artsyca

Not to mention once metrics become targets, they cease being useful as metrics because they're apt to be gamed.

It seems you simply can't win when you need to guard against mindlessly selfish behaviour.

Totally happening in the corporate world. Rewarding employee mentality while hoping for not employee mentality.

let's get this straight --

You're doing the thing you love most in all the world, surrounded by people who feel the same way.

You've gotten every perk known to man from ping pong to free booze.

You're getting paid handsomely, more than any other humans on the planet.

You've created a buffer zone between yourself and the client that could withstand a rocket blast from a scud missile

And you are allowed to wear whatever adolescent threads you choose up to and including socks, sandals cargo shorts and a spiderman T shirt ..

Yet you're not having fun and you still call it a job?

CydeWays honestly what more could anyone wish for? Isn't it enough that you've bucked every professional convention? Aren't you satisfied with the greatest free lunch in the history of human enterprise?

Could it be that all these enticements are what's actually robbing you of the fun you so certainly deserve?

Who knows maybe I've read one too many Aesop's fables.

And what's worse, you wouldn't consider a dress up job to save your career, nor does it strike you odd that there are no dress up jobs to be had.

By now you still haven't noticed that casual culture is a poor substitute for no fun and you're stuck treating your job like a job, so what exactly is the upside?

That's the spirit mihaaly. Now follow this line of reasoning a little deeper like good little knowledge worker my dearest colleague.

It's only a job if you treat it like one.

But then again you most likely refuse to dress up for it, amiright?

And you'll throw every prevarication in the book at me as to why dressing up for work isn't necessary.

And I'll tell you that's employee mentality talking.

And you'll say but I'm an engineer.

And I'll say dressing up is fun, for children and adults alike

And you'll say fun has no place at a job.

And try as you might despite all of your engineer's training you won't be able to see there are more than three ways to frame any context.

CydeWays, I like you don't get me wrong.

We go about claiming that we're not saving lives and then we invest our entire existence on this earth towards things that aren't fun? We're going further than not saving lives bro, we're wasting lives.

I'm glad I have the shirts on my back bro and your comment has inspired me to mend my fraying dress pants.

By the way I think he's being rhetorical, not literal. It's an order of magnitude thing.

i.e. I had o(n) where n < 1000 and now I have o(10n)

Sounds like something I would write, kudos. Bro it's not about getting more t-shirts. One day you may wear collared shirts.

If it ain't fun why do it?

I'd venture it's not so much the technique behind the individual layers but the understanding of the need for all the layers and their interactions and the best practices in given situations.

We're prone to tediously repeat the same conversations over and over and take the cosmetic approach rather than the fundamentals-first way of doing things.

I gotta keep it real for you sir banana, the only way to have a legit conversation on this platform is to have an equal number of up and downvotes.

I don't want to sound like I'm pontificating or defecating on the corporacy at everyone's favorite hardware company but it strikes me that these sorts of lapses are cultural and stem from this tedious emphasis everyone places on having "relaxed working environments"[0]

Does it surprise you that the product of this culture also has relaxed security characteristics?

[0] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/culture-at-nvidia/

This is often because people don't understand that the real deliverable is knowledge gained throughout the process and the software is actually an artefact of this knowledge.

I often refer to this diagram when in doubt

https://www.scrumexpert.com/knowledge/how-to-detect-agile-bu...

Agile bullshit starts with the attitude that some of our people are not client facing

I know the best art is created by embracing constraints.

This is the comment I'd like to end my HN career on. Goodnight for now and very pleasant dreams.

He's the inventor of the danged electronic dictionary man.

10k steps is about 6km give or take.

This is a bit of a tangent but I think we can all agree that with the absolute glut of endless streams of information we are now relying more and more on heuristics to determine what information is relevant than we've ever done.

Yet people still go on about never judging books by their titles and all that jazz.

Is it finally acceptable to use appearances as a heuristic albeit an imprecise one and to expect people to put some effort into their appearance in aid of this?

