Yes, they do. And they make the news.
I was always amazed about the stories of resonant frequency issues, not just from walking but also from wind! - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)
1,563 karma · joined October 6, 2014
I was always amazed about the stories of resonant frequency issues, not just from walking but also from wind! - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)
No women - what did they care? :-)
I went to an engineering school. People who designed bridges had a wide, but constrained parameter space, and well-accepted design patterns.
I started out in semiconductor (MCU) systems and sometimes circuit design, and we had a broader (but not yuuuge!) parameter space, but it was growing as transistors got cheaper. Less well-accepted design patterns, because what you do with 50K transistors and 500K transistors and 5M transistors and 50M transistors - to use effectively - you need different patterns - and that changed so fast!
I did software-ish things with my h/w teams, and they would mock me because "software is easy". "You can do anything". And to do a rev, you didn't need to burn a $50K and 6 weeks (or whatever it is now) at the fab for each turn.
The problem with software is that it is SO unconstrained. You truly CAN do anything - except engineer in an unconstrained environment. I guess this realization (and Python blowing up on me in run-time environments) have taught me that: Constraints suck. But they are good. Software could use more of them, because they force discipline at dev time, at compile time, which reduces blow-ups at run-time.
I may or may not be using a Mac at some point during the day (because Apple forces me to, to do iOS development), but usually whether my host is Windows or Mac, I have 3~8 Linux VMs running at any particular time.
Now, I will use SublimeText, instead of vi, from time-to-time (not often), but I don't think I am out of the mainstream...
BTW: I up-voted you because I think you have a point worth discussing, and that's hard to do when you are down-voted to hell, even if I don't agree with you...
Depends on your definition of 'hypnosis'. There are some pretty prosaic definitions that are clearly and repeatably demonstrable. There are also, at the other end of the spectrum, some pretty extraordinary claims for "what it is" and "what it can do". The former is riduculous, and for the latter, skepticism seems to be prudent, pending further articulation.
Gosh! That's a lot!
If an airplane hits the world trade center, would I push the fat man in front of the train? (Sorry - moral philosophy question)... Ummmm. I don't know! Would you? WOuld I? How long would I brain freeze? Would I ask people to stay? Go home? Take books? The vault? I don't know! What would you do?
My point here is simply this: You don't know what you were do, in real time, until you are in the hot-chair. You don't! Nobody does. And you will get it wrong. And anything you decide (anything!) will be criticized for decades. By people who were not there.
I am here to understand the thinking of people who thought management should have "done better".
It could well be that this is correct, but it was a very confusing morning, if you will recall, and nobody knew what the hell was going on.
One stupid example is that my friends at Bear Stearns in WTC-7, left the building (evacuated) when the stock markets in NY shut down, and all lived. But the other friends on the bond-desk (traded out of Chicago, which didn't shut down), stayed and all died. (Hard to get a bond trader off his desk!).
It was a horrible day. And also unprecedented. I think it is a little unfrair for people to expect managers to know how to react (immediately and pro-actively!) to an unprecedented event. If I had an argument, it would be that: If I were a manager on that day, I would have been confused. And so would you.
What do you think the correct response by management should have been? 15 minutes after the 1st plane hit, everyone shut down, go home, leave the files and binders?
I've got to say that the NC (Chapel Hill) pixel machine may have been a more supreme technical achievement, but it was harder to "get a feel for". As a young semiconductor geek at Motorola (Tokyo Design Ops) at the time, I did push for getting 1~4 bit CPUs on every column of 128-~192- bit deep framebuffers for a time. I almost got Sega to sponsor the project, but then something distracted me (I don't know what - but I suspect it was the Motorola 96K and a bank of AMD bit-slicer chips)) and I wandered off to do something else.
Bless that man!
It seemed as if he had the process down.
I made more friends in jail than I did in college. But you are right - it is no fun and it is no joke. For anyone.
