kitanata

I am so triggered by this.

The author is a prime example of a person with one nuero-type expecting every other person they work with to operate the same way as them. It is anti-empathetic to folks with a neurodiverse background. The mentality is hostile to everyone that you work with.

Let me address each point.

1. Some folks do well in an environment that is just to "catch up" or "hangout". This is called an unstructured meeting and it has value. It is impossible to ascertain if an unstructured meeting is going to have value to you or anyone else. Sometimes it's just going to be about getting people in the same room to chat (or even just to hang out and have fun -- and yes, fun and camaraderie is important and has value). You should not expect every meeting to be structured.

2. Asyncronous communication... or even just communication with other members on your team is important. Someone dropping into your DMs and asking you a question is... normal. How else are people supposed to communicate with you? Are you expecting them to call you? Are you going to be upset if they email you? Come on! -- You aren't going to be expected to respond immediately, and if you are just tell the person you are busy and will get back to them later.

3. Some people... a lot of people actually... are perfectly fine with dropping a conversation when it has finished. You don't have to cap every conversation with "goodbye". Again, remote communication is asynchronous by default. People have other things going on. They could be driving. They could be dealing with their kids. They could have been called by a higher-up to an inpromptu meeting. They might even... GASP... think differently than you do, or process information and communication differently than you do. Can you believe it? Some people are different!!!

4. There are a great many types of people out there who are terrible at "deep work" (i.e. programming / design / whatever), but excellent at organizing people and tracking tasks / removing blockers, and helping people "get shit done". These people are valuable. If you don't recognize this value... I really question your engineering prowess overall.

5. Some people are introverts, have social anxiety, are autistic, or otherwise self-conscious. As someone who is openly autistic the author's mentality here is... frankly disgusting and offensive to me. Not everything is about you, brah. Have you ever considered how the person not turning on their camera is feeling? Did it ever cross your mind that maybe that has a debilitating effect on them -- or otherwise harms or hinders them?

People are different. Fucking deal with it.

This author...Daniel Yefet... sounds like a total ass to work with. Daniel, it's not others that need to grow and change. It's you. You are the problem.

We use poetry for apps in production. At this point I think that's the winning solution and as it continues to grow and improve I think it will overtake all the others in this respect.

Is this just the equivalent of saying "Hey, REPLs are nice when you're trying to figure something out", but spouted off as some deep programming wisdom?

Like, folks... REPLs are really nice when you want to figure out how a function or module or whatever works. Then yeah... you can take that knowledge you gained and apply it to your work.

Like.. how is this a deep profound revelation for folks?

Wasn't the original timeline meant to be completed in 2014?

I've turned down Amazon with a "hard no" twice citing exactly these reasons. As technology workers we have an ethical responsibility to not work for such a company. When enough of us boycott working at Amazon and organize in solidarity with our fellow workers they will be forced to listen. We run the world, folks. We need to start understanding the power we have in the workplace and use our voices to effect the right kind of change. We need to form a union.

We've recently standardized on using Poetry at JP Morgan Chase for projects in our Organization. We're betting on it becoming a standardized tool everywhere.

That may be true, but in this instance there is clear evidence that Mr. Smalls was retaliated against for his labor organizing actions.

It is my understanding, that from a legal perspective firing an employee in retaliation for engaging in organized labor even if their employment agreement is "at-will" (which is the default), is illegal. But IANAL.

Source: https://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2014/10/can-you-be-fi...

This is a union busting, anti-labor and retaliatory firing. It is illegal in the United States.

Multiple employees have spoken out about the working conditions at Amazon's warehouse facilities over the last couple of weeks. Common complaints include a lack of protective equipment, sanitization, health monitoring, and working "shoulder to shoulder". Workers are getting sick, and Amazon isn't properly reporting the actual cases of COVID-19 at their facilities.

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/26/amazon-warehouse-employees-g...

Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/whole-foods-amazon...

Source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/whole-foods-workers-to-strike-...

Mr. Smalls announced ahead of time that he was going to lead a general strike at his facility in solidarity with the instacart and wholefoods strike on the same day. This was reported in the media. Amazon knew this was being organized and waited to fire the worker until after the planned protest strike occurred.

Source: https://apnews.com/cf27e9bec86d846447aad7e632484bea

Here is Mr. Smalls talking about this in detail: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/03/30/staten-island-whole-fo... - All he was asking for was for the building to be sanitized after a confirmed case of COVID-19 occurred at his facility, at Staten Island near the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States in New York.

