blakeyrat

I wager the labor savings from SQL Server will pay for itself in a few months.

I have different priorities than you. In terms of IDE quality, debugger quality, flexibility (ability to use actual threads if you want them!), performance... in my opinion .NET Core is already so far ahead of Node.JS it's embarrassing for them.

The only thing I might stack in Node.JS' favor is their NPM package manager. Maybe. Possibly.

I can open all of those formats in Microsoft Word right now this instant. So.

Good argument?

It doesn't need to be. (Why the italics?) In fact I don't give half a crap about the implementation details of how it works. All I want is to be able to drag a little diagram from a paint program into my code editor and have it there in the code and then when someone else looks at the code they see the little diagram, too. Whether it's implemented by a "binary object", or by adding an additional XML file, or by a magical monkey from heaven reaching down and placing it there, I do not care. I'm talking about a feature I want to use, not about nitty-gritty implementation details.

As for "shunning other editors", well, frankly, why are we as an industry bending over backwards to support people using editors from the 1970s? Do you think Ford still builds cars with imperial measurements just so Old Bob the mechanic can keep using the tools he bought when he went into the field in 1968? No of course not, that's stupid. But that's exactly what our industry is doing.

The Xbox One is a combination of game console and DVR. It has no features designed specifically for workplace conferences, but of course there are tons of apps so it's possible some workplaces are using it that way. In between rounds of Call of Duty.

Meanwhile, Git has taken over all source control for development despite being possibly one of the worst applications ever created. (Hell, even Lotus Notes tried to be usable-- it failed, but it tried.)

It's a lost cause in this industry.

You spent (likely) years learning Emacs. How much time did you spend learning each of those IDEs you've tried?

You have to realize that psychologically: you like things you're familiar with, and dislike things you're unfamiliar with. That's how top-40 radio works. That's why everybody bitches over every new software update, even when the new version is provably better.

So of course you like the thing you spent years with over the thing you tried to learn for a week and a half then gave up on because Emacs is better. That has nothing to do with UX.

You could use a nicer font, for one.

I think we need to first get over the hurdle of "code == text".

I mean, the features you talk about are great-- but right now I can't even embed a little vector graphic explaining a function's flow in my source file. Every time I've suggested using a file format that allows things like fonts, styles, embedded images, to write my code, the reaction is always an insanely irrational knee-jerk against it. (Seriously, try it out with your programmer colleagues.)

(And to prod the bear a bit, a large part of the problem is the developers who insist in working in tools like the ones we're discussing here, designed in the '70s and using absolutely no technology that was invented after 1985 or so. Ludicrous. Imagine if any other industry worked that way!)

Then a couple days later, you found out they spent like an hour making ASCII art of some diagram because they couldn't just paste the actual diagram into the code. Sigh. Reason #3136269 I don't get along with other programmers.

I mean you're talking about advanced AI code that looks up Google links to explain code constructs, meanwhile 95% of the industry is using a code editor that doesn't even allow you to embed a link in a code file. (If you're lucky, it'll make an obvious URL clickable, that's about the best you get.)

It's been a couple years, but it used to be my hobby (after a Linux user told me their Linux laptop "just worked") to reach over and hit the mute button on their keyboard, which rarely worked.

Not sure if that trick is still effective. But the Linux definition of "everything works" is a little different than the Mac or Windows definition. It's more like, "everything a CLI-using geeky developer cares about works."

An opinion stated to a community that (generally speaking) thinks that Git is a pretty good piece of software.

Snarky, I'm sorry, but you're 100% right. I grew up in a world where there was tons of optimism in software development. Programs like HyperCard, FileMaker, Microsoft Access, Visual Basic/WinForms, RealBasic, etc. promised to make (the most common type of) application development accessible to everybody with minimal training.

HyperCard's most successful developers didn't come from software development backgrounds-- they were artists, journalists, historians, etc.

(See this excellent article: http://www.filfre.net/2016/10/the-manhole/ )

All that's abandoned now. The optimism is gone. Developers who gave a crap seemed to have disappeared a decade ago. The open source development methodology, who never gave a crap about ease-of-use even when Apple and Microsoft used it as the foundation of their products, have taken over all software development.

And I sit at my cubicle, thinking about the now-dead world that was emerging back in the mid-90s, thinking: I could have been a plumber instead.

Who told you Google had a reputation for good UIs? Every Google UI is atrocious. Gmail uses UI concepts that were tried and rejected by Microsoft back in 2000. (Drop-down menus that obscure less-used options under expandos.)

YouTube's ContentID UI deserves a special mention, it's not just awful, it's actively sabotaging people questioning ContentID strikes (90% of which are fraud.)

Or try the new Google Hangouts desktop "app". (Not really an app any longer-- now only the Chrome add-in is available.) It's hilariously awful. It's almost as if they're trying to sabotage their own product. Don't take my work for it, read literally any of the reviews on their own app site:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-hangouts/nc...

Sorry. I could rant about how terrible Google's UI/UX is for days.

The DEA is under the Executive Branch. Once Trump's sworn in, he's their boss. If he wanted to disband the office entirely, I'm not even 100% sure Congress could stop him.

My knee-jerk is that it's an East Coast thing. I've never been drug tested, and I've worked for companies of all sizes and types, nor have I ever heard of anybody getting drug tested in the Seattle area.

You say "jobs are moving to cities" as if it's a law of nature. It's not.

Maybe they're working on one. You gotta walk before you run.

A submarine would have to be very autonomous, though. Getting a high-bandwidth signal to it for real-time control (without it surfacing) would be a huge challenge. A surface ship can just use old-fashioned radio.

> So you're proposing

I'm not proposing anything. This is a casual conversation on a web forum, not drafting a party platform.

