662 karma · joined December 9, 2022
It's much easier for a country to retire an engineer with a fat paycheck than to create an incredible amount of distrust killing him.
An assassination only makes sense if somehow he threatened to tell everything to the iranian goverment.
Quick example, we had creationism before 2010, after 2010 something even worse(terraplanism) appeared.
That's like a complex legacy application in which the original developers passed away. In this day and age one can only wonder how the american armed forces will deal with this problem in a scenario where the military struggles to attract and retain their talent.
Honestly I didn't see much of point in paying more for a thinkpad loaded with enterprise specs(pro chip, for instance) and lacking amenities like a graphic card instead of just going right away to a high end consumer-oriented laptop like Yoga Pro.
Am I missing something?
But you can always check on linkedin the many hundreds of people who apply to any managerial position.
I don't want to start a flame war but it's much easier to replace a manager than a technical person, a technical job is boring and most people don't want to do it while management relies more on soft skills, something that most people can do at a minimum level. Being a manager who's always employed is more about social connections, if you don't befriend the right people your job security might also be at risk.
- A first one that develops a product that creates a value for the company in the present(sales/marketing).
- A second one that develops a product that will possibly create value for the company in the future(research/development).
- And the last one that develops a product that created value for the company in the past and now has only to be maintained(maintenance).
Honestly I think that this division is a bit tautological. Everybody in the industry knows that maintenance project are bad and only are worth it if you're making a good money working in them. Now in practice the hypothetical division between sales/marketing and research/development that the author proposes is pretty blurry and in my opinion doesn't do a great service in categorizing the activity of a developer.
School has become a place where children stay so that their parents can work. While there is nothing inherently bad about trying to solve two problems with only one solution, for the specific case of the educational system, conceptualizing schools as places for taking care of kids instead of a place for learning is very problematic in so many aspects that it's hard to even start.
When my aunt bought her a new computer with Windows she couldn't use it properly and complained that she wanted a computer "like the old one". She was equally unable to use Macos in my laptop. Nowadays when people complain about Linux's usability I know that they are normally overstating or talking from prejudice because from a practical point of view no way the usability of any modern distro is significantly behind Windows' or Macos' usability, it's even the opposite I would say.
If Linux weren't always behind the door threatening Windows, surely we would have today as the only option a hiper restricted OS with a terrible performance, a huge pice tag and horrible terms of use(well... this is already the case).
But now there is another complication to an eventual reemergence of ruby on rails: the competition defeated the initial comparative advantage - i.e. the simplicity - of the RoR platform. The premises that justified RoR in the past are too weak today in my opinion. The framework was sold on how easy and no-nosense it was setting it up and start prototyping your commercial solution in a time where the competitors were awkward and epitomized by J2EE, where setting up and developing the most basic application was time consuming and complicated.
Today with Spring Boot, for instance, you can bootstrap and develop your app as quickly and easily as any other cool and alternative framework but with the advantage of using a really popular and fast language.
Technologies don't die quickly and COBOL and Perl are the living proof, but it's really hard to see a bright future for RoR and ruby and I think that most of their contribution was already given.
It's not only that ruby and ruby on rails are trending down, this has been the case for at least 10 years.
https://berk.es/2022/03/08/the-waning-of-ruby-and-rails/
This is only an article, but you will find the same point of view in many other places. The decline of ruby and RoR is obvious for anyone doing web development. Python is only getting stronger, Typescript the same, not to mention the statically typed competitors like Java with Spring Boot.
I wouldn't doubt that even languages like Go and Rust might surpass ruby soon in web development because as general purpose languages they are already more relevant.
I'm a former RoR developer and I took off the keywords ruby and ruby on rails from my curriculum because for me professionally it makes no sense to invest time in them.
This introduction about a framework built with ruby and not ruby itself was necessary because even today, I would guess that 95% of all development with ruby is RoR applications. It's my understanding that ruby rose to prominence mostly because of ruby on rails, now that RoR is in a downward trend I think ruby will follow the same trend until it's reduced to a small community of enthusiasts in the same way that happened to perl.
As for the language itself I can't think of a single reason to opt for ruby over python or typescript. Ruby doesn't do anything better both in terms of language or platform than its already better established competitors.
So fucking what, is pretty much the way that people tend to view this problem, and understandably so, thought Dirk. After all, who wants to hear a bunch of fat fish, oh all right, mammals, burping at each other?
But for a moment Dirk had a sense of infinite loss and sadness that somewhere amongst the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods."
