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ernon Google doesn’t want employees working remotely anymore

I have a team split between 5 cities and timezones using modern software development work practices. I offered to comply with my employer's 2 day in-office mandate, but made it clear that on in-office days I wasn't going to work extra hours to support my teammates who were offshore. I was given an exemption.

ernon Google doesn’t want employees working remotely anymore

Criticism of open office plans was almost a trope (there's a software book from the 90s that rips into them), but in the years before Covid, companies doubled-down, removing partitions and implementing full hot-desking.

I think those horrible, noisy environments would have led to a backlash sooner rather than later. Now any complaints about open plan offices will just be dismissed as people whining about not being able to WFH.

ernon React is 10 years old

I was referring to greenfields projects, but the problem is even more acute for the maintenance problem you outline. You have a portfolio of front end projects: each one would involve learning whatever quirks the framework and implementation were used (by necessity). A company with a reasonably consistent back-end architecture, project structures and coding practices would have an easier time onboarding maintenance developers, as long as each project was done with some kind of eye to maintainability.

ernon React is 10 years old

You are correct, there have been changes on the back-end as well: containers and Kubernetes vs serverless. The endless tension between microservices and monoliths. Multiple IaC options. Onprem vs cloud (which cloud?), and associated cycles of disillusionment.

The difference may be that once a particular back-end approach/architecture/design is adopted by a dev shop it remains stable over multiple projects. I’ve seen this in both consulting and in LOB roles. Because of this, I can hire a competent .NET developer and be confident that I can get them to be productive relatively quickly, since the foundation on which we write our code is stable, and I can invest in enhancing the developer experience to support them. In fact, an explicit criterion for every project in my teams is that we make it easy enough for any competent C# developer to ideally be able to open a small, but meaningful PR by the end of their first day on a project (if needed, I don’t treat it as a retention gate or anything!). They do have to adapt to our infrastructure and our ways of working, they don’t need to relearn the fundamentals of how to produce code.

Whereas every time a new front-end project starts, there’s a near-compulsion to use the latest and greatest techniques. Everyone has to catch up, because of their previous experience being somewhat redundant. No one can invest in improving things for other developers, because they don’t have the time, and because any investment would be wasted, since it would be redundant beyond the current project (or two, if we’re lucky).

I can’t really hire an Angular developer for a React project that starts tomorrow, and expect them to be reasonably productive immediately, despite them being competent in Typescript, CSS, Node etc. Heck, I wouldn’t even be able to hire a React developer who last did it 5 years ago, and expect them to be immediately productive.

ernon React is 10 years old

There are certainly benefits from doing things in new ways, but a lot of the time things swing too far in the opposite direction, and become of a form of “IQ signalling” for smart developers.

It isn’t only front-end developers who are prone to this: 20 years ago, before FP became a mainstream thing, being able to do pointer arithmetic was seen as the differentiator between a “smart programmer” and a “bad programmer” (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...).

Was React great and fun to work with? Yes, but then Redux came along and made something simple into something stilted. Our team used Mobx instead, which was simpler IIRC.

Similarly it’s been a couple of years, but I remember React Hooks being a bit complicated for the value we got out of them.

Ultimately, it’s hard to tell if something is an improvement, or a time suck to allow the elites to stand out. I stopped playing the game and stepped away from front-end development, as have many of my experienced colleagues.

I’m assuming things have settled as Big Tech focusses on profitability rather than funding an endless parade of frameworks, and the IQ-signalling will become less prevalent as generative AI competes with the brainiacs. When that happens, I’ll dip my toes back in the world of front-end development.

ernon Year Usenet Timeline (2001)

I could have sworn I posted the Internet Archive link. Maybe it was stripped off.

ernon Are sockets the wave of the future? (1990)

They bought Dejanews, but then some people donated their archives dating back to the 80's and they were integrated into Google News.

https://web.archive.org/web/20011212191924/https://www.googl...

ernon Tesla removes parking sensors, the results are predictably terrible

What car do you have?

ernon Ask HN: How do I move forward after being laid off?

