2,869 karma · joined December 7, 2017
Positive upbringings helped those folks navigate everything in life better from simple chores like laundry, to relationships, to school, to careers... etc.
People are more healthy when they're in an environment that promotes emotional/educational growth vs. when they're forced into a survival mentality. Those who had the opportunity to grow in safety have an easier time socially vs. those who had to navigate turbulent childhoods.
Much of it is just trust
After awhile I didn't want to be a smoker anymore and found a self help book - "Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking." Friends of mine suggested it, and I found a PDF and read it during a dead afternoon at work.
Instead of focusing on the "hard" trope of quitting smoking it presented it as easy - hence the title. It framed the habit for exactly what it was, a drug addiction, but it never talked harshly to you about how you became a nicotine addict or the quitting process. It focused on telling you exactly what to expect if you decide to quit, and then gave you a positive framework to help overcome the effects of quitting. The overall message was always "think of how much you're going to gain by quitting... health, money, etc."
It worked, I am no longer a nicotine addict. I don't think I would have had the capability to quit without some mental reframing which that book 100% helped me accomplish.
> That's were the focus should be, not on the people who always walked the happy path and just "worked hard". Overcoming hopeless situations, stigma, bias, ego. That's actually hard.
Agree.
There's always the "work hard" narrative and I find it's often coupled with a discrediting attitude like OP's comment. The effect of that attitude demotivates more than it helps. As cheesy as it was I found the tools to fix my nicotine addiction in a self-help book ha
As I grow older, I see a huge divide between those who have/had parental support vs those who don't/didn't. It doesn't even take financially or professionally successful parents. Many of my peers had middle-class parents working normal jobs who just loved unconditionally + put effort forward... the difference between them and those who had less than ideal upbringings is typically vast.
Having loving parents who teach, model, and promote healthy discipline habits is paramount for a kid's success. Unfortunately many children don't win that lottery.
Interviewing is a high stress situation where the person performing the interview ultimately has power. What you're discussing here is how well I can socially fit in - regardless of pressures/stress on my side of the table etc.
It's 100% performative - if I am an interviewee I'm showing you the professional version of myself which is positive attitude and politeness. I'm upholding a social contract.
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> Do they pass the "have a beer together" test?
I'm not here to have beers with you - I'm here to work. And, I think this is pervasive in regards to hiring. This can be incredibly discriminatory and I would appreciate you interview me on the value I can add with my labor vs. "can I have a beer with this guy?" That's weird to me, and as someone who interviews I work hard to not think this way... "Who I like" isn't necessarily who is going to perform in the role - I have to keep my personal preferences out of my professional decisions in my world... and I think that's fair.
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Idk - interviewing is not fun for most people. I defend op's "we're not peers, we're not having fun" perspective both as an interviewer, and interviewee. I think it's a reasonable stance to take as long as they're outwardly presenting as professional and polite as that's what actually matters... not "beers"
Due to the abstract nature and infrequent experience of healthcare solutions in the US, I believe people need to have these abstractions drawn to illustrate the absurdity of it all.
I have had such a positive and lovely experience with it. It's the reactivity I've always wanted; ie plays nicely with VanillaJS without imposing a complex build process.
It's not natively supported - runs on Google Cloud Run instead.
It is one of my arguments against devs trying to bring Dart into solutions. Historically, I have had colleagues push to use Dart for backend/cloud/automation work which I personally disagree with.
If you're looking for cross-platform on the desktop it really hasn't been a popular option vs. Electron/Qt.
All anecdotal:
I've only met one person who was excited to work with Dart, huge Google fanatic/fanboy. Otherwise it's sorta seen as a unique language choice that makes other devs go, "oh..."
The Java/ECMA ergonomics are weird, it's hard to find devs who have experience with the lang, and due to the language popularity there's a lot less community/3rd party deps available.
I really tried hard to give it a fair shake back in the day but I just ended up sticking with Node (and now +Deno), Typescript, or Go if I need performance/types. There are way better ecosystems around these and I find the tooling/ergonomics much less awkward. Also, if/when I need to hire devs onto my teams I will have a much easier time.
Also, I can actually write a serverless function in these tools (GCP Functions, AWS Lambda) - as far as I know there's nothing like this available for Dart.
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EDIT: It's worth mentioning I've only had Dart jammed down my throat on the backend (API's, data transforms, jobservers, etc). It may be a fine tool in regards with Flutter, but it felt like a really awkward tool for where it's come up in my career.