-- Douglas Adams
It's a wider pattern in fact:
"The productivity paradox, also referred to as the Solow paradox, could refer either to the slowdown in productivity growth in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s despite rapid development in the field of information technology (IT) over the same period, or to the slowdown in productivity growth in the United States and developed countries from the 2000s to 2020s; sometimes the newer slowdown is referred to as the productivity slowdown, the productivity puzzle, or the productivity paradox 2.0."
Ok, maybe I came to the wrong place to say what I'm gonna say because I guess that a sizable part of the demographics here works in hot, meaningful projects, but as a corp worker for the last 8+ years, it has been my experience that a lot of companies have products that are used either internally by their own employees or by another corporate client that still pays for them out of inertia or because there is just too much custom business logic that now it's too costly to replace them.
In both of these cases we're talking about uncompetitive products that are probably going to remain so before being discontinued. And in both of these cases companies will try nonetheless to create a SCRUM-like arrangement with PMs and POs and behave like they are building a revolutionary product, urgent taks and pressure for results included.
It has also been my experience that in this kind of environment normally PMs and POs will be fully invested in doing politics to try to climb up the corporate ladder without much concern about what makes a good or usable product. They will steer the project in whatever direction makes them look good to the administration or the client at the cost of creating a fragmented product that many times looks like it's doing a random walk in terms of functionality and improvements.
I'm not old enough to know how things were built in the 60's/70's/80's(no SCRUM/PM's/PO's I guess) but the catastrophist discourse that there's a deep slowdown in productivity compared to the previous decades and that today we're mostly relying on things we already did in the past maps pretty well with my perception.
This current trend of finding any kind of cynical counter argument against a phenomenon whose evidences keep piling up is something that comes already from the 00's. It's the same thing with vaccines, it's the same thing with creationism and to a smaller extent it was the same thing with the flat earth theory.
One side of the "debate" is not really interested in debating anything. They are only interested in propagating outrageous and colorful conspiracy theories that in their minds piss off people who disagree with them politically.
When the planet goes down to drain in 20, 30 years these same people either will be dead or will come up with some kind of excuse saying that in spite of the climate catastrophe all that was needed to save the planet from a global green dictatorship.
How many software developers can, in a reasonable timeframe, buy a house in the place they live and support alone a family of four people? Then the truly insane salaries you are talking about are not really that insane.
>Laying off makes sense. Sometimes you hire to backfill roles or for strategic teams. Sometimes an H1b is the correct hire.
Developers are seen by companies as over expensive peons and they have been maneuvering to turn the whole field in an low cost industry. I hope you are younger than 30 to still hold such a naïf worldview.
Companies colluding to make the life of workers worse and boost their profits, that has never happened before in the history of humanity.
Japan for sure ranks pretty high on women freedom and rights and chances are that the track for these issues has been improving in the country over the years, not declining.
So the direct incentives that you claim that have never existed were there all the time, having a family with kids were the natural and expected thing to do. It used to go good and easy, but now all the economic incetives go against it.
I don't like to keep bringing back the old and tired trope of how the boomer discourse and worldview are completely out of touch with the reality, but when it comes to the debate about demographics it's completely impossible not to.
The educated middle/high class in Moscow was probably quite critic of Stalin's policies and nothing would happen to them as long as they were not loud enough with their criticism.
You don't have to go back to the 50's. You can see buildings like that in any european capital today. Moscow from the 50's looks very in line with most european capitals by the way.
>I didn’t think they illustrated what it felt like to have secret police looking over your shoulder. If you weren’t in trouble with the state or an upper class westerner I don’t think there was a huge difference in lifestyle between East and West Europe for most people until the late 60’s / early 70’s
Sometimes I have the impression that Hollywood movies gave people a permanent wrong perception about what it really means to live in a dictatorship with a secret police. For the urban middle/upper class it didn't mean much except if you were involved in politics. That was the case in Latin America at least.
I guess the biggest losers in the Soviet Union were the poor farmers and the industry workers who were forced to work, but you will barely hear about their drama because people don't really identify with them. It's much easier to sell police states from the past as low tech minority report scenarios for an urban middle class even if that was not really the case.
It doesn't change the fact that you're using other people's work as an input for your commercial algorithm that makes money for you. This by itself, without any merit to the discussion of how much is being copied, is enough reason to make you pay for the use of someone's else work.
Companies now will download your art without consent, make a lot of money and not pay you a single dime because their algorithm is "not copying". It's a complete absurd.