I’ve not had mentorship or real guidance offered in my career. I would say I’ve made connections, but my experience was very much just “you’re in charge of this team now because someone left. Why are you sucking at being a lead? Geez, we even sent you on a single day management course! I don’t get it!”. And the same for being a manager. People are very complimentary about me when I’m just doing programming because I don’t need any help, but as soon as I get into a situation I’m not very good at, it’s criticism all the way. I would bet this is pretty normal since many managers don’t seem happy being managers, and that only a minority get significant career development value from managers/leads.
I’ve seen emojis completely banned on some codes of conduct because of potential offence. The OK hand symbol, the basic smiley face, or using the white skin tone on Slack could all be seen as hostile by some groups of people. Yeah it’s a bit crazy but this is one of the necessities of inviting lots of diverse groups of different ages and backgrounds to work together - there’s less of a base of shared communication and more risk of angering others, so communication must become more formal and defensive (at least until people establish good will with each other).
Agreed, something is odd about this. A few people have sent me code that ChatGPT has written for them. They don’t have the capability to determine if the code is good so they ask me. If the result is even something that will compile or address the asked problem at all, it’s barely competent nonsense that only a beginner programmer would write. For example asking it for code that will generate recipes, and you get back code for a random selection from an array with “Italian, Chinese, pizza”. It never asks clarifying questions either, it’s perfectly happy with a “garbage in garbage out” approach. So if ChatGPT is passing the interview, the interview questions are not selecting for what I would consider a good developer.
How many adults would eat happily if you took their phones and TV away? I reckon most of them would get just as perturbed and restless as the kids. I think it’s fairly normal really and we only find it odd because it’s an ipad now… I always had a book at the dinner table as a kid, there’s the stereotype of dad reading the paper at the breakfast table, many families eat dinner with the TV on, restaurants give kids activity menus, etc.
They say that “public” means what “private” used to mean, “added to profile” means what “public” used to mean, and “private” now means that people can’t see the playlist at all even if they have a link to it. But it’s completely unclear which setting controls whether someone can search for the playlist by name and find it. I found out about this public/private change because I somehow got a subscriber to a playlist I’d thought was completely private, so I’m sure the previously private playlists actually did become more public without my permission…
I think the most amazing mistake Spotify made was that recently all private playlists suddenly became public, because they changed the meaning of private and public to introduce some weird third level of privacy. I now have no idea what the privacy settings do.
Second most amazing was when they made the scrollbar literally two pixels wide and therefore unusable.
It’s not even that these are huge errors but it just makes you wonder who drove those change and why? What on Earth are their teams up to when they’re prioritising those kinds of changes?
Same happens to me with the mute button. It also seems hard on newer phones to find a position where the speaker is clear - shift it by a millimetre and now you can’t hear anything. The phone is so big that holding it completely still for a long call is uncomfortable. People ask why everyone holds the phone out and uses the loudspeaker now, well…
Yes, we could flip this around and say that men are more likely to bash their head against a wall. Women say “hmm, clearly I’m not getting anywhere with this, I’ll go try something else.” Which is better? Both strategies probably work out fine, but you’ll end up with fewer women in jobs which involve a lot of head-wall-bashing and a lot of evaluations without much support/guidance/encouragement (and surely programming is one of those jobs).
> I am deeply hurt and disappointed with way corporate works. I feel cheated.
I feel this every day and I’ve been working for over a decade. Work has so little to do with getting things done and being rewarded.
Ask your manager who to talk to about getting a pay rise. Hopefully it won’t be your direct manager because they might get paid less than what you’re asking for. Come prepared with a list of responsibilities that are above your current pay grade. Don’t bring up fairness. Ask for a rise a few k above what you think you can actually get. Ask your coworkers their salary if you’re brave. Be aware that management will probably fob you off and tell you the pay rise is impossible and you don’t deserve it, you’ll come away feeling devalued and stupid, but they’ll probably grant it anyway. Don’t expect regular pay reviews to come to you (my managers have looked flabbergasted when I said it should be the main point of the appraisal/review process), make sure you’re bringing up pay regularly yourself.
e: also, once you get the raise, slack off a bit. It’s not like they can reduce your pay.
And in any loud, crowded room (say at a conference, or a pub/bar after work), women and quieter men will struggle to be heard at all. Men with loud deep voices will dominate the conversation automatically. This probably has more impact on professional development than people think.
