brianmcc

+1

I think "code is carefully designed AND has a bunch of decent tests" places a codebase ahead of many tbh, even now, regardless of how it's produced

>> ... TDD is unlikely to help you solve problems that are beyond incremental changes.

Thank you for expressing this niggling problem with TDD. Personally I just cannot use it for "new stuff", I need to explore and create direct with "real" code for anything non-obvious.

It's harmless, it's a 6 month window. Number plate:

XX24 - registered between 1 Mar 2024 - 31 Aug 2024

XX74 - registered between 1 Sep 2024 - 28 Feb 2025

XX25 - registered between 1 Mar 2025 - 31 Aug 2025

etc

The first two letters of a number plate identifies the location where the vehicle was registered. For example, LA – LY covers London and MA – MY covers Manchester and Merseyside. Nothing personally identifying whatsoever.

If you're truly paranoid about such things you can always buy a car registered hundreds of miles from your residence, and in practice with an abundance of second-hand (used) cars in the marketplace from across all the UK, there's always a huge variety of registration letters driving about anyway!

Totally. 5 years of

- build and ship

- then move around

- repeat

Is sorely lacking in vital important experience towards becoming a rounded senior.

As is so often the case in these sorts of "countries that function quite well", the Scandinavians aren't doing too badly:

https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking

USA is #36, a "deficient democracy". Not a surprise and sadly I can see it only dropping further in the near future.

The scale, interestingly, goes:

- Working Democracy

- Deficient Democracy

- Hybrid Regime

- Moderate Autocracy

- Hard Autocracy

Further details on methodology -> https://www.democracymatrix.com/conception/democracy-matrix

I'd describe a lot of my job and my team's job as "figuring out what to do". Lots of talking to people, debating options, weighing up trade-offs.

Customer support, "pre sales" stuff too.

Distilling complex situations involving tech but also people into bullet-point reports for management.

To reference another one of these neat little phrases: building the right system != building the system right. The former is hard to automate, the latter is indeed more open to AI involvement.

Not my quote but: "The trillion dollar problem AI is trying to solve is wages. Your wages."

Not wanting to come across all Luddite about it, but we really ought not to stumble blindly into all this.

That said, I remain sceptical. The 10% of my job which is coding just isn't the difficult part.

all true; there is though a useful point to be made that more WFH-ing office folks does free up transport for those who need to travel, be it rail/bus or just car commutes

Sorry but this is a hopelessly naive view of what is widely understood to be A Bit More Complicated Than That.

Yeah like current sibling reply here, it's OK to be idealistic: "here's what I think perfect looks like", and accept that sure not everybody meets that definition. Doesn't mean it's a bad aspiration though.

I mostly agree with the article, FWIW. Including having worked with various "talented but difficult" people before.

One of the more under-appreciated aspects of management is having direct reports you can delegate stuff to and (a) they just deal with it, and (b) you need little or no supervision and there's no drama.

Managers are humans: making their lives a little better by being Mr/Mrs/Ms Reliably Gets Things Done will in any sane org yield dividends. Of course not all orgs are sane, and not all managers are Good Managers, but that's a different conversation.

But since when did techniques which obsessive systemizers like us use play out well with the general population..? We're not discussing what works well for a niche community of hackers, but what will work for the hundred million+ on a sustainable long term basis.

I think "perfect is the enemy of good" applies here. People en masse are not controlling their intake. They just aren't. They can't do it. We can rage about it and criticise - and many do for all the good that's doing - or we can explore options. Medications with few side effects have some appeal here. Evolutions will likely reduce those. Eventually that will not be a strong argument against the medication option is my prediction.

I don't disagree. As I've gotten older though I am just increasingly convinced that for the regular person going about their life, the fight against cheap and terrible and calorie-laden - but tasty! - processed foods is not an even one. Perhaps some form of counter-balance is just not such a bad thing?

Yep. When 1 or 10 or 100 people do a thing, it's a "them" issue. When 100,000,000+ do a thing - it's a wider issue, and asking those 100,000,000 to do it differently just isn't a useful strategy.

>> I scanned, weighed, and measured every single thing I put into my body

Not being snarky, but is this truly "better" than a single weekly injection - 10 seconds and done for the week? I do think our wider society sees medications for overeating as "cheating". Perhaps we might benefit from rethinking that.

To be fair OP did say:

>> And you know what it is? It's volume. I eat too much.

Good luck maintaining a civilized society without the rule of law underpinning it, with enforcement.

It's an unusual idiom to be sure. We talk about lots of fruits and foods every day without such qualifiers. Are we to assume OP meant possibly-stale bread because it wasn't explicit?

This is a great question. I don't think mentoring features nearly enough in our line of work.

Guiding early-career engineers is something I am sure many of us seniors have done (I'm 25+ years in to my own career), but for people like yourself with 10, 15 years+ I do feel it's hard to find such guidance on "what next?" and "is this the right path?", and someone that can help one navigate choices which might become available.

Perhaps a professional life coach? Although I have never done so and cannot recommend or discourage, it might prove completely fruitless...

Plus workers in tech are absolutely not immune to this stuff and nobody should be complacent.

"They can't monitor me because I spent my morning mentor Alan the Junior at his desk" - that may be so but it won't stop them from trying, and the lag from deploying bad business intiatives to realising they're bad can be months or years in the making.

if "don't aggressively spy on your employees" puts you out of business what on earth's your business model?

You're not wrong.

I think a lot of people miss the "Cockroaches survive everything" implication.

It's meant to imply indestructability, not creepy yucky beastliness.

Obviously that goes over the heads of many people initially but at least it can then be explained!

I think Mongo is way worse tbh

I think the term "theatre" implies "is meant to achieve X but fails to", rather than "achieves X in a slightly flamboyant manner".

Like all the COVID-prevention theatre: sitting in restaurants and only masking when you visit the toilet. Hand-washing often whilst in unventilated areas with no masks. That's all "COVID theatre" IMO, as it fails to actually prevent the thing ostensibly being tackled.

My favourite one FWIW was wiping down the seat padding in the gym where nobody was masked - I mean who came up with that??

A creative hardware source of legit randomness is not the same as security theatre, and arguably has some useful educational aspect - it's certainly a talking point!

Processes for safely and hygienically injecting vast quantities of sugar, salt and fat into "food" != good nutrition.

"Teach yourself J2EE in 21 days, 2nd edition" remains marvellous for this :-D

Watching a few episodes of recent TV show The Traitors should dispel any positive myths re the wisdom of small teams! :-D

High on both sounds like Spolsky's "Smart and Gets Things Done", and not surprisingly your conclusions rather agree :-)

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...

Also applies in medicine/healthcare:

"Silence, power and communication in the operating room" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001035/

+1 for data in the database, code as... well, code. And also learned this the hard way. Code you can build and run test suites against, extract logs from, place debug breakpoints in, is such a quality of like enhancer.

edit: typo fix