npsimons

Say what you will about the guy, and there's an argument to be made that Tesla at least is incremental and not a crazy new idea, but Musk co-founded Paypal and is now pushing limits in spaceflight.

I mean, this is basically QAnon, antivaxxers, creationists and trickle-down economists in a nutshell. That said . . .

> Are they mistaken, or are you? One of you has to be.

By default I assume I'm in the wrong. There's just so many domains of knowledge, the probability of me having enough depth of even more than a handful is highly unlikely. The hard part is distinguishing those who are domain experts, and those who are not, when you are not a domain expert.

> If you're the one who's mistaken, that would be good to know, because it means there's a hole in your model of the world.

And I love viewing everything as a mental model, because, well, it is, plus models are plastic: they can be changed. Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong" comes to mind.

This! When I have enough money to take a year (or more!) leave without pay, but you say "sorry, you've used up your annual leave", the only option I'm left with is quit.

And when it comes time again to get another job, that company that wouldn't give me more time off is not going to be my first choice.

I mean, some of us value work life balance. Even on projects I'm insanely passionate about, I need to pace myself, otherwise I'll get burnt out.

I've been trying to escape the C++ world, despite my mastery, and get into Common Lisp. I would honestly take a pay cut to work on only Common Lisp code.

OTOH, there are groups that don't have their shit together. I fought tooth and nail to try to get continuous integration up and running at the last project I worked on, and it was just so fucking frustrating trying to get people to change. They recognized the need and the benefit, but wouldn't take any action to actually implement it.

And now they're actually looking to abandon Gitlab "because it corrupted one of the repositories." They're going to go to a direct git repo and someone proposed building their own CI from scratch out of cronjobs and such.

Very much this. I can put up even with FORTRAN - hell one of the most interesting challenges I had recently was figuring out how to call C++ from FORTRAN.

But I've been living in Emacs for almost two decades, and longer than that in Linux. I have to insist that my personal development seat is Emacs on Linux. Yes, I can target Windows and probably anything else from Linux (iOS is a challenge, but I'm looking into it), so I don't see the "need" to develop natively.

I'll second the interesting work and keeping people busy, as the job was boring me to tears. Part of it is on me, as I was having problems giving 100%, and that's unacceptable to me as a professional. But if I was being tasked, I don't think it would be as much of an issue.

I'll also second bare minimum raises. It's not about the money, but rather that the Trinity study found that inflation averaged 3% YoY. If salary isn't going up by at least that much, you're cutting my pay every year.

While I can sling bits in just about anything and have system administrator experience to boot (running my personal domains and mail servers on the open Internet for decades), I have to insist that my personal development seat is Emacs running in Linux. Apart from the fact of it sucking less, I'm so experienced with them both, it's a waste of my time to force me to use other tooling. I can (and have) cross-developed software for Windows, OSX and vxWorks (and soon to pickup Android and maybe iOS), but I've done it all from Emacs under Linux with no issues. I have no issues learning new SDKs, toolkits, frameworks, languages, etc, I just have 20+ years of Linux and Emacs experience under my belt, it's one of my skillsets that is a feature.

And last, I'm never going to work in an office again if I can manage it. No, I don't care how awesome your team or office is, I'm happier, healthier and more productive at home. Other tech firms have realized this[0], figure it out or I don't want to work for you.

ETA: Ooh, another big factor is leave. I don't need money, in fact I'm probably a bargain, but I want to work less hours, not more, and in my free time I rescue people off mountains. But this requires I be in a state of semi-on call, able to drop things at a moments notice to go rescue people. I always make up the time later (or take annual leave), but part of what I like about software development is the "episodic" nature, where I can cut to something else for a day or two, then come back to the project fresh.

[0] - https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/02/01/why-we-still-believe-i...

This. "Identity theft" shouldn't be a term. There's already a term for what's happening, it's called fraud, and it's perpetrated on the banks without involving the person whose identity was "stolen." Consumers shouldn't have to deal with the fallout from banks' fuckups, especially given the resources banks have available to avoid said fuckups.

Same. I'm so sick of being locked into one system or another, having my eyeballs monetized, or getting the shitty version of an app because it isn't the vendor's platform. I got a Roku because they're as neutral as one can get, and so far I'm happy paying for YouTube Premium, Amazon Prime and Netflix. You tell me I can't run those on my Roku, well fuck you and your service.

