concede_pluto

If a face-to-face conversation is important, one of us will spend two minutes finding a good time and booking a meeting. If it's an emergency, my team has a pagerduty rotation. Showing up at my desk is not the best way to do anything.

It's been over a decade since I had so much as a semi-private office (shared with just one quiet teammate) so I have to say the death of the open office is exaggerated. And all of their workarounds assume a laptop could ever substitute for a desktop with an ergonomic keyboard and a large screen.

It's amazing that the escalating competition in pay and perks never seem to include space to get into the zone.

No matter what I do, I would always look like a foreigner in Venezuela. This is also true in Thailand but they seem to do a much better job of protecting farang from violent crime.

Go is basically using multiple return values as a half baked Either type, only you're on your own if you want to pass it over a channel or store it anywhere.

Amazon can't undercut manufacturers (not without becoming a manufacturer). If they undercut middlemen who weren't adding any value, what do I care?

Or vice versa. What we have is a small committee of people you've never heard of deciding to reject deals that both renters and contractors are desperate to make. If we had a plebiscite on housing density, the outcome would be much better for most people.

We hanged proven murderers, not every member of an odious political party.

> The day of the lone wolf programmer is long past!

I wish this disastrous extrovert invasion were more clearly disclosed. It took me a long time to realize that my maddeningly arthritic big corp experience wasn't just an outlier.

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696799/utilities/df.... says what df does on any POSIX system. I love Dwarf Fortress but running it as root is more !!fun!! than I'm looking for.

If you buy an electric vehicle, you're committed to always having a private garage, which severely limits your rental options in the future.

That future isn't here. At my current job, people are encouraged to go out and move their cars when charged, and still they can't be confident there will be a charger available every day. My previous job had none.

If I could drive down the street and replace my electrolyte, neither changing jobs nor moving would suddenly make an electric vehicle unusable.

Those services don't bring a car to you with a driver. They're competing with Avis and Hertz, not taxis.

This. Even before the collapse of email as a writing medium, it was never a life-critical system.

Say you want to add some feature critical to correctness. "Request can't be committed until resent to other quorum members." Something serious like that. You can't use 418 for that feature because some non-conforming servers are already returning it as a joke. You'd have to triage new RFCs until you get one that isn't important enough to work reliably, and sacrifice it to use up the tainted code.

Two problems: suppressing dumb ideas lends them unwarranted credibility, and in their fervor they will almost certainly victimize innocent people.

When someone decides a config file needs two different serializations and a daemon, I'm reminded of https://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html.

Google has no competitive advantage in energy. No way to evaluate world class expertise. If I plowed a billion dollars into energy, I'd waste most of it, and they wouldn't do much better.

This is required to support one of the most peculiar features I've ever seen--method dispatch on the concrete type of object that isn't there.

The vendor could still assign the debt to a collection agency or sue; a declined charge does not get you off the hook unless they decide it's not worth pursuing.

Go binaries are small and don't do much initialization work but they don't run especially quickly, mostly due to GC and value->interface conversion and dynamic dispatch.

I needed a ListMultimap a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately it had already been implemented for me because my language doesn't prevent that.

> software tends to pass around multiple different teams with widely varying skillsets

I find this to be the most damning drawback: by design you can't ever get better with it, to cater to people who shouldn't be in the profession. There's a reason that using a spoken language clearly and eloquently is beyond the skill of a young child.

I agree that vendoring is the right solution for libraries that are not packaged for your target platform, in fact it's damn hard to reach truly deterministic offline builds without vendoring.

Imagine Google required candidates to bench press 200 lbs as well as solve brain teasers. That means they turned away a lot of qualified devs for no good reason, but it does not mean they hired anyone unqualified, because lifting does not make you stupid.

This. Someday software developers will look back on us the way doctors look back on barbers' bloodletting.

It's better to do the big commit and then refactor it. Otherwise you won't have tested whether the hunks depend on each other, which means history littered with broken commits.

> Also companies have proven that they are more than willing to outsource everywhere, hiring people anywhere.

Debatable. Googlers complain of pressure to relocate to Mountain View (despite using video even for intra-campus meetings), Mayer shut down telecommuting at Yahoo, Facebook built the biggest open office in the world.

Surveys are only useful for studying for what people believe, and only then what they're willing to admit. The discipline shouldn't make any claims about actual behavior when the only observations that could possibly support them aren't permitted.

Wasn't there a period where "programmer" was the job of turning a flowchart from a "system analyst" into machine code? Basically a living compiler that didn't require a formally specified high-level language?

Every package dependency should be installed in /usr/lib by the admin or else vendored in our repo using its canonical import path. It's a mistake for "go get" not to do this by default, because the compiler shouldn't even be aware of the name of the repo we got the code from.

Every browser I've used for a long time has supported Accept-Language with a preference list I can change. Are there any that don't?