The attorney general of New York recognized this issue for what it is.

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New York Attorney General Letitia James said late Monday evening that "it is disgraceful that Amazon would terminate an employee who bravely stood up to protect himself and his colleagues."

"At the height of a global pandemic, Chris Smalls and his colleagues publicly protested the lack of precautions that Amazon was taking to protect them from COVID-19," she said. "Today, Chris Smalls was fired. In New York, the right to organize is codified into law, and any retaliatory action by management related thereto is strictly prohibited."

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/tech/amazon-worker-fired-stat...

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Here is another article discussing the actual conditions of Mr. Smalls Facility:

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Despite Amazon’s efforts, Amazon employees at multiple facilities who spoke to CNBC argue that the measures aren’t enough to keep them safe. They say uneven safety precautions at facilities across the country have sown feelings of distrust between workers and their managers. Workers say they’ve become worried that managers aren’t being honest about whether employees are sick with the virus, so that they can keep the facilities open.

At some facilities, workers say essential supplies like hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes are rationed or there’s none available, putting them at risk of catching the virus. Warehouse workers say they’re forced to choose between going to work and risking their health or staying home and not being able to pay their bills.

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/30/amazon-fires-staten-island-c...

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Amazon is in the wrong here. They retaliated against Mr. Smalls. This was a labor movement action, and they illegally fired Mr. Smalls for organizing at this facility.

These workers aren't asking for more money. They are asking for safe and sanitary working conditions. Are they not entitled to a healthy working environment?

Edit: Formatting issues. This was a copy-paste from a comment I made on a /r/business thread on reddit. Formatting on HN is a bit different. :)

For ASD Individuals “Masking and Passing” is the primary mode of trying to “make it” in the world. It means we try to fake being normal as much as possible so folks see us and treat us as normal. This requires constant concsious thought as to our actions, our intuition and our judgement of other people and their emptional state, because we are absolutely terrible at reading other people. As an example, most people can tell the difference between if someone is excited or angry. I cannot. Anger and excitement look very similar to me. Similarly tiredness and extreme sadness looks very similar to me. So I have to constantly evaluate given other contextual clues what mental state the other person is in. This is an ongoing and very conscious process using logic and deduction. Nuerotypicals do not have to do this. You might get confused from time to time as a neurotyoical and ask someone “What’s wrong” to clarify but for us, it is a constant state of confusion. It gets fucking tiring. We spend our entire lives trying to conform to the world around us, while we are lost 90% of the time.

This by the way, is why I made the decision to “come out of the closet” and damn the consequences because for me personally, I am just done trying. It’s been a freeing experience and has given me energy I never thought I would have. The skills I’ve learned from “masking and passing” are still there and are definitely still relevant and helpful, but I just don’t put as much effort into it as I used to.

I really think that more ASD people need to come out of the closet too. We need to start demanding that the world understands us and meets us halfway. So far it’s been a one way street, and that’s just not viable long term.

I think a lot of psychologists really have no clue. I was diagnosed with bi-polar II when I was 10, then major depressive disorder, then adhd, the oppositional defiance disorder. I was put on so many different medications which fucked me up and stole my adolescents from me. I ended up a ward of the state and cycled through more than a few mental institutions in my teens. Then I met someone who was like “I think this kids previous shrinks fucked up. I’m taking him off all the medication and then I’m going to observe him and find a diagnosis.”

Turns out I had Aspergers. So at age 15 I was diagnosed, and then participated in a few brain studies which confirmed it. I stayed off the medication and went through therapy focusing on life skills and human relationship training (how to talk to and interact with huerotyipicals).

Since then my life has been pretty good. It’s had its ups and downs, but a wonderful journey into my 30s.

In my case I was on the spectrum, but the whole experience has made me very skeptical of psychologists. I sometimes think about how many terrible programmers there are. I think the same spread of skills probably exists in every profession. Unfortunately, in psychology if you’re bad at your job, you end up ruining lives.

Like anything else, it’s best to shop around.

First rule of design: Know your user. Second rule of design: You (the designer) are not the user.

I think the general criticisms here are because this designer didn't follow these 2 basic rules.

Speaking as someone on the spectrum, please do not fake a condition to try to get better treatment or something you want. Not only is this dishonest but it makes it harder for those of us who are really on the spectrum to get the assistance we really need. It’s already hard enough for us to get support in the workplace or even hold down a job, to contend with the “I wonder if they’re faking it to get special treatment” it just makes things harder.

