Afton

You're responding to an aggregate statistic with an anecdote. I too did not graduate high school, but now have an advanced degree and a high paying job. Claiming that that invalidates the notion of privilege is silly.

I interpret your last line as "If an E2E test fails because of a product bug, the result should be a unit test".

I've been fighting this fight for a decade now, and I'm pretty sure I've never won it for a whole team. The best I got was that people would pre-populate bug fix code reviews with reasons why they couldn't sensibly unit test this particular issue. If you have had better success, please tell me your secrets!

"fighting the last war"

I know several developers from developing nations that have strong ties to their countries of origin, and engage heavily in various "good works" there. They have massively more resources to do so due to their salaries in the US than they would if they were stuck in their countries of origin.

For sure, it's an empirical question what %age of people who would accept this kind of offer are "I have no other choice, so I accept your offer" or "I want to make sure I will actually want to work at your company".

I'm just saying that I would 100% not do this unless I had no other choice, or was independently wealthy.

I think it usually involves 'helper' type folks. They end up on a project, and they 'help' the project get done. But the work they do tends to be just the boilerplate (or cut-and-paste style work), or just the gathering of test resources, or a surprising amount of work that you would assume that the PM or Manager would do, but instead is done by this person (organizing meetings, setting up checklists, emailing people about current issues/priorities).

This isn't to say that those people don't add value, but if they do this for a few years, they may find that their ability to do greenfield coding has significantly diminished, so much so that they struggle to write objectively simple code because they've fallen out of practice.

Source: I've been one of those people, and I've worked with many. It's an easy rut to fall into, particularly in Test Engineer role (what MS used to call SDET roles).

Someone always suggests this. The issue is that if you did this, 95% of the candidates that would agree to this kind of setup would be the kind you didn't want.

If I'm sitting on 2 offers, one is a hire and one is a "Let's see how this works out after 2 weeks of work", I'm going to take the first one. And that says nothing for the necessary benefits question in the states, where changing jobs often involves expensive (in money or time) changes to health care insurance.

No, you can't. There are all sorts of restrictions, which you already know. But since you are deliberately missing the point, I won't be responding. Feel free to get in the last word.

> This is absolutely absurd

This adds nothing to the discussion.

> Your belongings and wealth belong to your estate and as the owner of it you decide how it should be distributed.

Well, that's literally the question at hand. You don't get to just say that it is so. A dead person's wealth belonged to them, but they are dead. They can't vote, they can't apply for loans, and, the parent is arguing, they can't arbitrarily pass their money to whoever they choose. They could have, while alive, but now they are dead.

> Because it's none of your business. Why on earth are you vilifying people for wanting to pass down their hard-earned money to their children?

This is just some weird non-sequitur. No one's doing any vilifying, and Parent is arguing that it is societies business (and incidentally, given that an estate tax exists, society currently agrees with the parent poster)

One that really stands out is how quickly and easily I could fall asleep. Like, on a commuter bus, or watching a movie with people. And how I'd be asleep within seconds of getting into bed. I thought I was 'sleep efficient', turns I was just sleep deprived, but thought it was normal.

Literally 2' of elastic fabric and some velcro...

Please go see a sleep doctor, not a GP. I was diagnosed in my late 30s, and I was definitely not overweight at the time. In retrospect, many things that I thought were normal (or even positive) turned out to be very clear symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation.

I do this too when I need to reduce my caffeine intake. It allows me decouple the habit of drinking coffee from the addiction to coffee.

Youtube, for me. It's not perfect, but it is often good enough.

Background No specific antiviral drug has been proven effective for treatment of patients with severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Remdesivir (GS-5734), a nucleoside analogue prodrug, has inhibitory effects on pathogenic animal and human coronaviruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in vitro, and inhibits Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, SARS-CoV-1, and SARS-CoV-2 replication in animal models.

Methods We did a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multicentre trial at ten hospitals in Hubei, China. Eligible patients were adults (aged ≥18 years) admitted to hospital with laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection, with an interval from symptom onset to enrolment of 12 days or less, oxygen saturation of 94% or less on room air or a ratio of arterial oxygen partial pressure to fractional inspired oxygen of 300 mm Hg or less, and radiologically confirmed pneumonia. Patients were randomly assigned in a 2:1 ratio to intravenous remdesivir (200 mg on day 1 followed by 100 mg on days 2–10 in single daily infusions) or the same volume of placebo infusions for 10 days. Patients were permitted concomitant use of lopinavir–ritonavir, interferons, and corticosteroids. The primary endpoint was time to clinical improvement up to day 28, defined as the time (in days) from randomisation to the point of a decline of two levels on a six-point ordinal scale of clinical status (from 1=discharged to 6=death) or discharged alive from hospital, whichever came first. Primary analysis was done in the intention-to-treat (ITT) population and safety analysis was done in all patients who started their assigned treatment. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04257656.

