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pracer

44 karma · joined September 24, 2020

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pracer··on The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better
I think the point missing is that food that get wasted could not arrive where it is needed before getting rot. Letting aside the expenses to do that. The problem is not that we waste food, as it would not solve starvation, the problem is that in those places where people has no food, there is no production.
pracer··on Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness
If the plan is to live off the savings, probably not. The idea is to make some investments, either stocks or real estate (for renting, for example), and have the money work for you.

It is not easy in any case, that's for sure. Besides, I sometimes think if I could get there, I would work time to time in interesting projects.

pracer··on Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness
There are already problems with this written in a comment above. I recall it would be like: do residents get it too? How long they need to be in the country to get the UBI? What about expats working in the country? and their kids? Should the kids get the money since birth or later?

And last one: as UBI comes from taxes (the state generates 0 money, just collect from others), what about those who decide not to work at all? How long until some of them stats asking for an increase in UBI because they cannot get a rent in the city?

It seems you have an idealistic view about human nature and that everyone is good and honest, not greedy, etc. The reality is not bad, but not so naive.

pracer··on Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness
Totally agree with this. Otherwise, I don't see UBI solving anything, but creating new problems.
pracer··on Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness
No, is the other way around. You claim UBI would work and the problems some of us said are not real problems because it could be solved. So now, it is your turn to explain which mechanisms would avoid those problems.

Otherwise I could say "erasing money would make us live like aristocrats" without explaining how or why, and you should try to figure out why I could think that way, what kind of tools and mechanisms I thought of and after that, explaining why it would not work. Obviously, I could say those are not the right tools for my idea, so you have no real counter arguments, yada yada yada...

pracer··on Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness
Of course! government intervention in prices and supply and demand! How nobody thought about it before? Well, they did. And it failed spectacularly, as central planning of prices doesn't work due to the impossibility of getting all the information needed in time and the results of the analysis on time too in order to correct the market.

And as a proponent of UBI, YOU should explain how it would work, not the others. What financial tools or mechanisms would use a government to control the inflation or the rise in prices? I mean, even in the late Soviet Union had to look at capitalists countries to have an idea of the prices for basic products, because they coul not put a price that would make it work.

pracer··on Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness
I'm confused too. How is that engineers here talking about UBI as a solution to this pressure to keep your job don't talk or consider how to pay that? Besides, when everyone has a base level of income, inflation came in play (as a consequence of supply and demand of goods) and then we go back to the same problem: getting a good life or just the basics to life becomes expensive even with UBI.

Also, I would recommend to read "Debunking Utopia" about the social system Nordic countries implemented in the past, some kind of model for solving the problem of living decently for people without possibilities and/or problems to make a living. The countries are slowly but steady reducing that system because it solves nothing and creates extra problems. With UBI, which is a bigger plan than the system Nordic countries had, you would end up with the same if not worse problems than they faced: people decide not to work for low wages or in jobs that are needed but unappealing (and I don't blame them, for sure), but because someone has to do the jobs, wages increase a lot, which in turn, increases the costs and price of those services. And, voila, we are at the beginning of the problem, were people are stressed or unhappy because they have to keep jobs they don't enjoy or like.

The difference is that the UBI would be the new penny, because you could not buy anything. Maybe with AI and automation we would get there, as robots would not complain or care.

pracer··on A career ending mistake
Oh man, if you see it like that, is probably becoming true. In other industries or jobs it could b, but in tech? Companies are the ones looking for more developers, and if you made it to senior, you have a lot of power.

ABI or rich parents are the only options for you, it seems. Such a sad view. We don't need to be the next Bezos to avoid the wage slavery. We just need to be financially independent: some investments, maybe some flats for rent... in general, the principles of FIRE are possible for those who work in tech or engineering. It is a matter of making the effort to get there (and a bit of luck, of course). But if you start defeating yourself since the start, of course you will lose.

Also, working for a salary is not wage slavery in every case. In fact, working for money is the modern equivalent of spending the day wandering around for food or going to a 3 days' hunting trip with the fellow cavemen. What I mean is that no matter what, you have to get food and shelter to live, so either you work for it or someone else does. Which is essentially what ABI is. Until automation reaches full capabilities (if it does and Skynet doesn't kill us), you have to work to get food (and other services we want and need today) so try to find the best way for you to get that. Don't rely on others, they have no obligation with you and your desires.

pracer··on A career ending mistake
I think it may be about expectations. It is a game and, no matter what people or company say, they are NOT your family. Face your job with that in mind, avoiding the cynical views/attitudes. You go there to make money and if you learn and improve yourself, don't do it for the company to congratulate you, but in order to have more options and/or because you want to learn that new thing.

