i_made_a_booboo

I'm saying:

It's the goal of some engineers to write clean code for the benefit of the business.

It's the goal of some engineers to slap together something new and shiny, present it to management and get it approved for the benefit of their careers.

Engineers goals sometimes align with the business and sometimes don't.

It's a long game for the business. It can be a long or short game for the programmer.

That assumes they were using effective parenting techniques in the first place.

Siblings winding up in the ER?

Actually I wound up in the ES once come to think of it.

But being a parent now I get it. You do your best and unfortunately sometimes that's shit. I thought I would be a way better parent than I am but I try. Definitely no smacking because I worked out that at least that doesn't do anyone any good. In all my experiments of parenting so far the effective thing is making boundaries explicit and enforcing them consistently.

The hard part is consistency because kids are just relentless sometimes. But if you back down you lose. It takes patience and sometimes you just don't have it. S;me people lash out in those circumstance because the feedback is immediate and gratifying. It looks like it works.

I'm glad the data supports that while it works short term it's in aggregate more problematic long term.

Software is art, fashion and politics.

I second this. It's pretty fucking out there.

A microphone and a blog. Throw in a book for good measure.

I've always found it hilarious that what we see today from the Agile industry can in no way have come from such vague statements. 99% of Agile is shit people who weren't part of the original group made up so they could sell and the 1% if Agile that's actually real isn't specific enough to mean anything more than "do stuff".

Yup.

I've come to realize a few key things:

1) Humans have an extremely limited capacity to determine what's true. 2) Our modus operandi is not to determine what is true but with which side are we politically affiliated 3) The truth is of little importance

This plays out exactly like you describe. A cargo-cult. You're either for or against it. You are either on the political side of the divide that believes being in the cult is better for ones survival or you are on the side that believes deep introspection about what is better for the situation at hand is best for survival. Close to nobody has the resources or capacity to evaluate if it's actually a good idea or not and even less so the political clout to sway the group for or against. So cargo-cult it is, for better or for worse.

TL;DR The state of any development methodology you can give a name to and dogmatically adhere to: a shambles.

And Americas full of drug addicts, school shootings and cops killing black teenagers. And that's despite all those Christians, their morals and their prayers.

And as it turns out women and black people were distinctly lower class than men until a few decades ago. Religion didn't change in that time. But the social norms that various communities enforce on each other did.

And that's my whole point. Religion has nothing to do with it. It's the same dynamics that exist in every group that are what cause the phenomenon of people behaving themselves according to a set of rules.

My one and only point with my example was not the absolute morality of one place vs another but the fact that a place basically devoid of all religious belief doesn't automatically devolve into debauchery, chaos and total amorality. They seem to think that's what will happen. It doesn't but that doesn't stop them believing that.

People arguing the point completely miss the fact that humans don't care at all what's true. They care who's side your on and that's all they try to figure out.

Mildly hilarious how Japan is a ridiculously safe place crime-wise and has pretty high moral standards and is pretty much entirely atheist. They visit temples because they visit temples and it's just expected that that's what you do because everyone does it ala being Japanese circular logic. The same circular logic is responsible for their moral standards.

Turns out it's not God thats responsible for morality, it's the existence and enforcement of norms by members of the community that is.

Sadly I think we hit peak getting along about 2 years back.

As in the microcosm, so in the macrocosm. If you think about even the difficulty of maintaining stable relationships with the handful of people you know it's actually really damn challenging. Occasionally you have fights and disagreements and sometimes you think fuck it I just can't deal with you anymore or right now. If it's like that for everyone on Earth in their personal lives then that's what Earth is going to be like in aggregate roughly speaking.

I don't mean to be a downer about it. I just think we have a very rosy view of "the world gets better and progress gets made and that's the natural state of things". I've come to realize that that doesn't really hold up to scrutiny when you look at the history of the world over the last 12 to 13 thousand years.

As it stands this is mostly a happy accident. Scariest thing is it can all go back the other way.

Hmm I disagree with your conclusions.

What you seem to be describing is geopolitics. Honestly, not much has ever really changed.

I mean if I were to give a metaphor for how I see geopolitics has changed in the last 150 years I would say:

Imagine we are a group of kids going on a camp. First there is the argument over whether we should go on a camp at all. Next is the argument over where we should go. The last thousand years equates to fighting all the way there in the car. WWI and WWII were arguing over who got which bed after we arrived in the room. The first night came and went and followed by the first full day of camp. The first day of camp was going fine until it wasn't. That was brexit + Trump. A minor hiccup here and there but everyone lives in such close quarters at the moment we are all starting to get on each other's nerves. But mum and dad (The UN) tell us not to fight. One could break out but we try to keep the peace otherwise we know it's going to be miserable for everyone. Full scale warfare is a food fight away.

