org3432

He gave an amusing talk at Google in 2007 about creativity[0], where I thought he talked about one of the important things in science is actually believing the data since it seems so outlandish. I thought it was in this talk, but skimming the video I can't seem to find it. The talk is quite amusing regardless.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7M2l-jzRG8

The managers and directors if you talk to them will frankly tell you they have no idea what’s going on, they hire people and somehow the problems they were hired to solve don’t get solved. I had a founder tell me he created an entire department to improve the developer experience and nearly 20 employees later they’ve not made any successful improvements, they just limp along the broken systems.

> But of course, "doing things the right way" is terribly hard to quantify

I don’t think it is hard to quantify actually, shorter build times are better than longer ones, branch merges that take seconds are better than the ones that take up to a day, spending people’s time on higher level thought processes vs squandering their time going through pages of manual steps that could just be a script, etc. It’s just a lack of awareness of what the company is doing that turns them into molasses, and puts projects at risk of being canceled. The companies are still successful overall somehow, but individual employees learn and grow at a much slower pace than they’re capable of.

Yeah same here, what’s strange is you have to explain that to clients too. They don’t get you’re contracting because you like to actually do things and helping them is part of the reward. Otherwise you’d just be an employee.

It's not good, it doesn't understand the TF types and recommends values that are invalid for the context, there's no inline help (you have to go look it up on the website), refactoring a variable name doesn't fully work, and you can't set breakpoints or trace through the execution to determine what's going on... I mean it's practically in the mid-80s, although most of those things worked even back then.

The lesson here is that if you plan on making a language, even a DSL, you want to be sure you're really up for it since it's a lot of work.

Waldorf Schools show a number of times too, they tend to mix up science with romanticized fake spirituality, which would make perfect sense some of them would go too far. The parents are typically well educated, but also have a wishy-washy spiritual seeker tendency.

That's a useful list, thanks for sharing. What would be useful is if there was just a distribution of Vim that just had everything included for a specific language. Or at least a base and then a way to discover and add more from within Vim.

This is a good point actually, the sooner you catch the mistake the quicker you can correct it. So once it gets down the line, even in a pre-commit, you're just wasting your own time on getting the feedback. It's not always possible to get it sooner of course.

What packages are you using and what language out of curiosity?

I think VS Code has the same issues I see it with that too, I haven't noticed it as much with VisualStudio and JetBrains' IDEs. Agree completely on knowing how to use your tools, it's like a carpenter showing up for work with a rusty hand saw and thinking they're going to make a house with it.

> And I know devs that swear by vi...they are developing any faster than I am

I hear about this from time to time, but have never seen it people do it successfully first hand, what I do see is silly mistakes in their checkins; incomplete variable renames, formatting is off, syntax errors, switching between browsers and their code while looking at manuals, or other obvious mistakes that can be caught inline by IDEs while you type.

Audits can be hit and miss, I’ve seen high quality code review companies just miss major and obvious mistakes in the security by simply not tracing the execution logic step by step in critical code sections and instead just scan the code for common known mistakes based on code fragment matching.

> Think you can make things better? Go start your own company.

I did actually, turns outs those same people show up and they damage the growing cash calf so to speak. :)

What exhausts me is the people, the politics, the engineering egos, and the endless tolerance of companies to spend months of time working through previously obviously poor decisions and no tolerance for fixing the attitudes that created them. You’re called perfectionist engineer, regardless of how little effort or time it takes to correct the long term trajectory for your project. There’s little connection to clear organized thinking and the enjoyment of the work, it’s like everyone has gone mad and can’t see the obvious right in front of their face at times.

I guess it's similar to Japan's occupation of China as well, they didn't have much regard for the Han. Pretty bad.

It's surprising with the Tibetans though, given China's stance on liberating Tibet and it being part of China.

Right, but what's the opinion of their ethnicity I wonder.

Do you know why they think they're unsuitable?

Great stuff, I like the idea of bringing the same level of reasoning that's been hard learned over the past 50 years of software development to devops too.

Currently the state of devops tools includes omitting debuggers when a company makes a new DSL, poor if any linting, low to non-existent test coverage so obvious bugs and regressions are normal, very poor IDE integration if any, often no real way to test locally, and not surprisingly the tools are bug riddled and at best scratch a single itch in an eco system w/o directly addressing the overall business problem.

It's amusing, but it's likely a cardinality like issue, they have n cases * n tenses * n genders. So I'm sure they follow a pattern that reduces what you need to learn at least by half and every day usage is a fraction of that.

Here’s my addition:

Phone numbers are of the same length within a country. In Austria phone numbers vary in length, and the trailing numbers can also can be used be PBXs.

Yep, the tl;dr is that at the time my manager's manager didn't appreciate me being transparent on mistakes our department made with other depts. So in an effort to make me quit, aside from other things, he wrote a review for my direct manager and required him to say it was his review. If he didn't he would be fired.

Pretty normal stuff at a certain level with insecure managers. Not exactly the same, but Steve Jobs wrote about how they relocated him into an empty building at Apple to make him quit. I was relocated too in fact.

The red flags I look for now:

- clearly not as smart as their peers in their own or other depts, they're likely struggling and will act irrationally

- very ambitious, but risk averse

- tells people what their title is whether they asked or not

- been at the company their whole career and just went along with the flow

There's likely some others, but I'm careful around those folks, they're just trouble.

This is just how many managers are, the best approach is to just recognize them and avoid them as best you can.

Yep, couldn't agree more despite the down votes on my previous post. The picture that we like to paint about how companies work is far from the reality, you have play by the real unwritten rules.

This kind of retribution is pretty normal from the companies I've worked it, it's clumsy that it ended up in writing here and a bit more vicious than usual with a child involved. Normally it's done offline in private conversations or simply as something that's understood between like minded managers with passing comments.

One manager I had was pretty candid about it, he said he couldn't find another job and was looking to retire so he was going to give me a bad performance review despite actually being the top performer so he wouldn't be affected. He was otherwise very apologetic that his hand was forced.

I think SNL had a good point, Amazon isn't the worst company in NY, the Trump Organization is also there remember.

That was my thought too, I wonder how cubesats will also affect the asteroid belt we're building around earth.

Still no word on when they'll crack down on USPS junk mail too, I miss important letter because my mailbox is piled up with spam. And people to have to buy bigger PO Boxes just to support their racket.

I have and it's fine, I think the people that run into problems are just unable to manage their own minds. What's mind blowing however is that people then think everyone must be the same way, and it's simply not true.

I think they do train people, it's just not formal. And the other issue is the companies have no clue what their doing most of the time anyway, so you just end up with IT people on the market will all sorts of nonsense opinions.