People will get bit flustered but just kill 'em with kindness repeating the three main things in the quotes:
* Not feeling it
* Nothing personal
* It would be rude to waste your time
They'll eventually get it as you pick your stuff up and leave. If it's an interview I will thank the person for their time/the opportunity with a handshake on my way out the door.
I feel weird defending myself but... yeah. This is actually my experience.
I get that teams at FAANGs/startups can typically move faster but for your run-of-the-mill corporate America development teams people do not move that fast.
Personally, I have only moved that fast at startups which is why I typically find myself at them.
Again, this is anecdotal to my personal experience.
> but you also don't want a PHP/MySQL monolith if you're building something that works like, say, Twitter
This is a lot of whiplash in regards to discussing size.
I just want to say...
100K DAU with a PHP/MySQL monolith is 100% possible - I'm certain a lot of people here have achieved this without much problem. Things like Nginx, PHP-FPM, reverse-proxy-caching, load balancing to stateless application servers, read replica, offloading static assets to CDN, blah blah... I digress but you can 100% hit 100K DAU with a traditional PHP/MySQL monolith.
Right, and our empirical observations over these topics are different.
I just read your profile and frankly the projects/industries that we are involved in are very different, only confirmed by throwing "C++" out there - the closest I get to that is some hobbyist C development.
I apologize for agreeing with parent comment's generalization at 100k LOC being a "mega-monolith", along with what I added with team sizes/decades for timelines. Empirically and anecdotally this is what I personally have observed, specifically in regulated fields ie: banking, payments, and education. This is a perfect example as-to what happens when I don't include the word "anecdotal" in my HN comments...
Developers from different industry niches have very different ideals in regards to what a "monolith" is, or what a "two-pizza" team is capable of over time. I find your "wait what?" comment to be a bit dismissive, only to end your comment directly telling me what I am describing which clearly implies I don't know what I'm talking about.
We likely just have different experiences with project complexities, sizes, teams, etc. Sorry if this comes off as aggressive.
There's a magical period between Friday at 3pm to late night Sunday where no distractions means I can actually coherently focus for hours at a time. Also it's typically enough time to get to a MVP if I need to prove a point. Just sucks that this magical productivity time also happens to be "the weekend" =(
You don't get to that LOC count without huge teams and decades of time. Any project of that timeline/complexity/size should constantly be having functionality split off so that organizational units can be better groked/understood. To put it a different way, when projects hit this sorta size I have experienced them naturally shedding off functionality that makes sense to be external in a service-based development strategy.
These are the situations where it 100% makes sense for microservice architecture as you've hit the social/technical complexities where breaking things into organizational units makes sense.
And, I get it. Selfishly I would love to come onto a project and only have to worry about net-new development. It is hard to learn, and then positively contribute within another engineered system... of any complexity. When it's "my code" I tend to be much more productive, and it's easier to find my way through the forest.
Anymore, everyone is on a power-grab for "my tools" and "my way" in regards to everything they're working on with near-zero attempt to understand the base needs of the business/feature. Microservices fill this need well as devs can work with their preferred toolset and just setup I/O boundaries for everyone else to use their service. Also, this is good for resume-driven development as you can often claim creation/ownership over some "piece" which looks way better on paper vs. "contributed to a big 'ol project."
I'm not against microservices, I'm just being honest with how I've seen them socially play out - all of this is anecdotal to my experiences.
Most orgs do not have these things - especially not at the level of the Linux team. Also the motives of OSS are completely different than that of your typical business - I personally think this keeps OSS team coherent/productive for far longer than your typical corp can.
But even fighting for RDMS in 2022 is getting daunting as so many people will immediately start pushing for document DB's, GraphQL, etc. Seriously - I feel like SWE's have no idea the powerhouse a modest MySQL/Postgres instance can crank out while perfectly maintaining their data (ACID, replication, etc).
Everyone wants to use tools that were designed for FAANG scale regardless of org size. Anecdotally I've fought this hard because it's almost always at incredible detriment to the business's needs.
I find that modern devs balk at "single RDMS database + stateless middle tier" but only for selfish reasons like resume-driven development. This pattern is really burning me out more than anything else of my career.
Again, all this is personal anecdotes.
Overall I agree with your gate-keeping comment - that's how people interview/hire. I disagree that it "has no place" - if I'm hiring a mid-to-senior engineer that's web-capable I am 100% gate-keeping to make sure they have an intimate understanding of HTTP + are capable/comfortable reading RFCs.
That monitor used in their marketing photo is the EV2730Q and it's an absolute beast if you're looking for a balance between horizontal/vertical aspect ratios. Obviously not fantastic for gaming (minus Factorio), but for programming + shell work it's outstanding.
Cost.
