SicSemperUranus

So far 3 out of 5 items in the list have been called into question. Seems like an entire domain of knowledge might be a bit too broad to be summarized into listicles, even with the caveat that they are "rules of thumb".

A bag of flour would be noticeably better.

I didn't really believe in schadenfreude until this happened. Now, every day is filled with pleasure!

Finding good devs is hard enough without a dictatorial style of leadership. I find that people like democracy, for some reason.

Don't forget to cook and eat that potato!

It's a magic trick!

Your sarcastic implication being that being good at managing car and space companies make him good at managing a social media company? Not only that, good enough to be better at it than his predecessor? Not only that, he's better at it within days of arriving?

Occam's razor says he's a big impulsive dummy.

Are people really expecting Twitter to survive The Musk? His rash actions almost feel like sabotage. I honestly expect Twitter to be dead or irrelevant in 2 years at most.

I am actually familiar with some of the research actually, but thank you for your condescendence.

I didn't mean to imply that the SAT or grades are not predictive of future performance, only that lower socio-economic statuses will correlate to lower SAT grades in the first place, ie your (a) proposal in the second source.

From this same source:

> The SAT-grade relationship is not an artifact of common influences of SES on both test scores and grades

To substantiate my initial comment, test scores are highly predictive yes, but as you just linked, SES is highly predictive of test scores (and this is only for people who get to the damn test). This is the tautological part. High incomes make people test well which lead to jobs with high incomes. But since this correlation is not 100% but merely very high, we can pat ourselves on the back and say hey it's accurate!

Articles that defend the accuracy of the system tend to implicitly defend its legitimacy, which I think is a much more important question than "is SAT indicative of future performance" when considering whether the SAT is useful.

> Test scores are highly predictive

Any study in this area that doesn't control for socio-economic factors is near useless, because it mainly predicts that children of successful (ie rich) people will likely grow up to be successful (ie rich). This is almost tautological.

> in favor of other methods for classification and discovery

Aka the toxic engagement trap. I miss the days when unfathomable AI didn't dictate what's popular.

There's still a dislike button, it just doesn't show the like to dislike ratio, so it's barely worth pressing. The outcry at the time seemed to indicate that this is explicitly to appease bigger media companies, who put out crap and don't care what anyone thinks (but do care about what people think other people think).

It depends what the point is. You wouldn't let a motorcycle participate in a horse race. I think there's a place for AI art and it's fine if "manual art" remains the same. The difference can be arbitrary at times, but art often is.

So your argument is Amazon is too dumb to be a threat? Even if we assume this is true for the present, seems very short-sighted to me.

> never found a legacy JS codebase that has a robust test suite, so any refactoring I do can be hard to test and verify.

Wouldn't you just... make a test suite?

> Let me rent real servers, but expose it in a "serverless" "cloud-like" way, so I don't have to upgrade the OS and all that kind of stuff.

I think you're describing platform-as-a-service? It does exist, but it didn't eat cloud's lunch, rather the opposite I expect.

It's hard to sell a different service when most technical people in medium-big companies are at the mercy of non-technical people who just want things to be as normal as possible. I recently encountered this problem where even using Kubernetes wasn't enough, we had to use one of the big three, even though even sustained outages wouldn't be very harmful to our business model. What can I say, boss want cloud.

How to know if a Google project is getting shut down: Is it ad-related? If not, it's already dead and just doesn't know it yet.

"return to Uranus" sounds like a SpaceX kind of mission!

That was very informative, thank you

To me this is obviously unethical, but wouldn't this also be obviously unconstitutional in the US? At least if done deliberately? 14th amendment and all that.

Would you consider candidates outside the US? e.g. in Canada?

The article is paywalled, but this seems like a nothing burger.

The point of ESG isn't to save the planet, it's to make the world a better place to live/work in. Union busting is bad for workers and therefore society at large. What's the article's point? That point shouldn't care about social issues? Agree to disagree I guess.

But every community has their rules. Just because they're cultural rules doesn't make them anymore debatable.

You: Break user space. Linus Torvalds: We don't do that here. You: I feel excluded.

Good? If you want to do that shit, do it elsewhere. Don't come back. That's all the statement means: This is my standard as a leader and I don't have time to educate you. If you disagree, do it elsewhere.

Part of the issue with the mindset of never outsourcing mission-critical tasks is, if something is not important, why are we doing it? Do we just like wasting money?

For example, if I work at an accounting firm and we build our own account software (or modules, or whatever), is this development work not mission-critical? If the solution is good, our processes will become dependent on the tools, and the tools will need to be maintained and even improved.

So then, what can be outsourced? Team-building exercises? Not sure, but in any case, this "mission-critical" mindset should err on the side of always doing software development in-house. Which seems to me like a wise decision long-term, though it may seem too rigid a view in the short term.

Even if that were 100% true, people don't actually know what they want. "Business requirements" undeveloped in the minds of non-technical people are just ideas. There are immeasurable differences between what people think they want, what they actually want, what they need and what can realistically be done. Coaxing these out happens during the whole development process (even in a waterfall approach), because people are never as accurate as they need to be... Otherwise, they would not need software engineeers.

In a way, writing software is translating human speech into machine speech. Any good software developer is fluent in the "machine" part, but trying to "translate" from a language (and culture) you don't master is a recipe for disaster.

I agree, people who are only fluent in one language (and who don't study anthropology) tend to ignore the huge cultural factor in these things.

Indian people already have a hard time getting hired in your own country, you think your boomer boss is going to go out of his way to get them? I strongly doubt this.

Outsourcing has been tried for a long time, if it was a permanent solution it would have become the norm. Not to say that there is never a time for it, but software is, ironically, where I think it's the least likely to work out, precisely for the reasons you cited.

Wow, as lifelong web developer, you really got fleeced. This reads like a list of rookie mistakes to be honest, but not just on your side. Agencies should know when they're too big for a client, and they often do. It avoids exactly this kind of dissatisfaction.

And yes, they made money, but the hit to their reputation is usually not worth it if you're their smallest client. I dare say they probably didn't even do it on purpose, they just didn't have the bandwidth to actually care about your project.

I've been looking at Scrum more closely recently, and I think this would have been a good use case for it (with you as a stakeholder). This goes toward your point of doing things one step at a time. Scrum sprints are short and deliver value consistently. Looking back, I wish I'd had to use it stringently while I was still working at startups; I believe we would all have been much better off.

Any rational individual can see this is chicanery of the highest level. It takes an entire committee to be able to rationalize away the absurdity.

> I find/found the lack of colloquialisms one of the biggest problems with it.

This is actually a big problem with how people perceive language in general. It's hard to understand if you only speak one language, but the idea of a language as a discrete unit is a myth. Here in Québec there is Québécois French, which in and of itself is a generalization, as many regions have different accents and expressions.

In France there are many kinds of French. Some people say they "can't even understand" people from a certain other region... That's pretty much where a dialect crosses the line into a language!

In general people will learn what we call "international French", which is spoken by no one but understood by all. But good luck navigating the subtleties of a French-speaking society without being familiar to their regional dialect.