, and very useful directions like “turn left at the second stop light from here”.

I feel like C++ needs to go into its own category, seemingly infinite features with only thinly veiled illusionary safety.

In this case undeveloped. We Also have a lot of preserved land around us, but it is not ubiquitous.

Even then, preserved land can be tricky. A lot of State-preserved farms and lands were recently threatened by a project that was seeking Federal eminent domain rights. Federal ED would have wiped out the State level conservation.

Fortunately we were able to persuade the developer to give up (over the course of 7 or so year fight).

Agree on the quote. I love that our house is bounded on three sides by 100 acres of undeveloped wilderness in Western NJ. In a two minute walk I can get away from houses, see the mountain park across the valley, hear the coyotes and owls, maybe spot a fox. At night, the stars are bright because we have no street lights here.

Humanity can intrude, but even that can be sounds from a bygone era, like the steam train blowing its whistle as it’s leaving the New Hope station across the Delaware from us. There are few sounds more warming than a train whistle echoing off of valleys.

By comparison it takes some getting used to driving into even moderate suburbs.

Not bad, but this is very high level. In Payments, the devil is in the details. Things like tokenization, security authorization, fraud detection, various kinds of payments rails, recurring payments, cross border payments, etc often matter.

The author: “Christopher Eisgruber is president of Princeton University”.

I’m hardly a math genius, but isn’t this basically because he’s using polar coordinates, where nearly any trend is going to look like curves and spirals?