bpyne

I think you're creating a false dichotomy: either you accept a large gulf between those who have/have not and innovation or you create a society with a more even distribution and no innovation. As I read comments to socio-economic posts from people in various parts of Europe, it seems as though Germany, France, etc. are developing a middle way.

As a native to the US, I think we really need to pay more attention to the middle way. We could use a little more social harmony.

And this is the strong argument for purchasing online. When I lived in Boston it was fun to spend a few hours on the weekend perusing book stores. When I moved to a less urban place I had only large bookstores in suburban strip mall hell to choose from. My dislike for driving kept me from going to them.

Now, with a Nook, I love the ability to finish a book at night, realize I want to read longer, and purchase another one immediately. I don't have to plan ahead. There are a lot of upsides to purchasing them online. But, I do miss the culture and community of small bookstores.

I miss conversations with people at specialized book stores. I miss spending hours looking through the aisles. It was a great way to spend an afternoon on the weekend.

I like the convenience of purchasing books online. Admittedly, though, I've lost the whole community and culture of books that small bookstores provided.

What an incredible experience it must have been to be around such a creative group of guys. Even today, I can listen to Stipe's lyrics and find different meaning with my changing life experiences.

I know they didn't like it, but Fables of the Reconstruction is one of the most moody, creative works in modern music IMO.

The book "Beyond Category" is a fantastic book that profiles Duke Ellington as a band leader. He kept a large number of high-level musicians, often with challenging personalities, employed and working together for decades. He managed to accomplish it in the face of a "pivoting market": around the late 40's/early 50's listeners turned more toward bebop with its small-group sound.

It's a worthwhile read for anyone with both music and leadership interest.

The owner of a music school in my neighborhood graduated from Berklee Music College in the mid-90's. Even then Berklee had its students taking classes in business. A lot of being a successful musician is promotion and understanding how contracts work.

What a fantastic description or Morrissey. He's exactly a "master troll". His social "role" is like the chorus from Greek tragedies.

I don't often listen to his music anymore. But, when the mood hits, nothing else satisfies.

Musicians have a history of taking long periods off. Sonny Rollins took a few multi-year stints off, during which time he worked on technique and ideas he didn't have time to work on as a touring musician. The Who have been in and out of retirement like 10 times.

We'll see how long it lasts. He'll probably dedicate himself to writing for a few years and get himself back in shape with long-distance bicycling. But, he'll probably be back. I could easily see him not want to do arena tours anymore though, maybe some jazz gigs or small-venue acoustic sets with Rush.

It's kind of interesting that two iconic drummers from the same generation - Bill Bruford and Neil Peart - decided to get out of the industry.

Your experience echoes mine almost exactly. Now I can't imagine a life without my daughter.

Her interests got me out of my comfort zone - I'm president of a girls basketball league - and develop aspects of myself that I may not have. I stepped into the position because she and her friends love the league and nobody else wanted to do it.

It's amazing how many times over my career I've watched and participated in debates on software development methodologies. HN seems to have one at least annually.

The author of the post does a good job summing up the issues. I only skimmed it but have to agree with everything I read.

I can add that there's a time and place for Waterfall: when requirements are well-known and static and when lots of oversight is needed. I can also add that no methodology has successfully dealt with the mega-projects we read about in software engineering case studies.

Building stuff, whether it's software or anything other product, is hard. It's messy. Often the requirements are not well thought out. In the situations I normally deal with, a requester can state a high-level strategic goal for the organization, but not how the software can get us to it. That's where my team gets involved. One engineer I respect highly once said that we need to get something in front of the requester quickly so that we can find out what (s)he doesn't want. By process of elimination, the idea foments in the requester's mind and requirements become more concrete.

Again, though, some organizations are very static or they deal with software whose failure can be catastrophic. In those situations, the highly bureaucratic Waterfall method can be helpful at least for slowing down the process.

It's a combination of a shifted sleep schedule and teenage brains going through significant, exhausting development.

The mind does funny things. They also understand that exercise and good nutrition are fundamental to health. When I worked in a hospital I normally ate in the cafeteria. The physicians had horrible diets, including the cardiologists.

Let's not even get started on how many nurses smoke.

My wife's background is in childhood development. Her job involves keeping up with studies in the field. I remember her talking about this issue. There's evidence that school start times should be flipped for elementary and high school students: elementary going in earlier and high school later. Teenagers need more sleep due to their brains re-wiring, so the reasoning goes.

Keep in mind that in our school district, elementary school students need to be in by 8:40 while high school students need to be in by 7:50.

Our neighborhood is setup for walking. The elementary school is a six block walk, so most people walk their kids to school. My daughter didn't sleep past 7:00 for most of elementary school. Our experience was that elementary really could have started closer to 8:00.

I'm with you on all your other points. But, I think our experience was significantly different for elementary school.

This article brought back memories. When I was 9 something went through my eye. One night after surgery, the nurse came to check on my IV. She broke it. Her next mistake was getting a resident to put a new one in. Five tries in one hand and four in the other, they finally decided I could live without it for the night.

My wife and I still recoil at the memory of trying to rest the night after my daughter's birth. We were woken up every two hours for different tests. Keep in mind that it was a no complications birth. The fourth time they came in to run a test I begged them to leave us alone.

LOL...Substitute "parents" for "experts" in 2 and your comment is an observation of youth growing up. I think it's a human condition.

Thank you for saying what I was thinking. Anyone who has worked in a multi-billion dollar corporation has experienced mismanagement. I think it has to do with organizations that get beyond a certain size.

Soft skills matter!

Learn how to write good emails. Write to the point of view of the person/people receiving the message. If you can't describe a requirement without technical jargon, you probably don't understand the requirement.