In my case, for one, the engineering orgs were generally not much larger than 200 people. For another, the "To:" person(s) usually responded, but everyone else got cc'd with the list and then the list could follow. And, for me, finally: I find discoverability in a knowledge-base-way to be sub-optimal compared to an indexed (and threaded!) email list. Kind of like how Linux devs organize themselves.
And, maybe, finally, I'm old and have been using email since 1983 and it fits my workflow (or rather: my workflow adapted to email?). The get-to-it-or-it-is-gone thing with #slack bothers me, which seems great for asking people what they want me to bring back for lunch, but not for much else besides asking who broke the build.
Again - that's my take. I understand that other people don't prefer long-form debates/discussions by email and want an IRC-like answer to their immediate question.
Everything you need: High speed communications. Long-form, if you need it. Only getting notified about things you care about. Written discussions about things like how design or business plan decisions were made to be perused at leasure by new hires in the future (Knowlege-base).
For a company that got going for being better than email, it's shocking to me how email (done correctly) is still better on almost every dimension (except asking what people want for lunch).
I remember when I was prototyping an OpenGL thing on SunOS or a Renderman on same (maybe Solaris?), I was working ALL of the time and cranking out LOTS of code. Then refactor-refactor, fix technical debt, slowly add features without breaking, more automated tests, more platforms, and then, tada! My effective rate of coding (measured by LoC) was depressingly low.
I guess that I'm happy that it appears that I'm effective and relatively efficient, but I'm not the LoC-cranking-out machine that I thought I was. Sobering.
I've raised large rounds in the past, both corporate and VC, and I've learned to be wary about misaligned incentives.
Now - I don't go around saying: "Don't raise VC ever!", but I'm a little more attuned to the trade-offs than I used to be.
I'm sorry that I don't have many UG stories, because everybody was so far flung, it was hard to be intensely (or interactively, at least) social about it!
By the time I got to college (RHIT - Rose-Hulman), it was all men, all engineering, all the time, so there wasn't much need for an independed UG.
I feel as if I was "in the culture", but not "part of the gang" for much of that period. The WELL started about the time I was finishing up high-school, but it was a lot of fun, and made me sad about what I had been missing out on...
I guess I've been fortunate in that, all of the people being excluded were truly not pulling their own (traditional) weight because they were going through family trauma and on anti-depressants or something. (Divorce, loss of a child, etc.). People were pretty forgiving, but definitely didn't want them in critical path.
The handful (let me say, 5 G, 2L and 2T across 10 small teams over 5 years that I am going to use as a sample, circa 1995~2000) of alphabet people (is that phrase offensive?), were objectively AWESOME in terms of personality and group engagement and work performance. It really was never a problem. Maybe we hired well. Maybe we were lucky. I guess I haven't seen the passive-aggressive exclusionary thing you are talking about, but I will keep an eye out for it in the future.
Again: Thank you.
I "get" that it's not visible (sort of), but I don't get how to be on guard for it, prevent it or deal with it if we can't see it. How does a manager see the signs of it, somehow, well enough, to deal with it?
For one - I haven't thought through the ins-and-outs of this very well yet.
But in this new world, I may need to. I may come back with some questions, as you seem to be quite sensible! :-)
(BTW, IMHO: Bots to friend and mine is clearly over the line)
That is to say: Sometimes companies don't have much choice in some of this.
EDIT: I just remembered that I was talking to my corporate attorney's office recently (medium-size-law), and they say that if any applicant's facebook page over spring-break was too salacious (for example), they wouldn't be willing to hire them, because they didn't want the client to think that they were not 'conservative and judicious and considered' (when I say 'conservative' here, it has nothing to do with left-/right- wing politics in the US)
Employees in a client-facing role have the potential to harm a company badly. Companies are cautious. Now, I believe this twitter thing in the OP is ridiculous, and their faulty use of NLP is beyond atrocious, I think that it is fair for employers to be concerned about linking their reputation to that of "proven" rogues, renegades (I can't even spell renegade, George), party-animals, and revolutionaries.
Do you disagree?