I mean as valuable as every potential colleague, aquaintance, or other professional contact is I don't have the ability or the wherewithal to get to know everyone I meet on a fundamental level without any external manifestation of their inner nature.

Is there a balance between click bait and utterly banal that we can apply to articles, and people too?

And Mario kart! Greets to all of my 64-heads! Man I still remember the late 90's.. Not a care in the world saving up all my money to buy the next cartridge..

How does that bode for the vision fund? Doomed from the start?

Naw dude let's do this! We need to form a small support circle I'd be very grateful and indebted to our meeting.

A very generous and thoughtfully worded reply. Very grateful to your kind consideration of this subject.

It's incredibly complex and a lot of the evidence is circumstantial and layers of cultural cruft have certainly confused things but I'll say this --

People in the past didn't do things because they were stupid simpletons relegated to history books, they did a lot of things for real reasons and if we were born in those days we'd probably see the truth in spending a third of our income on clothing befitting our rank.

We ought to know by now the difference between an intractable argument and one we just can't understand yet, we seem to believe just because we can't understand something it can't be understood.

In my view people back then were very much worse off and struggling much more between the throes of life and death with sincere passion.

Having good clothes actually somehow conferred an advantage to the wearer that went way beyond societal perception or even shallow cultural biases to the core of their ability to live day to day.

You'd think we would've invented fast fashion earlier, but we've been wearing all sorts of costumes for millennia.

In the modern age our vehicles and electronic devices have taken over the cultural status symbolism perhaps but we've let our clothing sense lapse dreadfully into what I consider neo-renaissance pomp mixed with dark ages peasantry.

Anyway tl;dr - people in the past were struggling to survive yet still found some reason to invest a lot of their income in clothing.. Maybe there is something we've missed?

Join the conversation bro -- we can arrange a jitsi meeting

I have just taken the leap and signed up for protonmail it's my {$HN_HANDLE}@protonmail.com

Dude let's have a nice warm beverage and compare war stories

Dude read the first paragraph of "Call of Cthulu" by HP Lovecraft.

Unfortunately that ship has sailed for us, there is no going back all the way..

But you should take comfort in that you're not alone.

I have a lot I'd like to share with you, would you be into having a virtual cup of tea or coffee?

In case you don't know what I'm talking about

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

You know, I'd have to suggest "Intergalactic Pot Healer" as a soft introduction into the whole scene.

Thing about reality being slippery we have a tendency to acknowledge the fact when we're reading the books but then to comfortably return to our regularly scheduled mundane existence the minute the books are closed.

I still haven't been able to reconcile the sheer madness of the world with the workaday banality and obedience I've experienced in this cursed industry.

The only way out of this industry is to eat a poisoned apple.

Spoken as a software professional and computer scientist.

Human beings rely on signals to communicate efficiently, especially in larger groups.

In the absence of well defined signals people will use what they have on hand and the results will be arbitrary at best and unhelpful in all likelihood due to propensity for misinterpretation and misrepresentation, especially since they may rely on inegalitarian mechanisms like gender or hair style or age or other intrinsic characteristics which may be gamed or are inaccessible to all.

By dismissing corporate culture so egregiously we have also done away with most established signalling mechanisms without offering any new substitutes.

The definition of dressing up in this context is in reference to establishing and manifesting visible and unambiguous signalling cues for such things as rank, status, team membership, privilege or clearance and other relevant metrics.

Since we're so sensitive to traditional methods it's difficult to convince anyone to put on a shirt and tie and quit acting like children but nobody has offered any better alternative than a printed T which in my professional experience and opinion is an all-too-naive solution that fails the military grade requirements after which we've modelled our private corporations.

Imagine you're a new member on a team looking around the floor for someone with an admin override. You need to ask six people before you get referred to Joe who has the keys to production. If Joe had a stripe on his jacket you'd be able to tell right away.