I can see that, and perhaps my experience has just been unlucky. I missed usenet by a few years.
496 karma · joined August 5, 2009
some snippet of text from parent comment
I disagree because x, y, z.
another snippet
This is wrong because a, b, c.
(End example)
Doing so obliterates context from a position, especially long form comments (which is the main reason I’m here) in two main ways. First, the technique rarely reproduces the parent in its entirety, picking out black and white statements that are easier to argue against from a sea of nuance. Second, it cuts up the narrative in such a way that downplays the rationale of a position by either leaving out reasoning, or placing arguments between the reasoning and the conclusion.
Sure, the readers can go back and reread the parent. But when the structure of an argument depends on those snippets (and it almost always does) it becomes very difficult to grok.
Generally I just see it as a big warning sign that the quoter is more interested in winning than learning or getting to the truth of the matter and thus is best ignored.
I _don't_ think the right answer is anything goes (even if you attempt to let the community police that with voting). I've seen many small forums self-destruct due to the dedicated action of a few committed individuals to ruining it -- either explicitly (due to a grudge) or implicitly (a commitment to getting their way at any cost). Misinformation is terribly difficult to combat, and can lead to real harm to real people.
I _don't_ think the right answer is heavy moderation. I even feel like hacker news goes overboard sometimes (though I do enjoy the irony of comments here railing against calls for moderation on FB). A ministry of truth is never a good idea because it creates a clear path to corrupting the truth by controlling an entity.
I do think it is reasonable, however, to consider certain things to be settled facts. Humans breathe air, the earth is round, the holocaust happened, slavery is bad, racism is bad. Of course I have no answer about where the line is drawn between what I just said and a ministry of truth.
In my experience, the most successful communities are intelligently moderated, however, including IRC. Though the moderation was more about banning people and keeping channels on-topic than suppressing certain ideas.
The best answer I have so far is social consequence -- disagree vocally & publicly, block early, block often. Of course there are a whole slew of downsides here too, but I haven't seen anything better.
My experience was that everyone, including the CEO, was in an open office (40+ person startup, 800+ person growth company). But that it didn't really matter all that much because leadership (senior or not) was barely at their desk anyway.
I do agree that if senior leadership wants an open office plan, they should commit to working in such an environment with their teams.
However, I think there are two other factors that come into play that are very tough for people to vocalize when they are defending an open office.
1. Open offices are more appealing visually to a wider swath of people. Of course you can make either kind of office pretty, but there's something about humans that just really loves the wide open spaces.
2. Humans are social, we like to interact, even at the expense of productivity.
Personally, I prefer an office-per-team approach, so sort of a middle ground that allows for fast collaboration but doesn't require negotiating with 100 other people on the same floor about noise level, etc.
But to generalize at a higher level -- "by what mechanism do we force management to be decent?" -- the only one I've discovered is to be willing to leave jobs that have management practices that one doesn't agree with.
Unfortunately that advice doesn't work in the general case -- mobility is relatively easy for developers but we don't make up a large part of the population. I feel like the right answer is some changes in our social structure or economy that makes job mobility much (much) easier. Like a BI/Negative Income Tax, or free education, etc.
The matter at hand is: does he believe you deserve more equity at this point in time? If yes, then commit to fighting for you (and if equity is somehow impossible, explore other options). If no, explain why & how to improve.
To be fair, nobody is perfect in every interaction, and there are a million rational reasons why a founder would sidestep a question like that (terrible board relationship, you or others at the company have a hard time hearing negative feedback, distracted that day, etc.). If you feel like the matter wasn't resolved to your satisfaction, it is worth bringing back up.
I'm not really sure what you are trying to say here. A safety net is entitlement? How so? What's the correct cutoff here, should we end social security and medicare as they exist today? Are you prepared to retire without either right now (kudos if you are)?
Should the US summarily shrug at people with disabilities that can't reasonably work? What will become of them? Homeless? Death? Should their families take care of them? What if they can't afford to? What should people do if they can't join the military?
You correctly point out that expenses are _much_ higher now. Is my generation entitled because we generally want a fair wage to pay for those expenses? Are we entitled for desiring the return of unions -- unions that did much to create those high wages out of the exploitation of the 1800's & early 1900's. Have you really thought any of this through?
