vbtemp

Many other responses are absolutely true, but here's something else to consider:

Over the last 12-14 years, I've never, ever had a "job" that had specific, clear requirements and duties.

In the field we're in staff are not line-replaceable units. Each employee is like a box of chocolates, and you'll never know what's inside until you bite (hire them).

Some staff will quickly exceed the expected duties and take on high levels of responsibilities and massively contribute to the organization far in excess in what anyone could have foreseen initially. Others will only do strictly what is asked of them (or less) and do the barest minimal to just get by, and basically be a disappointment.

Some staff will be able to kind-of fill the job, but not entirely, and will need some training to get there. Others will hit the ground running.

This is often why there is a large and ambiguous range for job posts. Basic IT jobs that do have specific, clear duties (and extremely limited growth potential) can have much more clear, lower, and narrow salary ranges.

> If you want to hear about it's "success", just remember it was used for F-35's software...

This is the example I use all the time!!

Maybe agile is great when you're making an online shopping cart for a e-commerce website, but the idea of using Agile for complex, engineered systems is laugh-out-loud hysterically absurd. And this does not just mean spaceflight software, it basically means anything more sophisticated than a CRUD app.

> That's literally the agile manifesto.

I know, that's the irony. Agile as pushed today ends up with the compete anithesis of that. It's the difference between "Agile" (Capital A), and "agile"

For the past several years now, each time I join a new team or project, my first objective is to detach and destroy the "Agile" process workflow.

When you finally liberate a team from Agile, it's just breathtaking how much you can focus on delivering working software that gets deployed with quick iterations that's closely aligned with the business and customer's needs. When free from the tyranny of Agile, teams can be effectively self-organize, remove micro-managers, and quickly adapt to changing needs and requirements. My experience is that staff are usually much happier, more productive, and less stressed once agile is gone.

I mean contemporary Agile as pushed by corporations and those awful "coaches" (who never seem to be actual developers) --- if you were you design a system whose end goal was making great developers unhappy, unproductive and locked into a dysfunctional system, Agile would be it.

I might not have a multi-billion dollar company, but Think deliberately, Code carefully, Test thoroughly seems to maximize success for minimal stress...

I ask this literally every time...

Explain-Like-I'm-Five: Why would you use Robin Hood instead of a normal brokerage like Vanguard, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, etc that.. (1) already have commission free trades, (2) an app to make those trades, and (3) don't charge any fee for transferring your holdings in-kind to another institution.

First step is making sure you're using the flags

`-Wall -Werror -pedantic` and then one of `-std=c89` or `-std=c99`

(Or equivalent in whatever Windows C compiler)

On Reddit I've been trying to ask this ELI5:

Why would you use RH instead of a normal, mainstream brokerage like Vanguard, Fidelity, etc that already has (1) an app and (2) commission-free trades?

They would if people were cash-flow producing assets to be bought and sold.

If you establish a strong, rigorous software QA process, everything will be like butter. Your team will feel more confident about the product they release - and thus about you and each other, and you will have fewer emergencies to deal with, moreover with this virtuous cycle in place you'll generally be more on top and proactive about problem when they occur, rather than it just being another stressful thing in the backlog.

Having started my career in spaceflight software engineering, I can 100% confirm this comment is correct.

Having now left the field, working on most other software systems and teams tends to basically be "code-til-it-kinda-works" (despite the paeans to "Agile"). It's been amazing how just applying a little bit of the rigor I developed from earlier on in my career from working on embedded flight systems pays incredible dividends later on.

That said, one should have no illusions that NASA is this wonderful hub of innovation and a model for organizations to emulate. Not at all. Definitely not. But there is something to learn from a track record of consistent success flying computers deep in space.

For me, recently, procrastination (at work) was something deep down inside telling me that I was not happy where I was at work. When I got a new job with much more autonomy, and the position was what I could make of it, my procrastination problem pretty much vanished.

At my old job I tried all the tricks and ways to frame it mentally, but all it served to do was suppress something my instinct was telling me I need to get out of.

> wikihow is a cancer on the internet, clogging google and google image results with inane how-to guides

This 100x over. I've been trying to find a convenient way to block the domain from all my devices. It's all just utterly content-free cyber squatting.

What sad terrible news. I finished reading the Silmarillion just last week, and was impressed by how he turned loosely associated stories and myths into a single, cohesive narrative that even had full continuity with LoTR. Just this week again I was marveling that he was still around.

Interesting how people ascribe responsibility in different ways to thigs. Ultimately, those responsible are those killing the animals, thereby providing supply to a market for it.

Curious why do you say that?

I started to agree with you, but this took a different direction.

In general, it's smart, informed work that matters. Not grinding yourself down hard work. I feel Ive developed enough good intuition and judgment over the years that I'm capable of making well informed, strategic input to my organization that is infinitely more valuable than grinding away in PRs or tickets all day. I feel successful, it benefits my company far more than me just grinding away on "work", and I have balance and satisfaction from my work.

I saw this the other day.

It is indeed cherry picking various data points (e.g., chance of being beaten by spouse is not on there, chance of being sexually assaulted, etc).

However, it does beg the questions that you aren't supposed to ask, such as:

We have a criminal justice system that disproportionately incarcerates people of color. We also have a criminal justice system that disproportionately imprisons men, by an order of magnitude. The question you aren't allowed to ask: Is that ok too?

