HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

chandmk

85 karma · joined October 5, 2016

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/chandmk; my proof: https://keybase.io/chandmk/sigs/Q6qyOWr0ORfBPbBbhJwBjkxAf0nAZHUn0I-IpvrBPcQ ]
submissionscomments
chandmk··on We're all CTO now
So now the newly minted CTOs, get the same authority, credit, compensation, recognition as the real CTO for managing the hearless agents?
chandmk··on Restarting my career after motherhood
I am thinking about,

All those parents who are forced to work but always wanted to stay back and provide best care for their kids but couldn't do so.. feeling a gut punch.

Parents who chose career path and gets the slap in the face moments every time they realized that they could have spent more time with the kids instead of the work.

Is it possible to eat the cake and have it too?

chandmk··on Feynman on group decision-making at Los Alamos (1985)
I am wondering what would have happened if the committee chooses another idea instead of Compton's. Would Compton leave the committee? Would Feynman resent the decision? Or they wouldn't do that that is why they are called "great men"?
chandmk··on Agile Estimation Theatre
Over the years, I am convinced that agile process falls into the bullshit jobs category. At one point of time I stared asking a routine question, if we finish all of this work by next week, how long it would take for this to go to production? There is always several weeks of gap (unless it is really critical, then there is no agile process anyway).
chandmk··on The Price of Discipline
At the end it is very inspiring to learn that Andre chose tennis on his own to become the number one on his own terms. But somehow it feels very ironic that he chose what he was already good at! Perhaps his father saved him a lot of time by choosing for him and using that time to make him skilled at tennis. It just feels like a perspective change. He could have simply said now I understood what my father was trying to do. Because no one really knows what Andre would have chosen and done by himself.
chandmk··on Engineers should invest in decision-making skills early
>If you want a fulfilling career as an engineer, don't work in a cost center.

By that definition, I guess the above article is not a help to a whole class of engineers out there. Now I really doubt if they even be called engineers?

chandmk··on Engineers should invest in decision-making skills early
Try strategizing in a mid-sized non technical mid-sized company. Here is where engineers are treated like mechanics at pep boys. You are either ignored or put to your place about the kind of work your are supposed to do, with the exception of crisis scenarios or 'no-one is interested in the outcome' scenarios.

In large companies strategy is mostly about helping power brokers to do their bullshit jobs.

In my experience, only opportunity for engineers to contribute to a meaningful strategy is in a small team with business person as CEO/Owner and they really want to listen to the engineer's opinion.

Maybe in tech companies engineers might have different experience.

chandmk··on Way to Deal with a Micromanaging Boss
The idea that one can 'manage' another seems very primitive to me. Every one that did good job for me did so because they genuinely wanted to do a good job, not because I 'managed' them somehow. All I did was to steer the work towards the goal. If they didn't like the work to begin with or didn't have enough skills and inclination to learn, no amount of 'management' would have corrected that situation.
chandmk··on “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
I am wondering if Aditya didn't respond the way he did (using corporate lawyer's langauge), Greg would have not reached to this conclusion? I am a bit surprised by the entitlement he was showing. Why would anyone use those words despite sending a nonsense patch! What kind of defence he was thinking he had among a group of seasoned developers other than being honest about intentions? I wouldn't be surprised if his professor doesn't even know what he was doing!
chandmk··on An open letter to India’s youth: Get off that smartphone. It can destroy you
When I was kid, I remember my parents yelling at me playing 'useless' games at the end of the street with my 'good for nothing' friends.

When I was a teen, I remember them not liking me watching "too much" of TV and grumbling about reading 'no good' fiction magazines.

Now this.. "get off the phone" advice.

The key is, the choice must come from with-in, like Diogenes of Snopes[1] tells Alexader the great to stand out of his sun.