A low protein, high carb diet is how I got type 2 diabetes at age 30. This article isn’t just wrong, it is dangerous. Lower your carb intake folks. You don’t have to be extreme or anything. 45 grams of carbs or less per meal is a good barometer for everyone.

I had a similar thing happen when interviewing for ShutterStock 2-3 years ago. Wanted me to implement fibonaccci sequencer. I of course, forgot the mathematical definition of Fibonancii sequence, so went to Wikipedia to look it up. Was told I couldn’t use outside resources, then was told to think through what that sequence does and struggled a lot. Finally got through it with a really terrible recursive implementation, because the interviewer kept interrupting me and correcting me over the course of the interview, which took about an hour. I asked the interview where they put my skill level and I shit you not they said entry level to junior. I’ve been programming for 10 years at that point, and was significantly qualified for the position. After the interview was over, looked up a constant time formula based on the Golden Mean (from Wikipedia) and implemented a constant time algorithm to solve it. Took 4 lines of code and 10 minutes to do (including a test suite) Sent it in via email, and basically told them why their hiring process is broken and insulting to candidates.

I didn’t get the job, thank god.

Honestly, I think we should just unionize everyone in the tech field. A single Union that handles and accepts all software developers, IT operations folks, software testers, etc and we protect our own and lobby for the laws to benefit us and our profession. The things these companies do to get around basic worker rights is deplorable and we need to organize and fight back, and befor you say you make a ton of money and love what you do so why unionize, ask yourself how many hours you worked overtime and didn’t get paid for it. Ask yourself how many times you’ve seen a colleague let go because they had some medical troubles. Ask yourself how many times a colleague on a visa told you they felt trapped. Ask yourself how many times you’ve heard of a colleague get fucked out of their vacation due to a critical issue. Ask yourself how much power you have to effect change when it comes to just general process and how we go about our day to day. Ask yourself how many times you’ve felt you’ve been asked to do something that was unethical and didn’t want to risk the financial implications and consequences of saying “No”. We need a union. Call it whatever you want, a guild, a bar, a union. Whatever. The point is, it’s time to organize and it’s time to start fighting back.

I agree. This idea sacrifices readability in favor of terseness which is hostile to the beginner and to the professional. It results in less legible code for everyone. I hope this PEP is rejected.

The use of Lattice Boltzmann Equations to parelleize computation. It’s alreadg being used in doing dynamic fluid simulations but it’s applications are pretty endless. I wouldn’t be surprised to see LBM translated for use in Machine Learning, Cognitive AI, NLP, Computational Biology, etc, etc.

I don’t disagree with your principals of good code quality. I disagree that by following those principals you no longer need to use a debugger or to develop debugging skills. Your post is harmful because it suggest to junior developers that if they must use a debugger they must be developing their software in a poor fashion. This is not true. There are many good reasons to use a debugger, including to develop software or to explore a codebase and to debug your code.

This is perhaps one of the most harmful statements I’ve ever read on Hacker News. You’re not doing it wrong if you use a tool to help you understand what your program is doing. Should you follow good design patterns, like using small functions when writing your software? Yes. Should you minimize complex state? Sure. Should you use tools to help you understand what your program is doing? Absolutely. The two are not mutually exclusive.

There are a LOT of different ways to write software. Some more stateful than others. Some lower level than others. Some more asyncrounous than others. Some more functional. Some more object oriented.

Your experience with the software you write in your day to day, is not the same stack and may not even be in the same universe as what others are attempting. Writing a React app is very different from writing a game in Unity, which is very different than writing a game engine in C++ which is very different that writing large scale services that talk to clusters of computers and hardware devices, which is different than writing some low level library in Rust or Haskell or doing data science in R or Octave.

Please fucking stop with this “one right way”, “you’re dodging it wrong” dogmatic bullshit. Your limited worldview does not apply to ALL of software development.

Use a fucking REPL if you want. Use a debugger if you want. Use logs and traces if you want.

Just try to write good software, try to understand your code, and ignore dogmatic and valiantly bad advice and opinions like the parent comment on Hacker News.

I just took a job in a long established financial company specifically because they had cube farms. I can confirm it’s a thousand times better than the open offices I’ve worked at previously.

I won’t take any job with an open office floor plan for the rest of my career. The stress of environmental oppression (noise, people cramped together, close quarters, etc) is just not worth it.

I am much happier now.

