365 karma · joined November 18, 2016
I spent a lot of time in the IAC book many moons ago, extracting the concepts and motivations left unspoken in Apple’s newer “long lists of buttons” documentation. “How” stuff makes vastly more sense once you understand the “Why” that underpins it all.
As you say, you chose to coast at your own job as a reasonable and fair response. You did the work you were contracted to do and got paid correspondingly. Yeah you’d have liked a promotion path to a more demanding and rewarding role, but that’s just not something your employeer needed/wanted.
Lots of jobs aren’t our perfect dream jobs. But I assume you started looking in the meantime, and when you did find a job which better fit your ambitions you moved on, and did so in a professional manner which ensures your own professional reputation stays intact.
Gust just burnt the world; took his own pain and paid it forward. Victim (partly self-made) becomes an abuser himself. Sorry, no, I’m going to call that.
He was contracted and paid to do a certain job, and ended up doing a different, harder job which presumably wasn’t in his contract and for which he wasn’t being paid. That was his choice. I know, geeks are bad at saying “no”, but work-to-rule is a thing for a reason, and you don’t have to be a douche about it; unfailingly, excruciatingly polite is its own weapon too.
And then Gust turned various independent OSS projects toxic as well, even though his fight was not theirs. And the people they’re chucking abusing at now are not the abusive management who used Gust as their personal doormat, but ordinary employees down in the trenches just trying to do their own jobs.
I’m not sure where you’re getting the “subjected to further abuse after his resignation” from; there’s nothing in the article about that.
Nobody comes out of this one looking good, except for OP, who is just trying to do his job as best he can. His post is tagged “unprofessional-behavior” and he’s not wrong about that.
And Gust hasn’t done himself any favors either if/when that reputation follows him to future jobs. I get that he’s angry and burnt out and that’s leading him to make poor decisions—been there, done that—but like I say, if you don’t look after yourself you’re no good to anyone. I know I wouldn’t want to hire someone coming off the back of that shitshow lest they bring all their toxic baggage with them and infect my business too.
I understand Gust, cos there’s a bit of Gust in many of us, but he chose to take the abuse far longer than I would have before cutting my losses and getting out. And much of that abuse was ultimately self-inflicted because he chose to let himself be taken for a ride (because geeks love to be Helpful), instead of apologizing profusely that he was not qualified, competent, nor contracted to do work so far out of his job description. And sad to say the world is full of people (at all social and professional levels) who’ll be happy to take good-willed naive suckers for everything they’re worth (hell, just look at US politics!).
But the moment Gust turned abusive himself—boom, whatever sympathies I had for him as another fallible human being are done, and I’ve no interest in fellow geeks crafting a Robin Hood narrative just because it pleases them to do so.
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Still, I do idly† wonder if there could be better schemes[sic] than just slavishly refcounting everything? e.g. If you know which values never escape a given scope, maybe just dump them into a single-ownership pool that’s collected whenever execution finally leaves that scope. Which, for lists that compose the program itself, is the entire lifetime of the program (so no need to explicitly collect assuming the OS is happy to clean up after the program exits). It’s really just values that leave their originating scope that need to start refcounting (although, of course, there’s a raft of ways they can sneak out of that).
Although I think the most inventive answer to dynamic memory management was the language that simply tossed all newly created values into a single global cache, from which it periodically swept all values that weren’t touched again within a fixed period of time. (Obviously requiring 100% referential transparency, so that if an already-flushed value is needed again, it can simply be regenerated from scratch.) Alas, I can’t remember that language’s name (I think it’s an older and obscure one), but simple, effective, and sneaky AF? #MeLikes
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† Alas, while I have considered implementing a scripting language in Rust (to teach myself Rust as much as anything else), I’m already painfully slow writing them in HLLs that do all that low-level stuff for me. #BoVLB :/
https://notalwaysright.com/engineering-a-problem/61642/
Trust in notalwaysright.com/all to suck up even more of your life than the orange site already does. Also, clientsfromhell.net and askamanager.org. And I’m certain the Daily WTF, Acts of Gord, and BOFH need zero introduction here. Good luck in trying to distinguish if it’s day or night—never mind what’s true or false—by the time you’re done with that little lot!
Bear in mind too that the average employee, regardless of rank, is more concerned about what’s in their own best interests than what’s in the company’s. It’s only when you’re a director and major shareholder that these are one and the same, and even then you’re not magically immune to making really stupid decisions.
As for “Gust”, my sympathies are severely limited. He remained in a job where he knew his employers were taking the absolute piss out him long enough that he turned toxic himself. I get that changing jobs has its own set of costs and challenges, but thinking that your employer owes you for all your “loyalty” is a fool’s delusion. I’ve been in jobs where management’s been taking the piss while I’ve been burning out, and realizing that environment’s turning me toxic too I’ve walked.[1][2]
After all, my first obligation is to me and my health, and I’m no use to anyone when I fail to look after that. Too often computer geeks have a self-inflicted martyr complex, but you try telling them that their own worst enemy is themselves… (And, hey, fight me if you think I’m wrong.)