Look, I'm part of this generation you're disparaging. I could wax poetic about how I "pulled myself up by my bootstraps" because I'm doing quite well. But I know it is bullshit, because I've also been fortunate enough to choose the right career, at the right time, and had remarkably few setbacks in life. Also I'm a white male in the US. I'm playing life on easy mode and to say otherwise is a lie.
That isn't true for everyone, and standing on your soapbox calling on everyone to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" is both ignorant and dishonest. You've done well in life, but it appears to have bred a stunning lack of empathy.
Put another way, if this family does need the trauma unit for their child next month, will they hesitate? Which is worse for society?
Obviously there’s a balance to be struck (hypochondriacs), but I think we can collectively come up with a situation in which both the individuals get paid and the family isn’t being so financially burdened. False alarm or no.
Fixing might be a presentation, tests, documentation, refactoring, rewrite, deprecation, whatever. Just don't let it languish and the fear grow.
Even at smaller companies, however, there's some pushback to network hiring because it isn't particularly great for getting a diverse pool of talent.
To be honest, though there are a lot of dangers with this sort of thing, I am a fan. End of the day, engineers should be great engineers, not great at hacking the job finding process.
To use an example I'm familiar with: Code School courses took about 6 or so hours to complete (including challenges), but take 4-6 months of effort by an average of 4 people at any given time to create. We tried many times to tighten that timeline up, but being too aggressive inevitably resulted in a course we weren't 100% happy with.
Pricing isn't as obvious as it seems, as well. We raised our prices from 25/mo to 29/mo ages ago, which was a large net positive for the company from a revenue standpoint. We ran pricing tests a few times, as well, and anything below 29/mo performed much worse overall (we didn't get enough extra signups at a lower cost to break even). Sales & free weekends have a big impact, though.
As I've watched the space coalesce it seems like the very successful companies will be the ones that create some kind of "degree" (accreditation doesn't matter, only how much the community trusts them) for individuals, or companies that chase down enterprises for continuing education dollars. Or both. Both tend to charge a premium over that 290/yr price point, which you need to in order to be wildly successful due to the massive churn in the education space.
All that to say, from my perspective, $290 a year is very reasonable, and is probably the right price point.
Source: was the CTO of Code School
So, yeah, where I sit this is a good thing. If it were simply a bug that the company was open and honest about, then lets fix it and move on. If they cover it up, then there’s a solid ethical case for severe consequences in my mind.
Their notification system for breaking changes is truly awful (or rather, does not exist). I've been bitten 3 times, each taking a few hours+ and a lot of reading to figure out. I find all of the things you're supposed to "just know" or check before running a `pacman -Syu` to be pretty silly. The official attitude towards these sorts of issues appear to be dismissive, which is what convinced me to finally drop it.
I still recommend it to people who are serious about diving into Linux.
However, to give another perspective on it. When I think of changing an unequal situation, I look at the situations you described like this: "Did something happen early on in that person's life that just kind of made them give up?" I've known people like that, and although it is _also_ true that they _could_ lift themselves out of that situation, when you take it in aggregate over a large population, it becomes a problem (at least to me it does).
Why is it a problem? Well, to me it is for two main reasons. First, it gives an indication that there may be a systemic problem that could be corrected (overzealous police, poor education, a political issue, etc.). Frankly, we're far along enough as a species that there's no reason to tolerate that. Second, it means a meaningful portion of the population isn't contributing to humanity/earth/however you want to think of it in a way they otherwise could, which holds all of us back.
One of the things that makes it complex is that the answer, I think, changes a lot depending on the population.
Unhealthy eating (especially very salty/spicy/fermented foods), alcohol use, and so on also classify as environmental factors. But they are not caused by pollution or chemical-laden foods, merely bad life choices. Copious quantities of red meat isn't good, organic or no.
I don't meant to imply our bad handling of the planet causes no cancer, it certainly does. But it does not cause anywhere close to 90% of cancer cases. Not by a long shot.
Personally I am so tired of hearing lines approximating Bob's statement (if you don't do x you should feel bad) that I can no longer consider anyone whom utters them credible. It is provably false (Linus has no reason to feel bad), and a disservice to the entire programming community.
There is no silver bullet, stop acting like there is. Different things work for different people.
That said, while I agree that DHH came off pretty extreme (I don't think TDD is bad, just the overzealous proponents), I am glad that he did. It is really nice to have another very public figure speaking with equal passion and in utterly concrete terms to present to people whom are struggling with some degree of impostor syndrome over their dislike of TDD.