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The joke of a school I went to now costs upward of $38k/yr base (not sure what room/food on top of that is). Hell state schools are upwards of $20k a year even with financial aid...
Maybe higher education shouldn't be this expensive across the board so people wouldn't be saddled with crippling high-risk debt while they're arguably still children.
I can tell you whatever the %#%$ I got was NOT worth anywhere near that in tuition... gen-eds were effectively highschool 2.0, and I was learning more in-industry than I was in the classroom at the time for my main area of study.
To think people are getting charged $38k+/yr for that just pisses me off. Even if it was an objectively good education + program - it's still too expensive.
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Also one more thing I want to address in your response: what about economically disenfranchised peoples? If we implement the ideals you lay out I can easily see that being a huge barrier. I personally believe these folks should have access to higher education too - which is why I strongly support things like financial aid, grants, scholarships, etc.
If we make it into a more traditional loan I think it would potentially discriminate against students who come from less-than-ideal backgrounds.
> I'm curious to know how these loans became such a political issue. It's unusual to take out a loan and then complain about having to repay it.
Saddling _teenagers_ with such debt is problematic in many ways. For many of my peers they were not ready/cut out for college but still had the debt + schooling jammed down their throats because "it's what you're suppose to do."
Then, there's the cost to quality situation... I got nailed with this one - accredited private college with little oversight with a _horrible_ program for my area of study. We're talking two professors for the entire subject, and most of the courses they had advertised in their catalog hadn't been offered in over _seven_ years. Lots of people's time at school was just jumping through hoops for an "education" with very little value to their eventual career.
Cost has gone through the roof - administrative costs for colleges have skyrocketed. I've worked in marketing for schools - they're businesses before they're educational facilities. They're profit seeking through tuition, grants, donations, etc. Don't even get me started on sports...
> We don't typically reward people for digging themselves into a hole by bailing them out.
They were put through an incredibly profit-seeking system that operates in it's own self interest to get as much tuition as possible. Just like the healthcare industry, we've let administrative costs and middlemen drive the price of an education up while whittling the quality of it down.
100% they were not the only ones digging the hole that they find themselves in. Additionally, I have a hard time nailing 17-18 year olds to the cross for poor decisions in regards to their "digging" activities.
> Unless they're large corporations. We bail them out in certain cases. But I don't think that's a popular idea either.
And, just saying - yes this happens!! We consistently cut breaks to the interests of capital (large corporations, the rich w/taxes). Regardless of how any of us feel about it, this will continue to happen. So if our corporate benefactors are getting help, why can't a citizen with/seeking an education get some help too?
Anecdotal, but IMO lots... just depends on the industry.
It's a good situation for someone to come along and buy up some or all of your risk - especially for stuff like ticket sales. Many corporations like Ticketmaster design around this, and bake this part of the supply chain into their pricing/experience.
I mean there's whole services like 2captcha that give you a 24/7 on-demand API for this, and for some of their offerings/solvers there are specifically real human robots on the other end doing the CAPTCHA.
2captcha works very very well to the point that CAPTCHA is a very much solved problem especially for the popular services like Google's reCAPTCHA.
It would also make every decision that the company makes from here going forward one of fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. For a project rooted in affordable open-source hardware/software that's a major conflict of interest.
I get that "Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd" is not the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but it is wholly owned by the foundation as a subsidiary. IMO, it'd be of major concern if any RPI business entities went public.
In corporate environments it's super common to experience functional success in parallel to social failure, especially like your anecdote. Most corps/management love terms like "intrapreneur" but have zero actual interest in formalizing + celebrating internal innovations/solutions.
Agree. This is all anecdotal:
IMO - the people who get promoted to management in technical roles often don't have the people skills to perform the job well. I have had leadership thrust upon me multiple times in my career and it's very difficult. You're constantly balancing autonomy vs. active management for each person, in each role, for each unique situation. You're sussing out people's strengths and weaknesses working to help highly competent/technical people progress in their career. You're actively working to keep people on the same page, and sometimes you're working against your own contentious team members.
I rail hard against non-technical management managing a technical role - it just doesn't work. So, typically, technical people get thrown into management roles and I think we often suck at it. We don't take the time to work on ourselves to have the people skills required to be a positive leader of people. Then we compensate like any other crappy manager: we micromanage (crack the whip), we keep people in the dark ("mushroom management"), we DARVO, we have angry emotional outbursts, we pick favorites, etc.
What we see in software (and other technical roles) is that most people picked for management never put the work in to be an effective leader of people. And, I think the very nature of our work precludes many of us from developing the social skills it takes.