r_hoods_ghost

In case you hadn't noticed, this law hasn't been passed. It is currently out for consultation through a relatively transparent process. Certainly more transparent than the, let's all meet at the club and thrash it out between us, what what, process that takes place in Westminster under the current lot. This is how democracy is supposed to work, but alas very few people take the time to learn that or engage in the actual process.

So you do want the government to control jeans manufacturing then?

It's not a fundamentally bad idea from a practical point of view (like I said, I'll leave the ethics out of it), but I think it is not as good an idea as a lot of people think as it narrows the field so much. Also the signal that people get, unless they have worked directly with a person, rather than just chatted with them at a networking event or know them from their childhood, is I would argue "belongs to my tribe", rather than "good at x"

Let's be honest, the alternative to having an open hiring process, i.e. resumes, is nepotism and hiring your chums and the chums of your contacts. Which does describe the hiring process in a lot of startups. Ethical issues aside, the problem with this is that it shrinks the pool of potential hires down drastically, to people who look like you, think like you, and know roughly the same things as you. Great if your customers also fit into this bracket, not so great if they don't.

However I think the OP drastically underestimates the proportion of wholly unqualified on paper people who apply for most jobs. I'd put it at 50% for most and up to 90% for some. So you can see why people go down the nepotism + chums route.

As someone who has a deeply weird CV and life experiences / social circle that is pretty much orthogonal to most techies it can be difficult, as the nepotism / chums route is not available. But just writing a cover letter to the JD and company gets me a fair way usually.

By your definition of intelligence. By my definition of intelligence it is, but then I consider any system that displays goal oriented behaviour and an ability to react to changes in its' environment to be at least minimally intelligent. What is your definition?

My experience is that a lot of devs cannot or do not want to actually talk to users and learn how they use the software and what the need from it, and suggesting that they do this is considered an outrageous waste of precious dev time (I'm paid to code, not go to meetings). What's worse, is that a large part of the industry works to a set of tightly defined processes that are designed to buffer devs from users.

I am talking of course about scrum, story points, product managers, scrum masters, product owners, rituals, etc. All the crap and layers of indirection that sit between devs and the people who actually use the software.

Devs should be talking to and working with end users and building up an understanding of what users want and need from the software. I mean this literally. Actually sit with, work with, and talk to users, don't just communicate with them through an issue tracker.

You sometimes see this in early stage startups, but even startups often end up designing for VCs or designing to be acquired, rather than designing for users.

Yes users sometimes need training on how to communicate requirements, but it is up to devs to do this. Don't expect them to magically acquire this skill out of nowhere.

I'm philosophically comfortable with the notion that some things are unknowable and that eventually one just has to take certain cornerstone propositions about the nature of reality on trust and / or faith. Ultimately though the question is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, as the claim I'm making is that physical reality is at a lower level than socio economic reality (which I'll give you is a contested claim these days)

Very interesting question! I would argue that concepts like "size", "colour", "texture" are grounded in a more base level of reality than concepts such as "buy price", "sell price", "dividend" etc. The former set of concepts relate to aspects of the physical world as perceived by creatures that inhabit that world, while the latter refer to social constructs of the human socio-economic world that are themselves reliant on abstract human concepts of utility, value, the market etc.

This thought is not fully developed but I'm drawn to the idea that if an intelligence is grounded in an understanding of a more base level of reality it will find it easier to generalize beyond any one given domain. I could be entirely wrong of course.

Whenever I read something like, "Software development is not carpentry. Almost everything a developer writes is unique, they have never built that particular thing before. We are not cabinet makers repeating a variation of something we've built hundreds of times before." I just assume that the person is trolling, or a child.

Virtually all software developers are building minor variations on thing that have been built hundreds if time before. Sure, maybe not by that particular software developer, but by a thousand others at some point, and half of those have probably stuck their code on GitHub so you can look at how they did it.

This idea that software developers are somehow cranking about beautiful snowflakes of such uniqueness that it is impossible to ever estimate how long something will take is nonsense. It is delusional.

I really wish as a profession we could get over ourselves and acknowledge that, hey, it is possible to learn from others, that much of what we do is repeatable, and that if you're really struggling with estimating it probably isn't because you're engaged in ground breaking work that has never been done before, but rather that you haven't bothered to think things through.

Yes this is not particularly great aesthetically. But visually it is much better than what a lot of "full stack" (i.e. backend) developers can knock up, no matter how long you give them, as a lot of developers have no interest in making things look nice or even making them useable as long as they get to tick off another story point. It is definitely better than anyone without any experience of development could produce. It is also better than what an experienced designer could knock up in 30 minutes. It is also rapidly improving. I genuinely think that five years from now almost all developers front or backend will be obsolete, in the same way that buggy whip makers are now.

I hear this a lot. The counter argument is virtually no one is going from implementing chat gpt as project 1 to implementing google maps as project 2. In fact they are going from implementing v1 of google Maps to v1.1.