Companies are there to make money, and policies are set not as laws in stone, but to have some control over the work environment. That means the company would use those policies as needed. You are replaceable in general, and that's a fact. The same way companies should be replaceable for you. In this case, in tech, we are lucky enough to have plenty of opportunities to get new jobs, so use it. Not to find the perfect fantasy company, but to get the money you need to live a life you want.

pracer··on See how DMARC, SPF, and DKIM work interactively
As mentioned above, I think it is due to the fact that SPF may be too broad, as in softfail SPF (defined here https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7208#section-2.6.5).

Based on the RFC, for the rest of possible SPF configurations (more strict), SPF record would be enough. But I am guessing based on the RFC document and my experience.

pracer··on See how DMARC, SPF, and DKIM work interactively
I would add that SPF alone may not be enough, and that's why some of the other mechanisms are needed. AFAIK if you have a softfail SPF (a record ending in `~`), you would need DMARC or DKIM. But the SPF is needed always in order to specify the domains/ip that are allowed. The other two mechanisms are used for making it more strong and reducing the potential phishing attacks. In particular, a softfail SPF may be fixed by using a "rejected" or "quarantine" DMARC policy.

But this is from the RFC document, so it may be that in practical cases things are more nuanced.

pracer··on Lessons from seven years of remote work
Yes, life sometimes sucks. It is also bad to have to commute for 1 hour or more when you're a junior and have no car, so what?

When you're young you will struggle with things, we all did.

P.S.: if you are mostly doing videocalls in your daily work, you may want to change jobs. You should be ok in a library and going out to some room or hall for videocalls. Sucks? Yeah, not the best, but better than the jail that you said is your room.

pracer··on Lessons from seven years of remote work
Actually not true. That is the typical environment of big corps in my experience. And also for companies who didnt adapt correctly to remote work. I work from Europe with a NY based startup and these problems were resolved. If some work may require people involved in some critical path, it is scheduled in advance. And there is always someone on call for each critical system.

You keep using problems that are not related to remote work neccesarily, but to the way the company works.

pracer··on Lessons from seven years of remote work
That is true. But the problem here is not the remote work, is the company workflow. It will be the same problem in the office.
pracer··on Lessons from seven years of remote work
That is also the case when studying, and people may go to libraries or other places. That's an option too.

The bright side is that a junior eng. is young, motivated and full of energy, so it can be done for a while until the salary helps to move up. Unless you are in Bay area. Avoid Bay area :D

pracer··on Revenge Bedtime Procrastination
"But personally the late night hours is a time when the world seems to stop and I'm able to be in my own space."

I think this is exactly what the definition conveys. I had this "night owl" schedule when I was busy all day. Once I was able to have free time during the day, it became less interesting or even less than a need.

pracer··on The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers
Being myself a big advocate of remote work (and being working remote for the last 3 years, before pandemic) I agree that usually people underestimate the downsides. The thing is, in my opinion, that the key should be, does it really works having remote workers compared to in person offices? I think it does, once the dynamic changes to the new environment. And in the medium to long term makes people happier as they can improve their personal lifes with the time they can recover (as well as being able to organize the time by themselves).

The main problem I saw people had with the remote work is how to make friends outside of work. Most of us are used to "find friends" from our schools, then universities and then from work, so many people got the feeling that they were isolated. But that's because they didn't know how to find "pools" of people to find new friends from.

pracer··on The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers
> But I would imagine it's far slower than doodling on a napkin with a colleague during break.

I think you overestimate how much relevant these napkin innovation situations are. Talking with some coworker and drawing something over a napkin doesn't mean the idea will be revolutionary at all. Or even useful. It is most of the times, a romantic image that make people feel like the smart innovator they would like to be.

pracer··on The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers
It doesn't need to be so. I started in my actual company 3 years ago, NY based startup and I was based in Europe. The first months we had every day meetings with one of the senior engineers in USA going through the changes we implemented that day, how it worked with the rest of the codebase and systems, how and why this worked and that didn't, etc... It worked perfectly, considering we still work in the company and we are know the seniors. The system we started working on, that was freshly released then, is now smooth and stable. We did it full remote and also with a 6 h difference in time zone, and it worked.

The thing is the time investment may look big because you have to specify a meeting time and reserve a slot of an hour for it. But it is not different from having it spread across the day as the juniors find a problem, interrupt the senior, get the explanation, etc. I worked in both environments: in the office and full remote. And regarding work and knowledge sharing I don't see a big difference. The real difference is changing the way of working and interacting, but once that is done it works equally fine. The rest is a matter of preference related to interacting with people on a daily basis. But for me, that is outside working hours when I go to the gym, join activities like quizzes, sports, etc., with people I don't work with.

Also I want to add that I connect in videocalls with colleagues, when we have not much work for a few hours just to chat about work and out of work things. And we never met in person.

pracer··on What can be learned from studying long gone development practices?
"I am not employed to write programs for other users or to be read by programmers. Every user is different."

