phabora

Is the US serious about extra-planetary colonization?

I would rather risk a few local meltdowns than a global heatup.

To be fair C++ seems like a very non-boring technology. In the “may you lead an interesting life” sense.

Employees are hired guns. Employees want a tolerable job and a good salary while the executives and owners want to maximize profits.

If programmers can act with “complete entitlement” sometimes it’s only because they are some of the few workers who can demand something from their jobs, even without a union backing them. Most workers do not have that privilege/leverage.

I don’t understand what kind of sympathy this is supposed to express. Presumably the “kid” was really desperate and didn’t know what else to do. Even if someone from successful picket lane might know better.

Sometimes it’s better to say nothing.

Brooks’ book seems like it is percieved as a software engineering classic but it’s mostly about the management side of things.

Companies are very hierarchical so of course it makes sense for managers that most things should ideally come from one mind or a few agreeing minds. Then the average developer just have to do the grunt work.

So why is the book popular among developers? Because there is an elite cadre of developers in Brooks model which do have autonomy. I guess that cadre might also be known by other names.

[1] And the big man-month lesson of the book should be much more obvious now than it might have been back then: as you add more cooks you also have to take into account the communication overhead among all the new nodes.

Blue collar is not a synonym for subordinate.

Really good presentation. Even in this form. These are the best arguments for choosing Boring Tech that I’ve seen yet.

Almost gave me a sinking feeling:

> If you behave that way you miss out on the part of the curve that we call “mastery.” That’s a state to the right on this curve, where there are still problems. Everything still sucks but it feels manageable.

> The grim paradox of this law of software is that you should probably be using the tool that you hate the most. You hate it because you know the most about it.

I read it as a strong statement that the author immediately cowered away from.

Let n be the number of comments about syntax in this thread and let total be the number of comments: n / total.

Ma, the passion police is at the door again.

CRUD.