When I worked as a kitchen fitter there was a much greater difference between projects that anything I've experienced with a single employer as a dev. Fitting a top end kitchen in a listed 500 year old cottage is vastly different to fitting a budget kitchen in a new build, to fitting a period appropriate kitchen in a 1930s town house. Building out the next version of an API or writing a rendered, not so much.

I think a lot of Devs have a vastly inflated sense of the "uniqueness" of what they are implementing, and I think a lot of that derives from the industries obsession with reinventing the wheel, NIH syndrome and fashion driven development.

I live with an actor. Every year or so she gets a set of professional headshots done which costs somewhere between £300 and £1000 depending on the photographer. While the quality of a professional set is undoubtedly better than these (currently) they're not so far off and I can see an acting student or jobbing actor going for a service like this if they're skint.

A central authority doesn't control the size of the money supply in our current economy either, as the vast majority of money is created by private banks and other institutions issuing loans.

2008 was extremely similar to today, although the webdev ecosystem wasn't quite as degenerate. I'd say you'd have to go back to the pre internet era to find a work environment that was fundamentally different.

Umm, you do realize that the purveyors of decentralized Ponzi schemes co-opted the word "crypto" from us serious minded folks concerned with cryptography?

This very much depends on where you are. For example in the UK a lay off technically means being told to stay at home because there isn't enough work [1], although it's often used these days to mean "fired without cause", i.e. the American usage of lay off has become more common and it has simultaneously became common to use the term "furlough" to describe layoffs during the pandemic.

[1]https://www.gov.uk/lay-offs-short-timeworking

Net doesn't matter to the individual firm. And who should carry it? Everyone else who had the gumption to spend, what, a few man hours, to guarantee that they won't end up not being g able to make pay roll?

But they were by, for smaller but over 250k depositors, not spreading their deposits between multiple banks. Which can be done manually or through a sweeping account very very easily. Or, for larger depositors, having other safety mechanisms in place. Really depositors over 250k do need to take some moral responsibility, even though I think it is better that they be made whole to stave off a 2008 style financial crisis.

Really?!! There's a reason the government insures deposits, but up only to a certain amount. Because banks go bust pretty frequently. Of course this is the sort of think that should be on your risk register, whether you're an individual or a company.

No rational reason, however during bank runs rationality tends to go out the window and even banks that are perfectly safe on paper can find themselves in trouble.

Would a potential CRO really get full access to a public company's accounts and risk register as part of the interview process? Would a CTO really get full access to a company's code base as part of the interview process? Genuine question as this seems intuitively unlikely to me.

"Can you drive a car for free (for 5 - 8 hours) until you decide that's the car you want to buy?" Yes. It's called a test drive. I think the longest I've seen is a free 48 hour test drive with an online e dealership, but free all day test drives are the norm in the UK. Similarly most lawyers will give you a free consultation. I think you have a highly distorted view of reality, how other professions operate, and of your own worth.

I have worked in academia and I am aware of the restrictions on purchasing. But as an individual you can purchase software for yourself. You can encourage your students to purchase software. You can even make it a requirement of a course, in the same way as buying a textbook is.

I have never come across that is more reluctant to actually pay for the tools to do their job than devs. Hell we've even built a quasi religious cult in foss that revolves around not paying. Yes yes I know the "free" In foss is supposed to be free as in freedom, but in practice it ain't, it's all about free as in beer. See the gp and the offence taken at actually being asked to pay for the foundational tool they use to do their job.

"Canonical is unlikely to be that interested in the views of people who have little or no chance of giving them money, people like us." A university in one of the richest countries in the world, the academics employed by it, and the students who attend have little or no chance of giving them money? Of course you do. You just don't want to.

Every time I read something like this I feel like I am living in a parallel world. It really, really doesn't. Now if you were to say "the nature of web development and hn adjacent company hiring practices where people move every 18 months, coupled with ageism and fashion based development that constantly reinvents the wheel prevents experience" then I would agree.

As I said they took up about 50% of the second line support capacity for the entire organisation. So yes they were properly supported, unless you want a dedicated tech to hold the hand of every exec, dev and bioinformatician.

Because as someone who has done support for a 28000 person organisation, 27500 of which are using mostly Microsoft products on windows for 90% of the time and 500 of which are using Mac or Linux and doing other stuff I can tell you that at least 50% of the security incidents and second line support issues came from those 500 users.

SSO and SAML are not enterprise features. They are table stakes security wise, and intentionally crippling your security model is a good way of driving off customers that take security seriously, no matter their size.

This is utter nonsense and just shows you've never worked in a unionized workplace. You're basically repeating talking points from 1950s propaganda.

Yes, but what is the focus of google's privacy organisation? Is it protective user privacy or is it designing and implementing ways to circumvent user privacy controls and regulations? From the evidence I'd say the latter.