Human nature never changes but scale which it was never designed for tends to expose the very rough edges.

So you have to be an honest fake reviewer.

The irony.

So if you want free stuff just leave bad reviews.

The world is so broken.

My sister's used to do the same thing to the Coca Cola company when we were young. They would call the hotline and complain they had some come that tasted like dishwashing liquid and they would get loads of coupons sent to them for free coke.

I think they did it every time we moved house and we lived in quite a few houses. It was always entertaining.

Now that I think about it my 8 year old sister was committing fraud.

Well...

Are you being serious?

I almost agree with your sentiment however the prerequisite is that the group size is around 20 people. Earth has grown beyond where that is feasible and TCP/IP ain't gonna change shit. If you think about everyone on Earth in a connected graph the number of possible relationships in the world is 7 billion factorial. You're ever fully connecting that graph ever. And it will never be stable.

It's kind of stunning if you look at the majority of Africa and the Middle East and parts of South American those conquerer types are alive and well and steamrolling the network all day long.

It's just following the laws of Resume Driven Development.

1) If it's not on your resume it needs to be. 2) If it's already on everyone's resume you must seek alternatives 3) Resumes are never finished, only abandoned

I'm starting to feel like I should expand this into a manifesto.

Best comment ever.

Especially as I'm sitting here learning ASP.NET Core Identity on Pluralsight for hours and thinking about all the "identity architecture coordination meetings" I'm anticipating having on this next project.

I'm dying to read the whole thing. Please.

Which leads to Resume Driven Development driving choices rather than logical debates where merits and trade-offs are considered.

You have a problem. You decide to use regular expressions to solve it. Now you have two problems.

You have a problem. You decide to use microservices to solve it. Now you have ten problems.

I remember my first job was working on a massive enterprise system in a complex business domain on a codebase that had survived multiple iterations over the last 30 years.

It took a full 9 months before I finally thought 'I can do this job'.

I think part of it was eventually working out the baseline level of competence of the seniors and seeing just how much everyone had to communicate to get anything done. Over time I got used to the various systems and processes but also used to the fact no one knows everything and we just have to clarify with others what we don't know.

It's a team sport.

What led you to this conclusion?

I've come to the same one. I think it explains a great deal of what we see. Even in the hiring process and such. It's actually very primitive at its core. Who's part of who's tribe and who is jockeying for status in that tribe.

My God that quote is brilliant.

As my old boss used to say "qualify your advisors"

You articulated this problem perfectly.

One of my central theses is 'Its almost impossible for people to determine what's true and equally as impossible to get them to admit it'.

Every single case you point out each actor thinks they are doing the right thing. Nobody knows what they are doing aside from one of those cases. The caveat being they have to fight against everyone else who believe they are also correct.

This all feeds into another central thesis 'the truth is at the very top of Maslow's hierarchy of "nice to haves"'

For me it's about creating a personal connection and telling a good story. I dunno I just have a belief in my ability to do that from past experience.

This is new territory for me though, so we'll see.

I'm not in the US on, so I don't play the whole unicorn game. I imagine that's a whole different ball game.

Somebody promote this guy.

I'm pretty much coming to the end of mine now. Except I feel burnt out from the sabbatical whereas I generally always felt pretty good at work.

I read a shit tonne this last 8 months and have noticed a big upgrade in my worldview. I shipped a couple of projects on my own which I'm proud of too.

I grew immensely from the experience and a whole bunch of things I always toyed with the idea while working I actually got to try out and see how I really felt about them and not how I thought I was going to feel.

The recruiters being suspicious about the time off thing is something I wasn't suspecting but I did get that vibe. I made a point to network the whole time I was taking off and have been invited to visit a small company I'm pretty excited about after an hour chatting to the CTO. Political savvy was one of my unexpected skills at my last job, so I feel like so long as I can get in a room I can get a job (provided I'm actually interested and think the company would be a good fit).

So many lessons learned. Perhaps both good and bad.

10/10 I don't want to put on my rift to do work. Ever.

Maybe global warming is a secret plot done on purpose to make theer climate an impossible place to live.