Findings Between Feb 6, 2020, and March 12, 2020, 237 patients were enrolled and randomly assigned to a treatment group (158 to remdesivir and 79 to placebo); one patient in the placebo group who withdrew after randomisation was not included in the ITT population. Remdesivir use was not associated with a difference in time to clinical improvement (hazard ratio 1·23 [95% CI 0·87–1·75]). Although not statistically significant, patients receiving remdesivir had a numerically faster time to clinical improvement than those receiving placebo among patients with symptom duration of 10 days or less (hazard ratio 1·52 [0·95–2·43]). Adverse events were reported in 102 (66%) of 155 remdesivir recipients versus 50 (64%) of 78 placebo recipients. Remdesivir was stopped early because of adverse events in 18 (12%) patients versus four (5%) patients who stopped placebo early.

Interpretation In this study of adult patients admitted to hospital for severe COVID-19, remdesivir was not associated with statistically significant clinical benefits. However, the numerical reduction in time to clinical improvement in those treated earlier requires confirmation in larger studies. Funding Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences Emergency Project of COVID-19, National Key Research and Development Program of China, the Beijing Science and Technology Project.

Mandatory voting is necessary in the US because of the amount of voter suppression. It should be hard to stop someone from voting.

I don't think that's it at all. It's the 'normal' person being concerned whether they are at risk.

While lots of people 'know old people' or with pre-existing conditions, many people have youngish parent with already passed grandparents, who have trouble understanding why this is a fuss for them, since they imagine that it'll just be a cold (for them). Cases like this one are 'scary' because it shows that they might still be at risk. Which, in some sense, is good if it makes 'normal people' scared enough to actually stay home/self-quarantine.

I really don't think this has anything to do with the "US-centric mindset of blaming people for their own [snipped]".

You 100% don't need my permission. But even if your feedback as valuable, couching it in this kind of language isn't. Also, just telling someone that their idea is shitty, even if true, isn't valuable feedback without a discussion of why it's shitty.

Anyway, since you seem to be doubling down on being an asshole, I don't intend to reply again here.

Someone did something because it interested them, and someone posted it here because someone here might find it interesting. So I generally know why those people did what they did. But what about you? Why are you posting what you are posting?

If you have constructive criticism, this is the right place for it, but frankly, you're just being mean on the internet for no reason.

I feel like you may not have read my comment very generously. I am very familiar with the point of a test. Let me try again to explain.

There is a cost to a brittle test. UI testing suffers from this more than other kinds because there are many 'plausible' UI arrangements, and as the product shifts and changes, you need to distinguish

1. "The dialog moved slightly to the left"/"We refactored the HTML, but it still looks the same" from

2. "The dialog is now underneath another element".

Suppose it takes 10 minutes to find, fix, get reviewed, and push the fix, deploy the fix, and validate the fix. If the number of failures that are more like the former are RADICALLY more than the latter type of failure, then it is easy enough to come to the conclusion that the test is not giving you a reasonable ROI. Perhaps the cost of releasing a latter-type-of-failure is not that bad, if you can fix it and get it to production quickly. It might be cheaper overall then the ongoing maintenance cost on a test that would prevent this failure.

Also, and this is culture and product dependent, but we're talking about this like it's a single test, when it's usually a suite of tests (or multiple suites). If they have a 5% failure rate, and 95% of the time its really an 'update the test, this is the new expected', people will stop trusting the tests, and will take shortcuts. So you may find that instead of spending 100% of the maintenance costs for the suite of brittle tests, you're spending 70%, but only getting 20% of the benefit because people become accustomed to the failures , and once a test is failing, no one will notice that the failure changed from a 'benign failure' to a "customer-can't use" failure. (Note: numbers are imaginary, but not crazy).

At one company I worked for, it was so bad, that when we tried to introduce testing/checkin rigor, multiple developers pulled me over to make me explain "Why this dumb test is failing on my checkin attempt", and we would look at the logs and other artifacts to uncover that "It's failing because you changed something without updating the relevant tests". It took quite a bit of time to re-train developers used to brittle tests, to respect and maintain non-brittle ones.

