abbadadda

Any examples of this? > why Go isn’t for the “smart” developers

Just wanted to say that I really appreciated your level-headed responses here, John (& I am also this “DevOps/Systems Engineer/SRE” … must be all that incident response training paying off, calm is contagious and all that )

Really well said:

> “ Good thing I have this blog. Here is where I make the rules. Maybe this will get a lot of readers, maybe it won’t. I don’t make any money with it either way. It’s out of my head now, and that is what counts. Do wonderful things that make you happy, folks. Chasing the numbers will not give you any fulfilment. Quite the opposite.”

Same/similar happened to me. I literally had to turn up in person at LinkedIn’s London office to get support to unlock my account. Based on their reaction, it did not seem like I was the first to do this.

Love this. I have a young one I am thinking of letting get involved in the Minecraft scene (I think far less exploitative than Roblox?). How does one get started? What console are you using? Or PC? How do I enable mods? And who is Mojang?

I am not making points to expand on how I agree.. I am a elaborating on the benefits of having more senior colleagues around. The benefit is not that they watch you and correct you. Indeed, the mentee must drive their own learning. The really valuable part of having a more senior engineer around is not that you just magically learn by osmosis, but that you can ask them questions as they come up _and then level-up rapidly._ That’s the context my points were more meant for.

Agree 100%. Mentorship from more experienced colleagues can save an enormous amount of time in pain by pointing out someone is going in the wrong direction very early on. Mentors can also expose a mentees to “unknown unknowns,” which a mentee might not otherwise know that they need to investigate. I agree that “learning how to learn” is more valuable, but that’s not to say that mentors or more experienced engineers have nothing to provide of value.

> [In fact most companies have such opaque issue boards that as a customer I get so frustrated when I find a small issue or bug and have to spend like 50 hours back and forth to prove it’s a bug and actually get a ticket put in the tracker.]

Agree wholeheartedly. Back & forth emails, screenshots, Q&A (what version are you on?), etc. The number of times I make it to checkout on the last step and something breaks on a certain version of a browser

Probably there should be an independent body that oversees postmortems on tech issues, with the ability to suggest changes. This is what airlines face during crash investigations and often new rules are put in place (e.g., don’t let the shift manager self-certify his own work in the incident where the pilot’s window popped off). How this would look like with software companies, and what the bar is for being subject to this rigor I don’t know (I suspect not for a Candy Crush outage though).

In general, the biggest problem I see with late stage capitalism, and a lack of accountability in general, is that given the right incentives people will “fuck things up” faster than you can stop them. For example, say CrowdStrike was skirting QA - what’s my incentive as an individual employee versus the incentive of an executive at the company? If the exec can’t tell the difference between good QA and bad QA, but can visually see the accounting numbers go up when QA is underfunded, he’s going to optimize for stock price. And as an IC there’s not much you can do unless you’re willing to fight the good fight day in and day out. But when management repeatedly communicates they do not reward that behavior, and indeed may not care at all about software quality over a 5 year time horizon, what do you do? The key lies in finding ways to convince executives or short of that holding them to account like you say.

This is greyed out, but I tend to agree with the sentiment that there’s a right way and a wrong way to approach these “EV” questions. OP was a bit harsh with the stupid comment, and for SWEs EV understanding is not usually a critical thing, but ultimately you’re being asked about the probability and the ability to make good decisions. Trading firms make use of this when hiring traders (most famously Jane Street and also SIG); The thinking is that if someone makes bad decisions with toy games, and their thought process is not analytical, they’re going to make for a bad trader, not making good decisions with millions of dollars on the line. A good example of something that would rule out a trader is: You can flip a coin, if you win you get $1m, if you lose you lose $1m. Would you play? The EV is zero, but the question is about bankroll management and disaster avoidance. As an individual the downside risk of a $1m loss (usually) significantly outweighs the upside of a $1m gain.

Let’s see the Forbes 100 under 100 list!!

This friction is often invisible. This cost is not measurable. Hard work needs to go into measuring developer productivity, helping business people understand, and then make that number go up. The second part is perhaps the hardest as if you don’t do that you might not be employed long enough to do number 3.

Boeing enters the chat

Surely this is an erosion in public trust, but if you’ve ever been in a busy public toilet that smells horrendous, you know from experience that maintaining these public toilets is no easy feat. At the same time, I agree with the thrust of the article that they are a civic good & necessity.

I live in the UK. I use the “Radar Key Scheme” for both my son and myself. The Radar Key opens handicapped toilets around the country that are otherwise locked. I asked my GP about a referral for this and they knew nothing about it. In the end I just bought one online. Bizarre. I have a disability that’s not visible, I’m otherwise healthy and relatively privileged, but being unable to find a toilet to use when my bladder feels like it is going to explode makes me feel like a wild animal - unable to fulfill the most base need in a culturally acceptable way - terrible feeling.

Source?