Sorry to hear about that. It’s terrible. You say you have a 26 year work history: maybe reach out to a former employer to see what they can offer you?

ernon The new Bing runs on OpenAI’s GPT-4

I just got into it, and when I ask it about its limitations (like the reason for the 15 message limit) it ends the conversation. Seems to be a lot of censorship.

ernon Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

From the article: a legacy of distrust about biological research among Aboriginal groups means that genetic studies are viewed suspiciously and samples are hard to come by

ernon Controversial experiments that could make bird flu more risky to resume (2019)

It's unlikely for years, or decades. The entire concept has been entirely and deliberately conflated with Trumpism, and any suggestion of a lab origin is met with a combination of outrage, gaslighting and deflection.

ernon ESA: Small meteorite will safely impact atmosphere tonight over northern France

It confused me as well.

This post is mistitled. The original Tweet is:

A 1-meter meteoroid (small #asteroid) has been detected and is expected to safely strike Earth's atmosphere over northern France between 3:50-4:03 CET.

ernon ChatGPT is a bullshit generator but it can still be amazingly useful

The education system is moribund. During Covid, I thought we'd see the flipped classroom shine, and a revolution in education. Instead we got children chained to Zoom or Teams and attempts to replicate traditional classrooms remotely.

I wouldn't be surprised if my grandchildren are still doing the same bullshit in 20 years.

ernon The situation at LastPass may be worse than they are letting on

I think the policy is fine, but since I left my former employer more than a year ago, the policy should have been lifted on my personal account automatically (assuming that my former employer deactivated the work account, which I expect that they did).

ernon The situation at LastPass may be worse than they are letting on

Fair enough.

It was a support request, and IIRC they disabled it remotely.

ernon The situation at LastPass may be worse than they are letting on

This is quite interesting. A couple of weeks ago, I received an extortion phishing email, but it was directed to a secondary email address that hasn’t been previously compromised. It made it past Gmail’s spam and phishing filters into my inbox.

Maybe a coincidence, but I guess every weird thing that happens is going to raise alarm bells.

I was suspicious of the LastPass concept (storing passwords in a cloud app) when a former employer introduced it some years ago, but they had a strong IT and security culture so I trusted them to make the right choices and adopted it for my personal use.

A few months ago I hsd an issue with my LastPass 2FA device and a policy set by my former employer blocked me from resetting it for my personal account. It was resolved by LastPass, but that was the first strike, and I had spent most of the night extracting my personal account passwords manually from the mobile app, which remained logged in. That was strike 1. This is strike 2.

ernon Cancer vaccines: the next immunotherapy frontier

You are starting to run into No True Scotsman fallacy territory at this point. Everyone from the Surgeon General of the United States to random GPs on Twitter were vilifying masks.

ernon Cancer vaccines: the next immunotherapy frontier

A lot of doctors jumped on the anti-mask bandwagon. It wasn’t just pundits and media figures.

ernon Cancer vaccines: the next immunotherapy frontier

I fully understand that the science wasn’t settled. It was a new disease, and guidance was going to change.

What I didn’t expect was the overconfidence and then reversals, without missing a beat, and without acknowledging “hey, we were wrong”. The stuff around masks… first ”they don’t work”, “they make it more likely to get infected”, “people won’t know how to use a mask”, “masks are a superstition” then switching to mask mandates, without admitting that those who expressed those views got it wrong.

The reason I used “mainstream” was to show that these were people in positions of trust. News outlets with editorial controls, public health officials, elected politicians. Or doctors. It happened both on traditional, and social media and IRL. The term was not meant to be pejorative, but descriptive.

Vaccines are similar: there are many clips that show pundits, media figures and public health officials overselling vaccines. Instead of later saying “the preliminary data looked good so we assumed they would stop transmission and infection, but it turns out that these vaccines reduce serious illness and death. We were wrong, but it’s a new disease and we are all learning, that’s how science works” we got “we ALWAYS said that vaccines were meant to reduce illness and death and not infection and transmission”.

Maybe I hate being gaslit more than most. My mother, an intelligent woman who I love and respect, in an effort to spare my feelings as a young child, would try to warp reality: “oh you never had the toy that’s missing”. She probably thought I wouldn’t remember, but did. She continued that pattern throughout my childhood. Whatever the reason, I intensely dislike that sort of manipulation, and I think it’s corrosive.

ernon Cancer vaccines: the next immunotherapy frontier

It was pretty clear that vaccines had been oversold early on. The opposite happened with masks, where the experts pooh-poohed them, then backtracked.