Until the kids are capable of making the choice or until the kids turn into adults, parents and schools must create an environment that shows descent maker's alternative to phones. This needs lot of work on behaf of schools and sacrifices on behalf of parents.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_and_Alexander

chandmk··on Technical Debt: Why it'll ruin your software
One questions I ask myself to bring clarity is,

If I am the one paying bills, would I really pay another developer for this refactoring? Yes: Technical debt it is. No: just busy work.

chandmk··on Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?
Joining a new company is like starting a new life, which doesn't seem to happen many times in a life time. It is like you are being given another opportunity to start fresh. First thing then to do is gain respect, learn the culture. It is going to be uncomfortable for a while, so it is important to keep the opinions under check. Let the actions speak more than words. Remember that every design issue is a choice made by someone else to the best of their abilities. Finding a way to move forward without making too much splash automatically unlocks the doors. There will be lot of things to implement and you will find a way and while doing so you will learn a lot.
chandmk··on Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript
As a side note, Microsoft login echo system sucks big time in the context of office. You have no idea which URL to use to login to office 365. Between login/logout/timeout/other office apps/personal accounts/business accounts/forgot password workflows browser redirects to various URLs at least a dozen times. And you keep seeing new URLs I am wondering how less tech savvy people are coping with their authentication workflow.

Depending on how you are authenticating you will see URLs with various words in them.

loginlive office.com outlook.office.com office365 outlook.com account.live products.office.com login.microsoftonline.com

and this list goes on and on... I am wondering if they made an announcement that they are fixing their messy authentication workflow instead spending resources in rewriting office in JavaScript, that would have gotten this much attention on hacker news.

chandmk··on Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks
I used to work in a factory floor. Having a job at this factory used to be one of the nice things in the town. For the fear of being driven to work too much, workers refused to increase the thru-put beyond a union limit. They used that as a tool for bargaining for more pay. Observing bathroom breaks became the responsibility of supervisor. There were many missed daily targets, which became a regular discussion point. But in the end the entire thing was pushed too far. This, coupled with the top management inability to run the factory at a reasonably profitable state, finally lead the shut down. Ultimately it ended up hurting the workers more than the top management. Majority of top management found jobs elsewhere, and most of the workers ended up not having any jobs. This story merely reflects the constant struggle we are witnessing for generations.
chandmk··on You fired your top talent. I hope you’re happy
Thank you for writing this. The culture of one software developer deriding on other software developer work by badmouthing his/her work and bragging about how firing the developer solved the problem might have a place in politics but should not be celebrated/encouraged in the technical world.
chandmk··on We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made
While I understand that no one could have gotten to a better conclusion I find it a very distasteful commentary.

So Rick knew everything about the project, while everyone is simply making a living off his work all those months/years, saved the management face many times with miracles, probably not paid n*x, stopped attending meetings because no one understood the stuff anyway, and the author has bad opinion of Rick's code, conveniently ignoring context around Rick's choices, gleefully siding with all those managers who have no clue in the first place and fired the worker to have a new start!!!

Maybe Rick should be given a chance to comment on how bad those project savior choices were.

Now we need to wait and see when would they identify next Rick of the current version of the code when that stops cutting the muster for the flood of new requests.

chandmk··on Cell – A self-driving web app framework
Tried the hello world demo. When I delete the text it won't remove the first typed character from the label.

I thought one of the advantages of React/Angular/Vue frameworks is their support for event modifiers, cross-browser support for the events via synthetic events. Or is there a support for these ideas that I am missing.

chandmk··on Sleeping tactics and f.lux
"all the light bulbs in my home are warm, they emit more yellow and orange than any other color. Like chocolate at midnight, "

Now, it is not that easy to find these light bulbs that emit extra more yellow/orange light and chocolate color at midnight

chandmk··on Inside RadioShack's Slow-Motion Collapse (2015)
I always wondered if they supported and built a community of teenagers by providing classes, competitions on electronics related projects, and computer hadware, they could have retained a passionate base of customers for long time.