> a massive tax[1] increase

I'm definitely not proposing anything massive.

> on urban workers who live with urban compromises (traffic, high prices, crime, etc) to be near work so that other workers in the suburbs can enjoy big lawns and beautiful single-family homes?

I live in the suburbs and I have to deal with all of those things. Remember: my exact gripe is I have to commute into the city to be employed. While I'm there, I'm subjected to the same traffic, high prices, crime, etc. as all other city dwellers are. And I get even more traffic coming and going.

And I don't see anything wrong with people who want to own a lawn or a single-family home being able to own one.

> Well, that's been our strategy with these red state rust belts for decades

No it hasn't.

You know what? Nevermind. I don't want to get into any more political discussion right now. Just relax a bit. It's just a casual conversation on a web form, I don't run the RNC or anything and I wasn't drafting a law and I don't need to be yelled at for how wrong I am.

Companies are (generally speaking) founded by people with type-A "go go go!" personalities, who love to be in the center of large cities with all kinds of hustle and bustle. The kind of people who couldn't even imagine living anywhere else.

That's not to say they're idiots, of course not. But it might be to say that the reasons for placing their company in the center of a large city aren't very rational or well-considered.

You obviously don't live in the Seattle area. You can't move closer, because real estate is literally twice as expensive as where you currently live, and you can't change jobs because all the jobs are in the same places with the crummy commutes. About the only factor you can optimize is picking jobs that are along mass transit routes.

Yeah, but... doesn't that suck for everybody? Commuting time is wasted. (Maybe on public transit, if it's not so crowded you can pull out a laptop, you can get a bit of work done.) It's American productivity going straight into the toilet.

But you're also kind of missing the point of my post, focusing on one small tree and forgetting there's a whole forest out there. Whether it's an hour, or an hour and a half, or 45 minutes isn't the point-- the point is we should optimizing it as close to zero as possible.

At the time I made the choice, I didn't know that this industry was so concentrated in only large urban areas. In fact, I was basically hearing the opposite: "tech is HUGE, those jobs will be EVERYWHERE in 10 years!" Well. It's been 20 years, and they aren't.

So, yes, I made a choice to get into software development. It wasn't an informed choice.

How about we come at it from the reverse angle: why are all those 55-person tech companies founded in Seattle? They pay more taxes. They pay more for office space and pretty much everything else. They create a longer commute for everybody by centralizing all the work. What's the problem with spreading-out a bit?

Anyway, the question was how to help blue-collar workers, and I just gave an answer that amounts to basically, "move jobs where they are".

If I wanted to live in a city, I would have moved into one years ago. I don't. I like where I live. I just want a job within less than an hours' commute of me.

I live in a relatively small suburb of Seattle. I'm a software developer. There are no jobs for me where I live. None. None within 20 miles. The only job for me is in Seattle or Bellevue or Redmond, an hour-long commute. I love where I live, and I don't want to live in Seattle (which I could barely afford anyway-- I like owning a house). I also don't want to exclusively work-from-home and be cut-off socially from my co-workers. It sucks.

(And as I've griped before, this is only true of a couple professions, and software developer happens to be one of them. If I had become a lawyer, I could work in any town in the US. Or a plumber, or a doctor, or a school administrator, or a tow truck driver, or a...)

I'd just be happy with some policy that spreads these companies out a bit. Maybe a tax benefit for opening office space in communities under a certain population size. I'm not sure how it would work. All those angel investors propping up tech companies could also be propping up small town economies merely by moving their offices outside of Seattle, Bellevue, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc.

The last company I worked for had 55 employees, about a dozen of which were software developers. That 55-person company means nothing to Seattle. Not even to the South Lake Union neighborhood. It's not even a blip. But it'd be part of the lifeblood in a smaller town. It'd also help cut the commute for everybody, be able to recruit technical workers like myself who don't want to live in a big city, etc.

Anyway, just a thought, hopefully relevant to this site. Meanwhile I go back to the jobs site, sigh heavily, and judge positions on how close they are to the bus stops...

It's only 10 meters long, it'd have a tough time going out of coastal waters no matter what. (Unless it's very resistant to being flipped or swamped, which I suppose is possible.)

Instead of using uppercase, which looks awful, just get an editor with color-coding. Solves the same problem, no more ugly uppercase.

More likely because it's not available on-premise. Check into how many use HipChat instead, because it is.

Either way, this is a HUGE market Slack hasn't even begun to touch. (Although I see they now have a "coming soon!" banner on their homepage.)

It's from the same set of people who don't understand why Microsoft's Active Directory is more popular than the cluster of hard-to-configured, barely-related Linux utilities needed to reproduce some of its functions on a Linux server.

HipChat hasn't botched anything, but they also haven't done anything really well. HipChat is merely... ok I guess?

The thing keeping HipChat going in the face of Slack is that Slack can't be used on-premises, which is HUGE for an extremely large percentage of business.

HipChat hasn't improved as fast as Slack because they haven't needed to-- since no HIPAA-compliant business (to give just one example) can use Slack at all, the two products don't really compete with each other currently.

That doesn't apply to this new Microsoft solution, which will probably kill-off HipChat long before it kills off Slack. Unless Atlassian really gets their butt moving and starts improving their product.

Does Slack even allow on-premise installs yet? That instantly disqualified them from the last 3 jobs I've had. (All of which had data protection issues that prevented them from using off-premises IM systems, mostly HIPAA regulations.) Microsoft's got that market already sewn-up, right out of the gate.

Or the Site Optimization product I maintained from about 2008-2011.

The concept's old as dirt. Our script had to work on IE 5.5, though, so suck it kiddies. ;)