And that is why I am against automated UI testing in general. :)

I've worked with selenium for a couple of years. There are a fair number of gotchas, but it's definitely possible to write pretty deterministic tests. For one, retries of selenium actions are just necessary. So necessary, that you build them in to your test framework, instead of making them something that test-writers have to interact with.

I don't know what specific problems you were having, so I can't give more specific advice than that.

These examples show the system being very tightly coupled to the actual html. IME this leads to very brittle tests that fail due to restructoring/reorganizing/redesigning.

My two cents: I've never seen automated visual regression testing that wasn't terrible to work with, and where the most common result (by a large margin) of a test failing was someone would update the expected file/image so it would pass with the new visuals. It's a hard problem, and one that I've personally decided isn't worth doing for the customer facing software that I've been involved with.

I interviewed several people who wanted internal transfers. People who took 30 minutes to write a function like "write a function that takes an array of ints and returns the largest value". I have no idea how they got hired in the first place.

Yeah, big company, lots of variation in the interview process. Ultimately, the hiring manager has final authority, but if someone came out strong against you for some reason, they might be loathe to override. But it does sound like a strange experience. Just consider it an anti-loop. (https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goo...)

Meh, likely you're just used to the ways that cars fail to obey the law. Every day on my driving or biking commute I see cars failing to signal, rolling through stop signs "because you can't see from the actual stop sign", speeding, honking because they're mad at someone, directing traffic, illegally turning, failing to yield right of way, etc.

Straight up running red lights or stop signs does seem like it is overrepresented by cyclists, but I really don't they they're overrepresented for generic 'breaking the law'.

All my info is old on this point, but I doubt that there was company wide measurement here. This was an individual giving their own personal opinion/reasoning.

I got verbal feedback exactly one time (at Microsoft) during my attempt to land a post-1-year of university internship. I had solved the algorithm in a few minutes, but when trying to code it up, I struggled a fair amount before figuring it out. The feedback I got was "You seem like a smart person, who hasn't done very much coding. That makes you a bad risk. Go practice programming and come back next year". It was incredibly valuable advice that I got no where else, and it resulted in me coming back to MS a couple of years later once I graduated (I'm not there anymore).

I wish more people would give real, actionable feedback on interviews.

"That’s why Doug tied that brick to a pencil — to prove a point. Of all the tools we’ve created to augment our intelligence, writing may be the most important. But when he “de-augmented” the pencil, by tying a brick to it, it became much, much harder to even write a single word. And when you make it hard to do the low-level parts of writing, it becomes near impossible to do the higher-level parts of writing: organizing your thoughts, exploring new ideas and expressions, cutting it all down to what’s essential. That was Doug’s message: a tool doesn’t “just” make something easier — it allows for new, previously-impossible ways of thinking, of living, of being."

Hah. I injured my hand a couple of years ago, and had to type with one hand for a couple of months. I could code review, I could participate in meetings, I could identify the source of a bug. But I could not write any but the simplest code. I was mystified. I could write emails and to some extent documents (typing of course slowed down a lot). But I became basically incapable of writing code. Using too much brain power on the physical act makes you have less left over for the CONTENT. Cool to see that this problem was understood much earlier.

Thanks for replying.

Your first paragraph is strawmaning. At no point did I demand that you recommend a 100% fix. You made a claim about how the industrial age was the problem. I was trying to make a point that even if true, that doesn't really buy you anything, since we live in the age we live in. If I failed to communicate that well enough, I apologize.

As for the rest, it's hard to know what to make of it. It's like you're building a superpower out of failure to be able to focus when it's necessary to focus. Like if someone couldn't stand still, and you said something like "I bet it's really useful, because you never get stiff, and you burn more calories", but ignoring that it's fucking terrible, because you can't ever sit still even when it would be advantageous to sit still.

Note that executive control is also about planning. Of course it can be useful to rush of without planning, like when being chased by a panther. But it's not a good idea to have a significant deficit in the ability to plan. "Silly bullshit [that] doesn't matter" can mean not having the ability to pay for food, and it can mean having terrible stress over accomplishing trivial tasks (like filing out tax paperwork!).

Anyway. You're welcome to continue to not-buy ADHD, but recognize that people who live with, and who study it, think it's a thing.