spaetzleesser

That’s actually very good

The previous generations didn’t exactly set a good example for healthy, impersonal and professional argument.

Are there any communities that are really based on merit?

“Do these people not realize how annoying their process is and how talented people don’t have to put up with crap like this?”

Easy. They select for compliance, not skill.

“ Qualities like duty, loyalty, initiative and industriousness are deemed weaknesses.”

Wherever you look, loyalty is for suckers. Be it as employee, car insurance or cell phone plans. Only the new guy gets respect.

The current implementation of Agile in most cases is pretty much the opposite of agile as described in the agile manifesto.

In my team we have reduced the process to having a simple backlog which we work through. But I have seen other teams where you spend enormous amounts of time on planning but it’s frowned upon if you think any further than the next sprint. Just check off tasks without any thoughts about long term architecture or strategy. Basically just a sweatshop with replaceable “resources” (the company doesn’t hire “people” anymore but “resources”)

I have been to New York and I have also seen Paris during a strike of garbage collectors. It gets ugly very quickly once collection stops.

The number one thing I have noticed in New York was they seem to make trash collection as loud as possible ideally at 3 in the morning :)

“I used to wonder how on earth nazis and communists and the like were able to seize power and control of a population, and now I've seen it”

That’s how the US has worked for a long time. See the war on drugs and mass incarceration, laws against black people and extreme political polarization. There was always a group of “others” that people wanted to get punished.

I bet if Trump had been a little smarter he would have got away with a lot more while people cheering him on. But it seems a lot of political institutions are eroding so maybe the next strongman will be able to go way further.

A small hardware store in town went out of business because they were forced to close. Same for a lot of other small stores. I could understand reducing number of people in the store but closing totally while keeping others open simply didn’t make sense. I think the exceptions had more to do with successful lobbying than with health reasons.

“ That said, companies are often wrong to hire externally as they misattribute their problems to their employees instead of to their own leadership. It is easier for them to blame others instead of themselves.”

After talking to a lot of managers it really seems that a lot of them are deeply skeptical of the people they themselves have hired.

The same happened in CA with some stores being open and others closed. Why was Home Depot open? It made no sense in terms of spreading the disease . It was just arbitrary BS.

Closing the beaches was stupid too. If there ever was a safe place then it was the beach or state park wheee uou are in the open and the window blows.

Why do firefighters have no effect on tourism? Without them you can not run a city. Same for many other jobs like garbage collection.

I enjoyed programming in the 90s and early 2000s but I feel it’s turning again into tedious grunt work with scrum, agile, yaml configuration files and needlessly complex systems.

You need to nail one use case really, really, really well and impress people. When they ask about other things you can then state that they are in development.

There was a thing on NPR a while ago. It basically claimed that plastic recycling was invented as PR strategy by the oil/plastic industry. When you look at the facts it makes sense.

CA prefers to lead on insane housing prices, inequality and number of billionaires. They have played a pretty good role in environmental protections though.

Not sure how I should think about homelessness in CA. I think the problem is that the climate attracts homeless people.

The port of VS to WPF was definitely not a showcase for WPF capabilities. Pretty much everything was worse or slower after the port. And a ton of features was missing. Even now the customization of toolbars is not as elegant as it was on 2008. Not a surprise that they didn’t use XAML for any other big application

I wrote my first web app to track my rebates :). Even had some sign ups. Vbscript with an Access database. Worked pretty well.

I bought a lot of stuff with rebates and I almost always got a check after a very long wait. Sometimes you had to call the number to make them send it out. It was fine when I didn’t make much money but after a while it was too much hassle.

And the offshore team should be large to perform autonomous work. We often get only one or two guys from India or China who need to work closely with the US team . So it ends up with the offshore guys sacrificing their nights or the US people have to sacrifice.

It looks cheaper on paper but this way you get all the overhead of offshoring but bad productivity. It’s terrible.

This schedule may work if you have no other obligations. But it won’t work for a lot of people.

The disregard for time zones is really annoying. From the US offshoring to middle and South America works really well. But somehow we often end up with India where it’s basically impossible to find a decent schedule for the 12 hour time difference.

I do that too. I am not giving into the pressure set up by the company and it’s up to the other people to refuse too. Otherwise the company sets up abusive systems and workers play along. We all need to resist this abuse.

There are plenty of jobs with a regular workday. Stay away from operations/on-call and avoid companies with offshoring in other time zones.

Welcome to health care. We produce a ton of documents that then disappear into a terrible document management system to never be found again.

I think the first part of a standard lib is pretty straightforward to design. String operations, math, standard protocols, I/O are petty well understood. It gets more tricky once you get to higher levels abstraction like UI.

Probably like every large organization.

I have a plan to semi retire and do nothing until j get bored out of my mind and start doing something. I feel years of being a corporate employee in high stress function takes away your ability to do self directed things and to know what you really want to do. I would love to find that again.

You can rescue your profit margin by paying high salaries to executives and have a ton of administrative overhead. That’s how health insurance works. The profit margin says nothing about how efficient the company is.

I am in a similar situation. I have to write and review requirements and other docs in a system with the worst usability and stability I have ever seen. Every little thing you do turns into a massive ordeal because there is always something that doesn’t work right. So I am spending an enormous amount of energy and time just figuring out the quieks of the system. Everybody who has to work with it hates it.

In the last few months I have basically neglected my regular job which is to be a team lead and architect. Other people have picked up the slack to some degree but I feel more and more that my tech skills are going downhill because I am dealing with a software system that shouldn’t ever have been bought.

This is becoming a real career problem. I am learning “skills” that are totally useless in any sane company and neglecting the skills that can get you a good job.