Please use your powers to support and amplify others if you can. I have the opposite experience where I’ve dropped out of multiple lead roles because getting anyone to listen to me or acknowledge my decisions required a huge battle every single time. (Then I leave and they hire a consultant who looks like you to tell them the same things…!)
I’m hoping we get some kind of hilariously obvious astroturfed Twitter campaign telling people that opting in to ads is woke left-wing praxis to help content creators. At least I can get some entertainment value out of that.
Launching broken isn’t an unexpected thing for this type of game. Everyone is used to falling-apart-at-the-seams Bethesda games, constant patches, even full-on crashes are now apparently acceptable on a console. I saw some people saying “I bought it, but I’ll wait a few months to play until they’ve patched it,” and they think that’s fine. I totally understand why CDPR made that choice. A console game being broken on release is no longer a disaster.
Makes me feel better in a way. By age 60 it won’t matter much whether I had kids or not. Time spent with them per day equals, like, one TV episode. So I’m happy to see that my partner and my self will continue to be more important by that metric.
Also you might want to be careful with this; my experience is that once you have any kind of mental record on your file, your GP will try to say every physical problem is all in your head. If there’s no compelling reason to get the diagnosis, sometimes it’s better not to have one.
True - though I’m guessing there are a lot more vocal ethicists who will tone it down for money, than there are large AI corps who are actually willing to be honest about AI ethics! Anyway, sounds like it was a bad fit all round for both parties and this was the only possible outcome long-term.
If a megafarm hires you to write papers for the Ethical Milk Production team, any modicum of social awareness will tell you that they don’t actually want you to write a paper about the ethics of animal products.
But there’s also not many gifts I would want that only cost $20. Books, but that’s about it. A nice version of any material item seems to cost at least £30 ($40). What kind of gifts did people get?
The bouncing mouse balls, flash animations, pixel dollz, and spinning flame skulls of the 2000s were mostly copied off other sites. So sure, that’s self-expression, but only in the same sense that decorating your bedroom with posters is self-expression. When it’s just text, EVERYTHING on the site is your own words. It’s all from the author. I think that’s a more ‘pure’ self-expression.
If you like the geocities style more, then you can use neocities.
The point (at least for me) is that it will never lift off. Only a few people will ever use it. Good.
Also, as I think they point out in an FAQ, you know that when you go to a Gemini site it will behave in a certain way. When you go to an http site, you don’t know if it will be HTML 1.0 style or if it won’t even render without masses of js. There’s no boundary between simple sites and tracking-filled garbage. In Gemini you know you’re clicking an http link and you accept the risks before doing so; or you can stay in your safe Gemini zone instead.
That’s a feature, not a problem. The whole point is that every new post gets the same airtime. Of course actual spam/offtopic posting should get moderated away (yes, I know HN seemingly hates moderation and would prefer some algorithm to do it - I disagree), but any form of upvoting/nesting results in “winner takes all”/hivemind behaviour where barely anybody reads past the ‘good’ comments. A forum is like an in-person discussion; upvote-driven places are like an in-person discussion where a couple of people are grandstanding and nobody else gets a word in. That includes HN! There have to be mod posts saying there’s more than one page of comments!
Of course as increasing numbers of passive users joined the internet, upvote-driven sites became more popular. That doesn’t mean they’re better for actually posting on, though.
I still post on a forum and it’s the only place on the internet I feel has any sort of community. Reddit and Facebook groups are just newbies/morons posting the same newbie/moron questions over and over again; or instagram-lite (everything upvoted is a nice photo).
From talking with people, it seems they feel put off by forums and especially long-running threads because they worry anything they have to contribute will already have been posted before, and they don’t know if it’s ok to join an ongoing conversation. They don’t want to annoy people or look silly. In other words, they don’t feel encouraged to post spammy newbie crap, and they’re aware they’re posting to other people instead of to an algorithmic void. Too bad they don’t see that as an advantage instead of a barrier.
e: btw, no matter what tech you use, you will find it very difficult to create a community by encouraging feed-style posting (where you ‘express yourself’ in a wide broadcast to nobody in particular). This drives high-volume, low-quality engagement (which is why fb, twitter, tumblr, instagram etc use it), not high-quality human interaction.
Outside the big US tech jobs, software is already a menial job. Currently for quite a lot of money, but not even in the same order of magnitude as Silicon Valley pay.
And places that do have driveways have often created them by paving over an existing garden, which is two steps back for the environment. In my lifetime I’ve seen proper front gardens all but disappear in my area.