Hm, accidentally hit the submit button before the reply was fully done. Anyway, I think the story point completed, tickets done, pull requests submitted or even number of commits works somewhat well for measuring developer productivity, as long as nobody is aware of it. The least productive developers I've worked with did tend to have very few commits in comparison to more productive peers, but obviously that'd quickly change if they found out that it's a metric being watched, I see no reason for why story points wouldn't cause similar issues. Fight to get the "easy points", less collaboration etc.
I'm also pro-choice, but this argument isn't very convincing to me. We don't apply the same logic to murder, theft or even drugs, so why apply it to abortion?
Seems a pretty obvious solution to this loophole is to reduce non-cash deductibles by what would have been paid in capital gains, and have the non profit pay capital gains when they sell?
It wouldn't be a HN thread without the top comment being something like a middlebrow dismissal (the comment you're replying to).
Of course there are cases where the company can influence a certain type of behavior, but I've seen several of these stereotypes in companies which definitely did not "cause" it. Pretty much everyone can be difficult now and then, but there are definitely quite a few chronic cases out there.
Tap water is expected to be included for free in Sweden, and I would be slightly surprised if that didn't also apply to our neighbors (Norway, Denmark and Finland). Getting charged for water is just as big a cultural shock for us as it is for you.
I'm sorry, but what? If you can't even remember what list/set/map whatever is called, how are you going to use them? We're not talking about exact syntax here, just what data structures you use...
Unfortunately that's the logical choice for an individual, and it's not unique to America (the percentage of SUVs is increasing in Europe too). Probably needs some type of legislative action to curb the arms race.
Superior is very relative. I'm sure the Japanese are quite happy with their extremely low crime rates and overall safe society. But yes, there are tradeoffs.
Weren't all gatherings banned, but due to different legal rights for protests they weren't? Framing it as an attack against religion is incredibly misleading in that case.
The entire point is that "an honest mistake" shouldn't be able to cause a large incident at a mature company. Requiring tests, code reviews, a test env, locked-down prod etc may slow down delivery, but it also prevents Andrew the sales dev accidentally corrupting the production database when he's doing a "quick fix for a customer".
The ones that don't die or get permanently maimed in an accident live long and healthy lives, you mean. Which is still a very large majority, sure, but dying from a road accident is still a way more common way to die in those countries (7-15 times more likely than where I live), and it's a sudden death that can happen to anyone of any age. A kid needlessly dying because his parent irresponsibly carried her on their lap is such a waste of a life.
You can make the exact same example, except someone without a driving license finds a car. I doubt you're opposed to mandating driver licenses, though.
You have "begonias for everyone to view" and purchased a bigger begonia (visible to everyone but not yet planted), and a stranger asks "when are you going to plant the big begonia?".
While that may be a reason, I strongly suspect the real reason is that engineers simply don't want to spend time estimating. In my experience most people think breaking projects down into small chunks and estimating each chunk is terribly boring, they'd much rather have bigger and less defined chunks so they can start coding faster.
I think thorough planning and estimations usually makes for both better and faster outcomes, but I'm unlikely to push for it simply because a full day of planning (or more) every two weeks is pretty damn boring. Doing some light high-level planning and diving into things is less efficient, but way more fun even if you end up having to backtrack more etc.
On the other hand, you really do need some kind of estimate. You'd never hire an hourly contractor to remake your roof if he refused to give any kind of estimate, why wouldn't the same apply to software engineering?
That being said, accurate estimates are usually not needed, but the order of magnitude is. Knowing if the change is days, weeks or years of work is important - and while we're bad at estimates, we're rarely "I estimated 2 weeks but it took 6 months"-bad.
Breaking projects down into <2 day chunks isn't a bad idea (although max 2 days is a bit aggressive), but those chunks are likely going to be useless to stakeholders and shouldn't be communicated outside of the team.
It's probably mostly learned behavior; many westerners have the same reaction to eating things like chicken heart or fish eyes, which other cultures eat without hesitation. That being said, usually insects being in your food is probably a bad sign (e.g. maggots in rotting meat), so there could be some innate skepticism perhaps?
I don't think the moat for food delivery is big enough that capturing the market and hiking prices is a realistic option. Uber eats already has plenty of competition (at least in my country) from foodora, wolt and bolt food.
Isn't it a bit strange to say "they should invest in it because over time it'll become profitable" if they previously had it for 25 years without it ever becoming profitable?
30 days in addition to national holidays, at least in my country. Those national holidays are something like 6-9 days extra paid time off (exact amount varies per year as some can occur on weekends).