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[1] After giving generous notice, mind, and tying up the work I’ve done there as best I can. After all, I see no need to burn bridges with others already digging perfectly good holes for themselves. Besides, as an employee I know that it’s their work, not mine; so why should I get myself emotionally twisted up in work I don’t own when even its owners don’t care that much?
[2] (Including that time when I was the management. I don’t stand my own shite either.)
https://18seconds.sigurros.com/band/faq.php
what language does jónsi sing in? on von, ágætis byrjun and takk, jónsi sang most songs in icelandic but a few of the songs were sung in 'hopelandic'. all of the vocals ( ) are however in hopelandic. hopelandic (vonlenska in icelandic) is the 'invented language' in which jónsi sings before lyrics are written to the vocals. it's of course not an actual language by definition (no vocabulary, grammar, etc.), it's rather a form of gibberish vocals that fits to the music and acts as another instrument. jónsi likens it with what singers sometimes do when they've decided on the melody but haven't written the lyrics yet. many languages were considered to be used on ( ), including english, but they decided on hopelandic. hopelandic (vonlenska) got its name from first song which jónsi sang it on, hope (von). tracks 7-9 on takk are in hopelandic.
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† which doesn’t bother me as I can’t understand the words to most songs anyway:)
I can imagine phonologists playing this song at all their parties. (If anyone’s ever been to a phonologists’ party, please confirm.)
If that is their intended process, then it is such a false economy that it warrants firings all the way up to the board.
This is why we write documentation—good documentation, that explains the product and how to use it, and anticipates the common problems that users run into and guides them through those as well. So that users can handle the day-to-day stuff and only need to interrupt its developers for the exceptional cases that no-one has anticipated—which is as much about the developers learning what more they need to fix as about getting users over that hump in the meantime.
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Apple is absolutely, notoriously, abominable at documentation, in part I think because Apple really absolutely hates to admit that its shit ever smells too. But if you can’t own your own mistakes, then you’re never going to fix them and get rid of that stink.
Honestly, I really miss their old NeXt-derived docs from back in the early days of OS X, both in their content and their presentation and navigability. I mean, they weren’t brilliant—good on the Whats but not asogreat on the Hows—but compared to the slop they’ve been serving users these last 10 years those docs were an absolute masterclass. Or even look at Microsoft, who * and* accept their APIs are complex and difficult, and so document the tar out of them so their users can mostly get by for themselves.
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The other problem is, the health of the developer platform today isn’t immediately, directly reflected in the size of the next quarter’s results. So when the company’s run by and for the beancounters and shareholders, without regard for what the engineers are telling them, they don’t see the need for greater long-term investment. I mean: everything works great now, just look at the size of those revenues!
It not till years later that the knockon effects of those poor upstream processes and resources reach the surface, at which point the damage is far more severe than it ever should have been had they nipped it at the start. Just ask the formerly engineer-led Boeing how that whole McDonnell-Douglas pennycounting culture is working out for them now. Yup.
A good parent fights tooth and claw for their child, and gives it every opportunity they possibly can to enable it to succeed. (And isn’t afraid to show tough love either when that is what is needed.)
Sitting with your thumb up your ass expecting success will come to it automatically just because it’s deserving is the mistake I made. And that was no minor me-too indulgence; it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put end-user automation into the hands of millions. And all that investment and future potential crashed and burned at the very last step to mass adoption, because while I was a good programmer I was a terrible product manager.
Any idiot can write code. That’s the easy part. It’s all the other stuff you need to work hardest at if you’re to build a successful market. ’Cos if you fail to put bums on seats, the best code in the world ain’t worth squat.
Indeed. I think it’s telling that the opening question on that Reddit thread identified the exact same problem I did, and three months on they still haven’t fixed it. Programmers who fail to provide their users’ needs simply because it doesn’t interest them to do so is a cancer throughout this industry and culture. As a 30-year computer user myself, that is an attitude I expect from children, not from supposed “professionals”.
I don’t care how nice your language is, I care about whether using it is going to make my life better… or worse.
If folks here think I’m bad-tempered and unforgiving, then consider I’ve had to spend the last 20 years teaching myself to program just so I’d no longer be at the complete mercy of those “real programmers” who one too many times made my life shit.
In turn, I’ve done my share of making users lives both better and worse, and while I accept that shit happens I don’t tolerate me messing other people around any better than others messing me.
It’s meant to be called “Computer Science” for a reason. And you should see the size of the knives that real scientists bring to a science fight. I’m being kind.
