Tarucho

The article uses the same "smart riot girrl" marketing that has been used here in Argentina to bring young woman that embraced feminism into programming.

It´s most probably a paid ad in disguise (and I can point this out because I know a big consulting firm CEO that paid local media for this kind of "articles")

Curious thing is these articles always portrait a single cool young woman in their early twenties, never a woman with kids or a woman in their 30s or older.

Sadly this is not about equality at all, it´s about the employers having a bigger workforce so that they can reduce salaries and discard the old.

Computing is an smoke and mirrors kind of market.

This article assumes the overengineered abstractions make sense, as if they were all part of the same puzzle. Sometimes the code is just an abstract mess.

In my experience is not so much about under or over engineering but about how the dependencies and the side-effects were handled.

Given the choice of working on 1 of 2 code bases that solve the same problem I will choose the one where the dependencies and the side-effects are more up front.

Yes, time to invest on Viagra-making companies.

But this happens in tech management too. Last 20 years: CMMI? RUP? PMI? XP? Scrum? Design Thinking? Project to product management?

This is not exclusive to dev work. Same can be said of managers.

Problem is management is a pyramid (there is no place for everyone, even the best of them) and in some cultures (I´m in South America) a wealthy and contacted people club.

Even if you are really good, you will not get promoted if you came for a non-wealthy background.

>One problem in these discussions is the curve of value delivered by an individual developer in a particular situation is short-and-wide and while I agree the senior developers are on a curve shifted to the right, there’s a massive amount of overlap.

This can also be said of managers. Then why aren´t they discriminated by age too?

Technology startups have a mandatory narrative of "someone young, cool, smart and with a great idea...".

Anyone past 38 (if I remember correctly PG wrote 38 is the cut off date for founders) is too old for said narrative. (BTW: I´m 43)

Maybe you should game the system and match with a young and cool co-founder that does the PR part.

It´s not bitterness. It´s a reality. In fact I worked as a manager for quite a time. Most managers are status seekers, and the freedom remote personnel has devalues their status, and they don´t like that at all.

Managers are status seeking people.

Part of the status is signaled by showing how many <<subordinates>> they have and giving orders to them.

Part of the status is signaled by beign able to be out of office whenever they want vs the worker bees that must be at the office 9-to-5 M-to-F.

Having to politely ask things on slack to a worker bee that is probably working lying on a couch with a smoothie in it´s hand is a manager vision of hell.

tl;dr: it´s not a lack of workers performance, but a wounded manager ego.

edit: I have never been downvoted as fast as in this case. It took less that a minute. Did I struck a nerve?

Companies tend to work (as we humans do) under the principle of least effort.

More employees means more HR work, more administrative work, more legal work, more work in general, and unless the benefits of hiring more people are great, they will just abuse the employees at hand.

But are the regulations enforced?

What is fueling estrangement is not a shift in values but a shift in expectations. Failure is not an option these days.

At first I thought the same as you, but for some chronic illnesses as rheumatoid arthritis where there is a lot of pain but no cure, the ability to turn pain on/off as needed (and under proper guidance) is probably something good.

Is Copilot aimed at programmers or at non-technical hiring managers?

I mean, it goes right away with the devaluing narrative of programming that is going around from the last couple of years. To the "anyone can code" narrative we are adding "more so, if they have AI assisted Copilot"

So, after 14 months of isolation and being in front of screens this person feels unhappy? And the cure is to be grateful and find awe in the small things because some study said such and such?

When did we forget we are still social animals?

The cure is to be in contact with nature and with fellow human beings (better if both are at the same time), but sadly even before the pandemic this was kind of a luxury. It is as if most people don't want to go out or interact with other people anymore. It's all about streaming services, social media and competition.

And what about asking devs to do QA while evaluating their performance on dev story points per sprint...

The broken practice in our industry is management...

It´s been a while since I coded some front-end. What about issues with different browser implementations? jQuery used to handle those discrepancies.

Unless you have no options (but you should check them thoroughly first), burnout is a road paved with self denial and failure to assess one own life priorities.

> I have been anxious/depressed for around a decade

I guess your first step is to get this sorted with specialists.

There is no point in asking what to do with your job when you don´t feel like working at all.

COM was pretty neat indeed

The problem is you don´t get to choose the content of your ruminations. When you are experiencing severe depression judgment is misguided and you don´t get to choose the contents of your mind the same way you don´t get to choose the contents of your mind in the middle of a maniac episode.

Maintenance is hard and once you are past the 20% that handles 80% of the cases work feels like maintenance.

Hard work + opportunities leads to a better life. Hard work alone? nope. Go to a construction site and do the work the low graded workers do for a day. Tell me if this is not hard work. Tell me where are they going to be in 10 years?

At the same time opportunities are getting more and more scarce as wealth is getting distributed between a smaller set of people.

People can be fooled, but not all the time.

Problem is computing is overstaffed with non-technical managers that believe programming is a thing for little employees.

Enterprise Agile has made this situation worse.

The article looks like a paid ad in disguise.

What kind of improvement will this bring to the seasoned nodejs dev, that it will leverage the learning effort?