prerok

At startups? Sure. Several stints at non-startups? Well, how much of that time was spent learning the domain? Is that knowledge transferrable (probably not because of non-competition clause)? Why were you not happy at the previous employer?

I am not saying any of these don't have valid answers. What I am saying is that we would prefer juniors that are commited and do the hard work when the work gets hard. And, at least where I work now, this gets recognized, and they become seniors in time.

Hmm, interesting point, I did not know that. But, aside from that, while they cannot tell you that the candidate would not be ok, I did get hints on what to look out for.

I mean, you always have to take the previous employers' statements with a grain of salt, but if they say they really employed for just that project, it's also good info.

Depends, but definitely not pointless. Though, I do have the benefit of working in a small country, so chances are that I will know of the company and perchance know folks that work there. Even if not, employers will still see fit to help each other, at least if they are not direct competitors.

Depends on the country, I guess. In Europe, it would definitely not be the norm and I would definitely call previous employers if it was several 2 year stints.

... and if you get it to work please tell us the prompt you used.

Indeed it is. I always wanted to chat with my clippy. Finally, after 20-25 years I now have the opportunity to do so /s

Indeed. Don't worry, ads will be back, just give it some time /s

Yeah, your work was so great that we are gonna fire just 3999 of you.

I did not see your talk but this summary somehow seems wrong.

I would say there are two types of software debt. Dead code/useless features not providing value, which is in my experience easy to excise and rarely really causes issues, and the badly written code, which is providing value.

The term software debt is usually used in the second case because you have to pay it for delivering new value to the product. The debt was introduced in the past when another value was being added and it was added in a way that increased coupling, reduced cohesion, etc. Let's just say that it was implemented badly, for many interpretations of badly.

Now, if I want to add this new value then that previous bad implementation is causing issues, because of unsolicited side effects, of difficult to reason about logic, etc. So, now, I have to pay the debt, by refactoring, or by changing the logic in tens of places (which further increases the debt).

Tech debt was never really about functionality that does not need to be there and is not providing value, because you seldom pay it, or it's relatively cheap to pay it. The problem is when you have to rework the old feature, still providing value and should continue to do so in the same manner, just to deliver this new value. That's the expensive tech debt.

I think they meant all the security holes that have been popping up and that there is no interest from Microsoft to fix them.

I think you are both right and it really depends on the leap that has to be done during the time constraints of the exam and how much practise was included in the curriculum.

Off-topic, I know, but I always disliked the time pressure of exams. All the bad scores I got were down to not feeling quite right at the time of the exam: maybe I didn't sleep well, the food I ate did not quite sit with me, had a fever, etc. None of these things actually impair too badly but if the time is short, there is an impact.

I suppose it's similar to sports where you have to, at least somewhat, adapt on the go. Many teams botch a game here and there. But... your final exam? Botch it and you're screwed. It just does not feel right.

If it's early enough, they would have to. And in case it's a false positive, they would be liable.

All this to say, I actually find the thing hillarious, though. If there's an actual apocalypse a plane will not save you.

On another post I've already argued that Romans already had a proverb "Scribere bis legere." Translated, this means "writing is reading twice".

In practice, what this means is that you have to know how to reproduce the knowledge you've read, in your words. Only then can you be sure you've mastered what you've read. It's the reason for homework and all other stuff we have to do. Reading something five or more times simply does not suffice for our brains.

I think there was another comment among these that said it best: "graphics designers". The main conflict seems to arise between usability (UX) and the "view". It may look pretty but if it's unusable it's a showstopper.

Sorry for regurgitating what someone else posted but it really resonated with my experience.

Presumably now we also have exploits written by AI, so I guess security has to be one-upped now?

Not that I expect companies to be more proactive now. I have been disillusioned of that long ago. With AI they could be at least a little bit more proactive, which I guess is a great selling point of AI to corporate.

Everybody knew somebody should do it, but nobody did it.

Classic.

There's an old Latin proverb "Scribere bis legere", which translates to "writing is reading twice".

In practice, what this means is that you can read some subject many times, but you would still struggle to reproduce the content by yourself. That is why, when learning, it is not sufficient to just read the material several times.

I once saw a pop-up in a game saying something along the lines of: wow, it's 10 years later and this game is still being played! Made me laugh out loud, nice little easter egg.

Sadly, I don't recall which game it was. Maybe SpaceChem?

Sorry? I don't get it. Why are you mentioning NYC? Was it a joke?

Well, it won't be your problem /j

Sorry, what?

Food is much more expensive, like 30% here in Europe, much faster growth than inflation. And before you state that food is accounted for in inflation: economists are doing some dirty tricks here by finding subpar replacements.

Cars are also much more expensive for the same quality, far surpassing inflation.

I will concede TVs and electronic gadgets, though.

Well, speaking from what I hear and see, employers want you to start using it so that you can be more productive. They've been sold this tool and want you to learn it so that your output will grow.

That's not an unfair take, I think. Again, just IME, they expect too much because the tool is oversold: it does not deliver that well. And we always hear, this new model is so much better, it's tiring.

I think we should all learn to use LLMs but we should still carefully review what they did. And that is what the employers don't quite get: the review still takes a lot of time. So, gains are not 10x but more like... 10%? Maybe 50 for boiler plate. Still gains are there, I guess.

I've seen that too, though I have to say that none of those were as waterfally as the actual waterfall process we used to follow. Back then it was quite literally 0 lines of code until spec (100s of pages) is complete.

TFA first claims that agile invented none of the things it encompasses, seems not to challenge those claims, but then just jumps to agile is dead because LLMs can code based on spec.

This is just a confusing and confused article.

Agile just finally embraced that specs are incomplete and can even be wrong because the writer of the spec does not yet really know or understand what they want. So they need working software to show the spec in action and then we can iterate on the results.

We are still doing that and will be doing it in the foreseeable future. Agile is very much alive and here to stay.

Agile never claimed that.

Agile is about working code instead of hundreds of pages of spec nobody reads.

Ok, so what do you think these wars are about?

Emm, what? You are aware of all the wars going on right now?

...and they are going to use LLMs to generate their reviews ;)

There are already more games being released daily than is possible to curate and select what you want to play.

Though I agree with you that what you describe will likely happen, I think that is not the future I will enjoy.

Geez, this brings back memories.

At one time at our university we had table desktop dancers installed everywhere. Was kind of funny when it turned up just as a student wanted to defend their work in a lab.