We can punish those who make egregious errors, like saving passwords in plain text, either literally or figuratively during code reviews (i.e., if a senior developer rejects a PR because it is too insecure)

Cool game. “7 +” is the start of a valid equation so making it error out can be confusing for 7 year olds that you need to “jump” over the operator. Great otherwise!

I don’t think you understood. The mother’s illness was not generalized to the collapse of global civilization. The author’s experience with the former is being generalized to the experience of others as it relates to the “collapse” of global civilization.

Nice. What game is that card from?

And I like the idea of meeting folks in London Mensa, my IQ is probably not high enough to be a member AFIAK, I’m perhaps top 10%-20% IQ, but that’s not all bad either. But I’ve met some people in Mensa that I’d not consider to possess a good comprehension of the world works. I’ll always remember the article on the how the man with the world’s highest IQ had almost debilitating intellect. And I tend to feel uncomfortable in environments that reinforce “we are so smart aren’t we?” I dunno! Part of me is afraid of committing in any one direction for fear of losing myself. But I suppose like skiing, “the mountain behind you is not your friend.” I ponder the quote from Kurt Vonnegut: “We are whatever we pretend to be” a lot. I think I’m good at pretending but do not yet know who I really am. I don’t need to pierce my nose or dye my hair to figure that out, but I am exploring psychedelics in a guided manner to unlock whatever subconscious feelings I might need help accessing. We’ll see!

> I can't think of much to add to that; good luck!

Sorry, I was trying to point out the difference in what I’m after regarding the comment above re: “counter-culture.” That is, of course, I am interested in interacting with others and improving the world. I just mean that in the first instance, I believe that I need to optimize my own life before I can offer any insight on how to improve the world. If, and, regarding not generally raging against the machine, I mean, I don’t want to be countercultural for the sake of doing so with no other objective in mind.

And great advice on the comment regarding the question. One problem I have, living among Brits, is that I’m extremely literal and these word games tend to not jive well with me as a person that says what I mean.

I could perhaps find some of what I’m looking for in a counter-culture community, but I don’t think that’s what I’m describing necessarily (see more thoughts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40029893)

Wow! That is really well said and I think quite profound. I’ll check out the video later… I’ve been chipping away at understanding myself but I suppose I’ve not been very proactive about becoming myself. Recent years have been better but I’d posit that understanding oneself is a prerequisite in many regards to becoming oneself (if that makes sense). I think we’re becoming all the time, but having a clear understanding of who we are enables us to move forward much more confidently and decisively, whereas from the ages of 23-30 I was very unsure about many things, and so any becoming I was doing was very intrinsic. The key distinction now I think is that now that I’m more confident in who I am I am more prepared to reflect who I am in what I do and the way that I look in a way such that I’m ready, mentally, to be perceived by others differently. The downside of this might be that I’d be shunned in some settings, which is to be expected if I’m not conforming, but the upside is that I’ll be more likely to meet like-minded individuals. I’m not looking for counter-culture, but rather “what works best” I think (although there are many things about our culture that are not ‘what work best’ I am much more concerned with finding my own way and optimizing my own life rather than raging against the machine - I think meeting and talking with others that think differently than the status quo will be key in all of this and thus the post).

> Did you think just the audiobook wasn't better or in general it wasn't as good as The Phoenix Project?

I listened to both audiobooks. Something about the paperbacks I couldn’t get in to. Now that I think about it, I don’t want to read a novel about work when I’m not at work. Also, audiobooks lend themselves really well to a commute.

At any rate, the narrator of The Phoenix Project is male and the narrator of the audiobook for The Unicorn Project is female. But that’s not why I liked The Phoenix Project more. The male narrator _really_ got into the voices of the different characters, which I appreciated.

I started listening to "The Unicorn Project" on audiobook. It is not as good as "The Phoenix Project" audiobook, but it does a decent job of describing problems from the software engineer's perspective. The problem is I need a version of these books from Sarah Molton/Steve Master's point of view (a novel about being a product manager or CEO?) to better understand what motivates that side of the org. I have been mired in "The Core Chronic Conflict" for years, paying down tech debt, and turns out changing an org to learn/understand/care about DevOps is Hard.

Does Scrum help with this WFH predicament?

95%, 6 perfect cuts (cut the 2nd one really terribly)

“Microservices” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

Did Steve Jobs have psychopathic traits? I don’t know. This answer on Quora has more to say about him being a perfectionist: https://www.quora.com/Was-Steve-Jobs-a-psychopath?share=1

I don’t disagree with you that having psychopathic traits makes you better at some things. How much of the video did you watch? The problem is more to do with systems that attract people with psychopathic traits.

I think you missed the point re: bikeshedding

The Phoenix Project was in fact inspired by The Goal:

> “The Phoenix Project”, a popular business fable about DevOps, is an adaptation of “The Goal” by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt. They are virtually the same book. The twist it takes on “The Goal” is that instead of focusing on manufacturing, the “The Phoenix Project” focuses on IT.

https://sobination.com/2017/08/08/the-goal-and-the-phoenix-p...