Learn how to phrase questions and responses in a thoughtful manner. Knee jerk responses are usually detrimental.

Learn how to present. You're going to have to make a case for your ideas in meetings. You'll also have to defend your actions sometimes, particularly with respect to operations and support.

Communication is so critical. It helps requirements become better understood. It keeps issues from becoming escalated so that you have more time to do the enjoyable part of the job: creating something for someone.

Your job is to make someone else's life better with your development skills. Whether it's saving a step in a task they need to do or providing timely information so they can make decisions important to the organization...whatever...you're there for them.

Explore what areas of development you like the most - analysis, project management, UI, backend, etc. - and follow them. Keep in mind that it may change in the course of your career.

Try to develop a good rapport with your colleagues. You spend a large portion of your waking hours with them. It's easier when you like them and vice versa.

Find enjoyment in each job. It's a long career. Don't stay with something that isn't enjoyable to you.

If you don't take into account cooperation, complex communication, and the ability to abstract (e.g. a rock isn't just something to step over, it's also a potential weapon and when many are combined a dwelling, bridge, etc.), then your observation has merit.

We're a relatively weak, slow animal. We don't see well at night. Our teeth and nails are fairly useless from a hunting or even defensive perspective. We don't procreate quickly and our young mature slowly. Our survival advantage is working in coordinated teams and having flexible minds with respect to the world around us. Cats are closer to what you described.

It's interesting just how much I've come to fit the facts stated in the article. Previous to online shopping, I'd wear clothes until they were threadbare to avoid going to a retail store, often having clothes for 10+ years.

Recently, I found that I like LL Bean for the style, quality, and sizing for both business and casual. So I'm slowly revamping my wardrobe and intend to replace pieces more often.

Shoes, however, I am still going in-person to find. I have a pair of podiatrist-made inserts to deal with my collapsing arches. It's devilishly tough trying to account for them when purchasing online.

For me, the most rewarding work is the volunteering I do. I coach various youth sports. I have no pressure to win so I can focus on letting the kids enjoy themselves, have positive interactions, and learn a little about the sports. Seeing them gain confidence and passionately work toward something is a major reward for me.

I still enjoy trying to match a user's expectations with the software I write. But, it's balanced by other aspects like coaching and being in a family.

My guess is that it's a myth that developed from the industrial era when more widgets could be produced in 12 hours than 8. The fact that developers don't do specialized line work doesn't seem to register.

As people are noting on this thread, startups are their own thing. During my startup days, we were always the next sale or funding round away from going belly up. We pulled late hours to get in the latest features for our president to "sell" to investors.

"Productivity of the system as a whole is significantly improved by communication."

That's an overly-generalized statement. Communication is sometimes helpful, when the people involved are good communicators. Often it's a source of distraction, e.g. email chains with multiple people replying-all to a topic that is at best tangential to what you're working on. There's also an equivalent that occurs with meetings in which people invite everyone they can imagine having any interest in a topic. This strategy has a wonderful way of bringing together a large number of people, most of whom have no valuable input, or interest, in the topic at hand.

The more detailed a job is, the more uninterrupted time it requires. So, if you want quality work and don't want to push the due date, give the person doing the work some uninterrupted time.

I've been a developer for 26 years professionally and, outside IT, I ran a 501(c)(3) of several hundred people. Yes, you can leave people alone to get work done without compromising organizational goals.

My title for my first programming job, circa 1992-3, was Junior Programmer. I was sent for two weeks of Oracle training on my first day. We didn't have a formal mentoring program, but the team was small and everyone was open to helping me anytime I needed it.

My recollection is that "Junior" positions phased out along with training programs as companies demanded pre-trained people. It seems like companies have basically shifted all the cost of training to the individual. This is having an effect on college computer science programs as students and their parents demand programs more catered to industrial needs. (The paradox is that industrial needs change before a student can actually graduate.)

Personally, I would love to work with Juniors and mentor them. In the absence of Juniors, I suggested that I do "lunch and learns" with our Help Desk people so they can be more than just ticket routers: maybe act as analysts before tickets get to senior people like me. As of yet, my manager and the Help Desk manager haven't approved. So, we keep riding the carousel of status quo.

Yup, I'll take Gadd over Moon any day.

Thanks for the perspective Klathmon and objclxt. The person's comment hits a fear of mine that people still draw the false analogy of manufacturing for software development.

Based on this comment, it sounds like engineers are more like line workers.

"EMs at Apple are powerless to push back. Every engineer's performance is tied to the number of Radars fixed and closed. Every EM's performance is tied to their team's total Radars fixed and closed, so they have an incentive to keep everyone focused on the prize."

Sorry to go on a tangent, but your comment reminded me of a book I read about the Chinese culinary culture pre-revolution. Chinese chefs had, and may still have, wooden cutting boards that were conditioned somehow such that they were as hard as stone. (There was also an implication that they resisted bacteria unlike normal wood boards when not scoured properly.) These boards were passed down from generation to generation.

The bit about the cutting boards being as hard as stone, is that pure hyperbole or is it possible?

From your first link... 1) Minimalism. 2) Dynamic typing. 3) First-class functions and closures.

"Modeled on" <> "is"

Brendan Eich admired Scheme and was still very familiar with SICP at the time. Perhaps "inspired by Scheme" would clear up the misunderstanding?

My question was about creating DSL's in JS. Is it simple enough that people actually do it in professional software development?

If it is, then I call into question the assertion that the majority of the programming community doesn't want to use languages giving them that much freedom.

Javascript is modeled on Scheme. Can you create DSL's in JS? (Legitimate question, I'm not familiar enough with JS to know for sure. Theoretically, it seems possible.)