This is wrong. Not wrong in an immoral sense but wrong in an academic sense. This so called “victimhood” culture arose as a culture of “believe and support the victim”. Of course within that idea of taking the victim’s side first a few people have exploited that for their own selfish reasons and some people have been unfairly targeted as a result. But this “believe the victim first” mentality came about as an inverse to the “give the accused the benefit of the doubt” mentality because the latter suppressed the former’s credibility and made it difficult for real victims of real heinous shit to come forward.

Also as a straight white male, I’m insulted by this author’s idea that this “victimhood culture” seeks to invert the power pyramid where now the white dudes are on the bottom. The point of these movements isn’t to invert the power structure, it’s to destroy that power structure entirely. There shouldn’t be a fucking pyramid. That’s the point.

“Victimhood culture” (i.e. social justice movements) is dignity culture. It’s about bringing dignity to those who historically hasn’t had that. It’s about bringing dignity to people who have lost their dignity through acts that have caused them trauma. It’s always been about dignity.

No. The model has a problem with overfitting. That’s my point.

Thank you for this. I couldn’t agree with you more. I see the exact same kind of risk aversion hiring with data scientists that I’ve seen in the past with engineers hiring other people without a specific engineering background because of the assumption that those people don’t have the right mindset or skills. My entire point is that this kind of hiring process weeds out potentially great candidates based on the false assumption that not having a PhD or some other hard to get qualification somehow makes you unqualified. I think this is the result of this “field” being relatively young in industry and it will change as it gets demystified over the next few years.

What value does a bachelor’s degree have if some kid can just learn ruby and JavaScript on his own and go make $100k/yr at some startup? Of course a degree has value but it is possible to provide value without one. This is especially true in 2018 when anyone can learn pretty much anything online, and download whatever papers they want online and read them. Your mistake is in thinking that somehow a degree makes you special. It doesn’t. It just means you paid for a head start. Anyone can learn anything you already know and they can surpass your skill, whether or not you have a piece of paper certifying your knowledge.

This right here is a perfect example of why this position is gatekeeped so much. Having a PhD doesn’t automatically mean you think like a scientist of a mathematician, and having a bachelor’s degree and 15 years of experience writing code and then putting in the effort to read Elements of Statistical Learning, compeleting several online courses in machine learning and data science, studying probability, combinatorics, graph theory, does not mean you don’t have a scientific mindset. A scientific mindset can be learned. You are not special because you have a PhD and I don’t. The only difference between you and me is that I had the ability to learn for free what you paid for. But when you go “oh hah, he’s just a coder and only has a bachelors degree” and you won’t even call me to talk to me that means you are missing out, and you are gatekeeping. You are not special and you are not smarter than me. You’ve just read a book I haven’t and wrote a white paper. I can read that book too. I can write a paper too.

I can do everything you can do.

I recently quit a gig and spent a few months looking for a data science/machine learning gig. I was surprised just how gatekeeped these positions were. Everyone wanted a PhD or a masters degree. I have 15 years of experience in software. I’ve done everything to low level game programming and graphics programming to web development, to AI (but not as a specific position title).

The gatekeeping in this field surprised me because in my study of data science and machine learning I did not think the practical use of these techniques was that hard. The math isn’t even that hard if you had to implement these algorithms from scratch. It’s just linear algerbra and calculus, which anyone with an engineering degree is going to at least have exposure to. I couldn’t get the time of day from anyone. Not even a call back to prove that I knew or could learn what was needed to be effective. It was incredibly frustrating and disappointing.

Data science / machine learning is not that hard, and you are turning away good candidates for bullshit reasons. Stop it. At least bring them in and talk to them. Jesus.

Most hot-stuffed pull-up leathers are water resistant because of the incredible amount of waxes and oils added. Pull-up leather is often used in boots and duffels for that reason. Veg tan leathers can be made water resistent with Resolene or a TON of surfaces waxes like Carnauba.

Source: I work with a lot of leather.

I think it's less about the notation, and more about thinking around computational complexity. You should know when to use a set vs a hash vs a list vs an array. You should know what different sorting algorithms do, and why you might use one over another. In some cases having exposure to more esoteric data structures like persistable tries, minimal spanning trees, red/black tries, bloom filters, etc can come in handy. Knowing why things like that are useful is worth knowing. But I agree with you, judging a bootcamp graduate on skills that can be taught with experience and continual study is probably not the best way to go about hiring people.

Reminds me of this research paper by Adobe and their approach to bringing Water Color painting to Illustrator on the iPAD.

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1598012&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CF...