It was quite eye-opening how fast the mainstream narratives were rewritten.

(I have had 4 doses by the way, I'm not going to cut my nose to spite my face: knowing that vaccines were oversold is not the same as believing they're useless).

ernon The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

No less a jurist than Antonin Scalia (one of the most conservative and intellectually formidable Supreme Court justices, whatever your opinion of his positions) thought that the US Constitution was too hard to amend:

"Scalia said fewer than 2 percent of the population could prevent enactment of a constitutional amendment. “It ought to be hard, but not that hard" https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/how_scalia_and_ginsb...

The bizarre circus of Supreme Court nominees coyly pretending to be apolitical in a plainly partisan nomination process is another indicator that there's something wrong.

ernon The case against masks at school

There is deep psychological damage to kids who sat alone, by themselves for the past year.

My kids and their friends repurposed their remote learning tools (MS Teams) and have had more creative interaction with their peers than they would have had otherwise (it's always been a pain organizing real-world play-dates). I'm surprised that this wasn't a more widespread experience.

ernon The case against masks at school

Kids have had long holidays as long as the school system has existed, and they never regressed enough for the general public to raise the alarm.

My own children just repurposed the tools used for remote learning, and now interact more with their peers than they did before the pandemic (and its not just video games either: there's a fair amount of creative activity that happens). Kids are incredibly resilient.

Poor education practices like chaining them to Zoon for hours at a time to attend class, on the other hand, would damage anyone, and show there's a long way to go in the remote learning space. You'd have expected some high profile projects to shine, but I haven't heard a lot from them.

ernon Remember: Commenting your code is an act of self-care for your future self

Most professional programmers (software developers) I’ve worked with avoid writing comments in favour of self-documenting code.

I wonder if this Tweet illustrates a divergence in style between scientists and others who code as part of their jobs on the one hand; and people whose primary role is developing software for a living, on the other.

ernon Every engineer should do a stint in consulting

The article specifically excludes outsourced development from its definition of consulting:

I’m not talking about becoming one of those contractors who are billed out by their companies as “consultants” but are really just serial hired hands. I’m referring to a true consultant role, where you are paid to bring expertise, give advice, and drive technical change.*

ernon Has the era of overzealous cleaning finally come to an end?

What I found deeply troubling was that many healthcare workers who weren’t in on the “noble lie” jumped on the “masks don’t work” bandwagon. They mocked and belittled mask-wearers on social media. They turned into anti-masking fanatics. It was a frightening display of of zealousness from the semi-informed. They just as quickly became pro-mask and ignored their previous stance.

ernon As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

How much of this is caused by remote learning? Kids tend to spend long periods out of school with no ill effects during holidays. They even do a lot of homework without a severe mental health crisis (we presume). The difference could be that they have control over their time. The remote learning experience seems to be needlessly regimented. My own children have repurposed tools for remote learning to keep in touch with their friends: they probably socialize more now than they did pre-pandemic.

He would scream and cry multiple times per hour on Zoom,” she said. “It was all really scary and not in keeping with his personality.

The fact that children are being tethered to Zoom for hours in regimented routines is really disturbing. Adults can push back, kids don’t have the authority to do so. Our boss tried a group “good morning” routine as a sly way to do a roll-call when we went remote-first, but a limited number of people took the bait, and she quickly learned to trust us.

ernon Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

Some of those cases are directly traceable to quarantined travellers, some aren't

One of those countries has been able to trace all cases in the last few months and makes extensive use of genomic sequencing. The leaks have all come out of hotel quarantine breaches. I believe that some Australian states that do not receive overseas travelers have not had a single case in months.

It may (or may not) not be feasible for bigger and non-island countries, although I suspect that the border closures will happen far more swiftly if there's another pandemic in our lifetimes.

ernon Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

I believe that, like New Zealand, we are just postponing the inevitable

New Zealand (and Australia) don't have cases, because every single traveler who enters those island nations is kept in hotel quarantine, and tested multiple times before being released only after the quarantine period ends. It isn't the same as testing people when they come in and letting them straight into the community if they test negative.

That said, with vaccines now being rolled out, it may well be that these countries managed to dodge the bullet. It's hard to see what was "inevitable" about Covid, except the dogma (still promoted by the WHO, when I last checked) that travel bans are bad.