Very much so. It took me a long time to figure out why I could never get into podcasts, and even interviews or talks by authors I respect are boring to me. Writing books takes a lot of work, and they are almost always better organized and more coherent than other forms of information (such as forum comments . . . ). You get more "intellectual nourishment" from books, especially good books.

I tried starting "Emperor's New Mind" by Penrose a month or so back. I don't think I made it past chapter one. Currently I'm binging Stephenson's "Anathem" (I fucking love this book), and feel a little bit of excitement at digging into the sources, but I'm afraid it will end up like most bibliographies I scour - well-intentioned lists I hardly ever make any progress on.

Despite my avoidance of FB, IG, etc, I still find myself spending an inordinate amount of time on Reddit or even HN. But the occasional hit of something truly useful (the Cesium for UE4 post was intriguing to me, as a project at work a few years back was attempting something similar on a smaller scale), but the constant low-level dopamine from neophilia keeps me constantly scrolling, but ultimately listless and depressed at the end of the day.

Oftimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better to make my own pinprick math, but I'm just too addicted to the Reticulum.

This! I don't get how HN, a community of hackers who can't but be aware of FLOSS, could claim with a straight face that "remote doesn't work" in the face of things like LKML.

And now you know how it feels to work in an open floor plan or cubicle where someone can come along and break your flow causing you to have to waste over 20 minutes getting back into it.

The key with the all day video conference is you can mute it and set your status as away when you need to do deep work. Can't do that in an office environment.

We are sentient beings that have had writing for thousands of years. Perhaps we should start acting like it.

A million times this! If there's anything that WFH has done, it's exposed the big gaping hole known as "institutional knowledge."

> Increased difficulty for juniors to ramp up when you are remote is a symptom of a culture with lots of overly complicated processes that are not well documented.

Or no process at all. Even on small teams, even on projects I start from scratch by myself, I GD document things. It's not that hard once you start practicing and make it a habit.

I swear, if a programmer had zero comments in their code and said "just come by the water cooler if you have any questions", they'd be fired within a week, yet we put up with this ephemeral bullshit for other things.

And that same assistant will screen time with the boss, something us plebs don't get.

If it's really valuable information, write it down so even more people can be exposed to it! It's like that saying about meetings: "this could have been an email."

It's not, really.

To think of it another way: what would happen if your mentors left for better jobs, got hit by a bus or even just retired? People need to be documenting things so that knowledge isn't lost and can be passed on to many more people. If it's really that valuable, just think of how much more of an impact it will have when it doesn't have to be passed on one-to-one.

And the mention of the kitchen in the post is spot on too - it's just way too convenient to have my full kitchen at home for a quick smoothie. Some projects at my job don't even have a refrigerator for Pete's sake!

This is a big problem. More often than not "institutional knowledge" is short hand for "I'm too lazy to write this down, hope I don't get hit by a bus!"

People pretend like writing wasn't invented thousands of years ago.

Meanwhile, those who already have remote work skills won't stick around to have their time wasted by being forced to work in an office.

I believe you are picking a point that wasn't my main one. I may not have made it clear, but in my view, I'm going to be using a tool (in this case, an editor), so if I can pick one that is powerful and will be around, it's a net win to learn it. I'm going to learn it anyway (through use).

Emacs is insanely powerful and it's not going anywhere, and I'm fairly certain it was a major point in my progress and productivity, and it continues to be.

What this sounds like to me is your organization isn't documenting things properly. I know, because I've run into this exact same problem on projects at my organization.

"Send me your coding standard."

"Uh, we don't have one."

"Okay, well what's your code review process for integrating changes?"

"It's not written down, I'll have to walk you through it."

"What's my tasking?"

"I'll need to sit down with you in person to discuss that."

The lack of communication skills in software people has never been more obvious than during the quarantines. It's a serious deficit that needs to be addressed. I mean, what happens when one of these people leave, either for greener pastures, something happens to them, or they just simply retire?

Yup. I'm wondering how many people are taking advantage of the tools available to them. I've seen remote workers be online in a video chat room so you could "stop by and pitch an idea." This was well over a decade ago.

Those old school managers you mention are the ones I find most likely to stick with things like audio only teleconference, even when there are things like shared whiteboards/documents available, and then they'll talk to slides they didn't send out over email. Incredibly frustrating.