Everyone knows the name Charles Darwin. Now ask them who Alf Wallace is, and why they should they should care. Or Yohan Blake. Or Atty Osborne… and so on.
Where’s the advantage in being an also-ran? It’s a tough but necessary lesson to swallow: accept your lovely technology is just too late to be the successful product you hoped for. Treat the whole exercise as a valuable learning experience, and move on to your next Big Idea as quickly as you can, this time, of course, making sure to get to market before your direct competitors can, so as to leave them in the dust instead of you.
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† Their website doesn’t say. Just a technical features list, and yep, one look: Rust, but a lot less mature with waaay less ecosystem and support. That’s not a winning proposition; that’s a sucker’s deal. Damn but every computer geek needs to do a marketing course.
But one thing Trump is really good at is lying to people, telling people who want to be lied to just what they want to hear. And Dog knows there’s a lot of relatively rich, pampered, spoiled first-worlders desperate to believe they are special and better than others and that everything will be okay. So you do the math.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/02/most-cuban-...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/racism-isn...
And credit to the GOP where due: their messaging skills are far, fae superior to the Dems, regardless how their actual actions betray their true agendas.
Oh, and p.s.: 10%, while it may be more than 6%, is still absolutely pitiful.
Naturally this was a disaster for both sides, so as soon the correct scapegoats were identified and dispatched, they could safely return to their Old, safe, familiar system which is a disaster for only one.
https://fs.blog/2016/07/richard-feynman-teaching-math-kids/
Adding together all the temperatures of red, yellow, green, and blue suns? Kill me now.
https://www.epi.org/indicators/state-unemployment-race-ethni...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/14/the-pr...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/report/the-black-lives-ma...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
https://www.amazon.com/Alt-America-Radical-Right-Trump/dp/17...
Really, dude. The Republican party shucked off all moral rights to Lincoln’s name after 1965, when it chose to sell out its principles in exchange for naked power. There’s nothing left now but a cancerous soup of proto fascists, theocrats, oligarch bootboys, and full-time professional liars, lying to the millions of Americans who want to be lied to. Which I’m not, so you can cram your GOP beer goggles where the sun don’t shine, because you’re just not that good at it.
Shocking numbers; the sort of APR we’d expect from dodgy pay-day companies and illegal loan sharks. You’d be far better off just taking out a mortgage, plus you get a nice house at the end and they don’t smash your ankles if you default.
There was a time when America invested in the education of its children as a way to lift up the country as a whole. But that was a long, long time ago, in political years at least. Certainly, I can see how encouraging an educated populace could be undesireable to a group that’s just spent the last five decades slowly laying the road to a one-party state.
I mean, just look at the GOP base. The party of Lincoln is dead; nothing now but Bozo Haram and Kmart Rouge as far as the eye can see. And those who’ve learned their history already know what that sort likes to make of such “intellectual bourgeoisie”: fertilizer.
[applauds]
The problem is, the prizes don’t just stop at Netflix.
https://deadline.com/2020/09/cuties-director-death-threats-n...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=accEKtBebaU
Good movie. A bit nuts. Product of a much more innocent time; set in an even more innocent time than that. Also no-one’s innocent. Free to watch with ads on Amazon Prime, or you can rent or pick it up on DVD for a few bucks.
https://www.amazon.com/Donnie-Darko-Jake-Gyllenhaal/dp/B002M...
And where have you been for the last thousand years? Or the entirety of human history for that matter?
We are a pretty awful species. But if we can’t talk openly and honestly about how awful we are, we’ll never need to own our own awfulness, which means we’ll never have to try to be any better than that. Because it’s so much easier and politically expedient just to project all of our own personal awfulness onto the Other.
Thus, all good discussions should start in a mirror.
Also, fuck TED.
Really? Were they unclothed? If not, perhaps there’s a different message here that you may have missed?
Go watch “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”, which I believe you’ll find on Netflix too. You’ll totally cheer along when they murder the fat man, who completely deserved it BTW. Though if you’re still cheering when they watch the home video they made of themselves murdering that entire family, then you may have missed the point of that film too.
Good film is a mirror on real life. And if real life doesn’t make your skin crawl, it’s either because you haven’t realized you’re a participant in it too… or because you actually enjoy it.
And guess whose culture it was that got flayed? Yup.
It got you to read it, didn’t it? I’d say that’s pretty good.
As to the rest of it: Gahh. If you’re struggling, talk to staff. There’s no shame in it; you’ve already bared your soul to them by doing a degree in the first place, and they’ve seen it all before.
Telling that you’re downvoted, but honestly the Overton window today would give even old Adolph a suntan. 50 years of the Republican party gently transitioning the US to a one-party state, with a spineless Democratic “opposition” content to normalize each new lurch to the extreme.
Democracy doesn’t die in the dark but on top of a stove: like a pot of gently simmering frogs.