Well, unless you are the only programmer that company will ever has, you should write code that others can read and understand. Or if you are working in academia, then you can write as you like, but as a professional, you should write readable code for those coming after you.

pracer··on Poor in Tech
"Rich people mostly ignore poor people because visible poverty makes them uncomfortable so they look away. They hate themselves if they see our humanity so they try not to."

It has to be amazing having such a simple world model. Or better yet, being able to know the deepest ideas and thoughts in other people's minds and to explain their behaviour.

Going back to seriousness, and leaving sit-com cliches aside, do you have any solid evidence about this? and when you say rich, could you give a ballpark of the money they have to have to be considered rich? Because poor people in US would have better living conditions than in other countries in Europe, for example.

pracer··on Can you become a firmware engineer(embedded software engineer) through bootcamp?
In regards to finding a project to start practicing, coupled with buying a dev board, I can recommend this course https://www.edx.org/course/embedded-systems-shape-the-world-...

I did it some time ago, the board they use is pretty cheap and it could be a good starting point. Disclaimer: - I did this course (or similar, but same professors and same university) online some years ago, so I assume it has been updated. - I do not get any benefits, monetary or otherwise, for promoting this course or for new enrollments. I just recommend it based on my personal experience.

pracer··on Just Be Rich
Spain. There are levels of taxation that provokes the following: your small company (1 to 10 employees) is doing really well so you try to increase the number of employees and business. And what happens is that when passing some threshold you will have to pay the next level of taxes and end up earning less after taxes than when you were smaller. So we have a lot of small companies that cannot or don't want to take that risk.
pracer··on Common Mistakes of New Engineering Managers
This is, in my opinion and experience, the main gist of the problem. Management work doesn't take full time and people get bored or scared they can lose their jobs if someone finds they didn't do much. So you end up with a lot of synch meetings, one-on-one's, backlog refinement meetings, weekly reviews etc.

And now most of the managers have a calendar full of meetings to coordinate projects with other managers that after that they meet with their teams to get feedback/answers they need to go back to the project meeting and tell other managers that tell their teams... If they were not managers but developers or engineers with technical knowledge, they would save a ton of time (and team's time) and solve most of the issues in a couple of sessions.

But most managers will disagree because they cannot see how the "difficult technical problems they helped solving" were not so complex in the first place... when you put together the people who knows about the code/projects/systems.

pracer··on Common Mistakes of New Engineering Managers
I would agree with that. But the problem (already mentioned) is: how could a manager help you grow in the technical field if the manager is out of touch with it and didn't do coding or dev work for years?

In any case, if I have to choose (and more times than not I wished I could) I would choose the option of the first comment.

pracer··on Common Mistakes of New Engineering Managers
And this is the perfect example of why so many companies are doing it wrong. Managers that truly believe they are the ones pulling the weight and making projects possible (without any mention to technology and eng. knowledge) and if not, it is because the engineers are over their minds and you have to micromanage them.

And because managers tend to be the ones proposing promotions or career upgrades, they reproduce this mindset by selection bias.

The point mentioned in some comment above about changing company if you feel forced to move to management has been proved by this comment. If you see this behaviour in management, no matter if you want to continue your IC career or move to management, run. Find a better place.

pracer··on Ask HN: Do you think Agile/Scrum is beneficial for software delivery?
Well, but that's what actually happens everywhere. The estimates are not for the team itself, but used for managers and the company. Even in the comments here it was justified as "the company needs to know that to sell it to customers".

So reality trumps ideals.

pracer··on Ask HN: Do you think Agile/Scrum is beneficial for software delivery?
>but a high performing team requires excellent communication and this is one way to achieve that.

This is the problem: that sentence is backwards, as it is scrum. A high performance team HAVE excellent communication. So Scrum tries to force this hoping it will create a high performance team. Effect before the cause. Maybe if you are lucky, it would work... maybe.

pracer··on Ask HN: Do you think Agile/Scrum is beneficial for software delivery?
> the sprint is meant to reassure management that they'll get at least *something (even if not a full X) in a predictable time

I would rephrase it as "sprint is meant to make management to believe that they'll get at least something in a predictable time".

I also notice that lots of comments seem to be coming from front-end or customer-based companies. For backend and b2b, 2 weeks sprint for some new functionality is funny.

pracer··on Ask HN: Do you think Agile/Scrum is beneficial for software delivery?
In my experience, when you see scrum, you will see an over-bureaucratic company with way more managers that engineers and, usually, those managers (call them product owners, project managers whatever) are the ones calling the shots which leads to all sorts of problems due to their general lack of technical knowledge and overfocus on "deliverables and customers needs".

And don't get me wrong: customer needs are the priority in every company that sells software or provides SW services. But one thing is what customer needs, and another is how to provide it to them.

More times than not, in those places, we ended up redesigning a feature in the middle of the development because it was designed by POs and other ilk only looking at customer needs, so that design didn't fit the system.

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