Men are (by a significant factor) more likely to be homeless, mentally ill, die by suicide or homicide, and/or be addicted to drugs. The forbidden question to ask: When it's on the basis of race, everyone understands that's due to systematic racism... but when it's on the basis of sex, and that sex is male... then what?

--

I guess my larger point is I've (thank goodness) made it "over the hump". With good family support, good education and a good career - also blessed with relatively good health - I made it safely to home base. I have the financial and personal resources to have a stable relationship, afford safe housing, invest in my career, etc.. There were many cases where if I had one link in that chain missing, I would have been a statistic like that. I'm the privileged man that's fair game and fat target for feminist critiques of the patriarchy.

But I think (since most of us are men) we know men who did not make it over that hump - who due to lack of education/money/work cannot attract a partner, struggle with a cocktail of mental illness and/or drug abuse, and generally have no future... and who have no public narrative of a class of people in need of support and investment. And this is to the ruin of us all.

I too have been around before Agile took off, and I too recall how dysfunctional it was before that. I do, however, attribute the positive development to better tooling: Git (and GitHub) instead of SVN/CVS/Nothing, Cloud computing and containerization rather than dusty-server-in-the-corner-with-curmudgeonly-sysadmin, popularity of safer programming languages rather than dominance of C/C++/early-Java, StackOverflow and full ecosystem of answers to every question you might have, etc.

In general, my experience has been that the most wildly successful projects I have worked on tended to involve the least amount of stress, most amount of personal/professional development, and best relationship with peers. The least successful ones tend to be stressful, frustrating, and destructive. The common denominator is that the most successful ones rely on experience, intuition, and professionalism of your staff, the least successful ones submit to tyranny of agile - and when agile isn't delivering success, to double down on it and all those awful "issues".

I think Agile is the heart of the problem. It is a cargo cult that brings predictability to software projects by ensuring that it's always a dumpster fire, that everyone's stressed, and that everything takes longer than estimated. Eating up "tickets" and crapping out code is not how you quickly deliver software to customers and iterate in the face of changing needs. It's so sad there are generations of developers being raised thinking "Agile" and playing absurd, time-wasting games with "issues" is how to build software. Agile is to the 2020s what the Bobs in "Office Space" was to 2000: "Trendy" corporate management absurdity and fury signifying nothing.

The alternative to Agile is Software Engineering, where you do important things like assess your requirements and capabilities, identify how to validate those requirements are functioning properly and support your business requirements, promote testing and QA to a first-class citizen. Most importantly to always have functioning software that is reasonably demonstrated to be correct. That way you release with confidence, people take pride in their work, and the product, team, and schedule all become quite pleasant.

I don't think so.

The person would not know how much the sender "paid" for the "postage" for that message. From ANYONE's point of view, they are not receiving more than N messages per day, as N+1 would become exponentially, prohibitively more expensive.

They would not have to make the first move -- at least not the attractive ones anyway. They would just be fewer, higher-quality messages. All the cruft and messages that came from guys "firing from the hip" would disappear.

Interesting idea, the floor does not have to be zero.

> I would assume the main idea is to put pressure to limit low-effort, low-likelihood messaging from both sides, more than putting a pricetag on a person.

Exactly.

I would argue the "magic" is that someone considered the risk and cost of messaging you, and feels confident they found something to connect about

Fair point that I had not considered. However, I would not necessarily say desperate but may be risk-taking, strategic thinking, and/or wealthy (enough to handle congestion prices) men

I had an idea for a dating app a while back, in which the basic idea is that you pay the service to message someone (above a free weekly limit of say 1 msg).

The pricing would be reactive - as popular attractive people get more messages, the more it would cost to message them, growing exponentially in order to limit incoming messages to approx a few a day. Unpopular people who got few messages would have a price that would go down to zero. This would hopefully solve the problem of women getting hundreds of messages a day, and men getting neither any incoming messages nor any replies to their outgoing messages.

It shouldn't be much of a problem to get women on board, as they rarely send messages anyway and it would always be free just to put up a profile and receive messages. And for men it would hopefully be a fair an transparent way to have confidence that their outgoing messages would be received and read (and have fewer immediate competitors), rather than just lost in the noise.

I don't have time for it now, but it's always been something on my mind.

Edit: Thanks for your comments. This is interesting. Lots of hypotheses worth experimenting.

What about most compensated tech skill. Highly doubt SQL and Java rank highly there.

Let's check the basics:

1. Do you have a LinkedIn profile, clearly listing your skills, accomplishments, and experience? Also with a clear, professional profile picture? Do you link to your Github page (and vice versa).

2. Do you have an account on StackOverflow careers?

3. Does your resume look crisp and clean (using a good template), with readily available information about skills and experience?

After this, remember that straight-up _applying_ to companies is well known to be the LEAST effective way to get a job.

The better way is to let companies - or at least recruiters or hiring managers at specific companies - approach you (usually LinkedIn, StackOverflow is better). This involves a lot of tending to your professional social-media profiles, love it or hate it.

The best way is of course to get hired by someone you know from prior successful professional collaboration who makes an opening at their company specifically because they want YOU.

TLDR, give a lot of attention to LinkedIn, GitHub page, StackOverflow careers profiles. Let people approach you. Don't fling out resumes to hundreds of companies like a frisbee.

I mean, this is a guy whose avatar on Medium is a semi-close up picture taken with a low-quality somewhat-fisheye webcam with bart simpson faces pasted over his eyeballs.. Yeah, he's probably lacking some of the basics.