Clearly DHH wasn't around when AOL dumped it's user base onto a community that was previously gated by having to actually learn something about computing in order to get connected. P.S. - Get off my lawn;)
Sorry, parent poster: Gotta agree w/ above comment here. With the minor warning that the unit tests are included in this. In a good environment, I should be able to go to the tests to understand not only WHAT the code is doing but WHY it's doing it. No matter how 'mature' the code base is.
Sadly, after more than 20 years building software, _NEVER_ trust a business person. My faith in humanity had to have me bitten by this the hard way more than once.
I wish adults were organized enough to a.) call it programming and not Computer Science b.) shift the conversation to STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Art & Math) instead of pushing Art out of the discussion and c.) start exposing kids in the tween ages (e.g. 9-13) before a lot of annoying hormones & social pressures kick in together.
I've had a habit over the last 10 years of gifting (I've learned to never 'loan' books to people anymore) used hardback 1971 editions of The Psychology of Computer Programming (some bought as cheap as $0.13 + $3.99 S&H on Amazon). Probably given away away at least a dozen to friends & co-workers. For the handful who did more than skim it, it enriched their understanding about programming as a social activity. He left a great mark on the world, even if only a few of us truly appreciate it.
Some flavors of class dysfunction as well as culture make this the preferred way to get advice in the US. The so-called middle class in the US likes to be self identified by what seems like 70% of the nation. Anyone from the working poor to the actual middle & even upper middle class over the past 50 years has the cultural message of "strike out on your own - make your mark in the world". But, how? Who knows how to do that?
The assumption here becomes that what worked for your parents (even if your relationship is good with them) won't work for you. Worse than that - they don't know how to do better because if they did, they would have by now! For dysfunctional relationships it's worse - the cultural message of "strike out on your own" becomes inferred as "you think you're better than us" and "you're just a social climber". The analogy of a pot of crabs that keep clawing each other back into the pot so that none escape is not a metaphor in the lower socioeconomic strata. It's an observable phenomenon that can make a foot note in your own family history.
In short, unless you want to end up exactly where your friends and family are - they're not the ones you want to be getting advice and ideas from.
Yeah. With fond memories of 20+ years ago when they actually existed in competitive markets. Unfortunately, house flippers have killed the "slow growth, sweat equity" path to ownership. Everything that can be improved, updated, or expanded in a competitive housing marked is done by flippers. Then, even 2 bedroom 1 bath "small" homes cost a fortune because they have stainless steel appliances & granite countertops covering up 50 year old galvanized pipes and electrical work with a limited number of grounded outlets. Flip with flashy improvements, drive up the price, and let the expensive infrastructure problems be a time bomb for the sucker that wants to live in it.
They didn't copy directly, they just re-implemented from memory. I worked for Digital right out of college at the "DEC West" site off 520. A number of my co-workers REALLY hated Microsoft. Swore up & down they had colleges who had seen NT source code when they started working together with Microsoft on "Wolfpack" server clustering that they were using the exact same terms & constants (e.g. structs for system values were identical). Dave Cutler & his crowd were not popular. That $60M - $100M was payoff money to avoid a very public & very nasty copyright suit. And back then, $60M - $100M was considered real money.
"Not only working software,
but also well-crafted software
Not only responding to change,
but also steadily adding value
Not only individuals and interactions,
but also a community of professionals
Not only customer collaboration,
but also productive partnerships"
I fail to see the "scam" here. Your follow-on comments seem to take issue with some of the popular opinions on how to best accomplish the goals above, but that hardly disqualifies the effort to improve software development as a profession outright as a "scam".
Be prepared to get a bullet any moment. When it comes to company sales, no technical person is untouchable. Even if you "know" things couldn't be done w/o you, they don't. That equity that is 'nearly fully vested' would do much better in the pockets of founders who are fully vested and don't need to share another crumb with a fungible resource. I'm not exaggerating, and not joking. Anecdotal, yes: but layoffs to keep equity out of underlings hands do happen.
Thank you for sharing this. I still have the copy on my bookshelf in my office. I know that I'm a different person now from when tried to read it 10 years ago. I'll pick it up again.
I tried. Twice. As a privileged white man in America trying to understand the black experience. However, I could only get about 2/3 of the way through before giving up. I empathized with his early agony and injustice, but the fact that he turned it into a hate for white people and a religious fixation was way too much for me. In the end I saw the only difference between his view and the views of the Klan was his brought out by personal and systematic suffering. The hate, the bias, the intolerance would have just been a simple copy/paste of terms. I got volumes more out of James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time".
The best response to people calling individual contributors "resources" is to politely correct them. If the abusive terminology continues, then the "resources" have the right to "return the favor" by setting the standard in the culture of referring to managers as "overhead" (e.g. "I should ask my 'overhead' if I really need to attend that stupid meeting. I might be able to dodge it so we can get this new feature checked in.")
There's a definite "corporate culture" bias there in your F50 tech company skewing the other direction. How many of that 50-75% are H1b? If not H1b, how "yes man" is your corporate culture? I've worked in large & small orgs on the West coast over the past 20 years, and I tend to notice that people willing to work in large organizations are culturally or personally conditioned to put up with large org B.S. I've seen a significant tendency of Asian workers to take orders and not ask questions, do not try anything outside of what is expected and perscribed. Large orgs thrive on that crap, small to medium orgs it's a sign of something wrong with you if you're not trying to work outside of your box.
Those number are way off for the greater Seattle area. $70k is what university students make their first year if they interview well and have had an internship/summer job before graduating. You factor in contracting rates for folks with 10+ years experience and principle salaries at Microsoft, Amazon and local Google/Facebook expansion offices and you start moving strongly into the $200k/year + stock & benefits neighborhood (assuming you can stomach the political bullshit, that is...).
Yes. Pair programming as the default for me since 2004. I've done it full time for 8 years at an XP shop (Scrum was added later) w/ 3 teams of 20+ total on 3 different continents. Worked for an Agile consultancy and trained people on Pair Programming and TDD for 4 years. I'm now working for an org that does both Pairing AND mob programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_programming). It takes time, patience, and humility to learn how to do well. I find teams that pair simply build better software that has less bugs. There's literally a book on it to consider (https://www.amazon.com/Pair-Programming-Illuminated-Laurie-W...).
This: closely followed by "people have heard of your torturous interview process and assume developers willing to both submit to it AND continue to administer it to others must be a bunch of egotistical assholes (who they'd rather not work with)".