softwarebeware

Meanwhile ... the SEC and DOJ are in a backroom meeting with Microsoft with their hands out for more bribes. :)

Looks like it was "..the whistleblower platform Lioness.." that released it today. Interesting that you point out it would have been more effective in the news cycle if it had landed another day.

Perhaps this is a case of Hanlon's Razor and the whistleblowers need to get more savvy.

Kudos to Yasser Elabd! This man sounds awesome.

This part particularly stood out to me:

> When he refused a performance improvement plan, he lost the job and left Microsoft for good in August 2018.

I didn't know you could refuse a PIP. TIL

Yeah, so in hindsight I feel that there's a better way to resolve this than the two options of "don't tell anyone" or "tell everyone."

The way I would do it, is tell people that we need to move their team to {{other country}} and therefore we would like to offer them either a severance package to find a new job _or_ work out a plan for them to transition to some other team that is in their location.

> "where does the new day start?"

I honestly am trying to understand the point being made. Isn't when the day starts obvious in either case? We know when the new _day_ starts because the date rolls over at that time. No one thinks the day starts at 12:00 in the 24-hour system, or 12:00pm / noon in the 12-hour system?

> ... there's a single point where the new day starts ...

Is this what you're saying: that in the 24 hour system, there's one point in time where the clock resets from a high number to zero, and that's also when the day starts. Therefore, it is "not confusing."

I felt rather that the problem the OP stated was simply "I am used to the 24 hour system and I was communicating with someone who was used to the 12 hour system. They naturally gave me a time of 12:00am but I didn't notice that am part and assumed they meant the same "12" that I understand as "12" in my system. So I missed an exam."

Ah! You mean like adopting service buses for everything and watching them lose messages consistely. :)

In my experience, it trips me up no more than Python or Fabric do. I have used Fabric a lot too. At another job, we built all of our pipeline tooling in it.

I somehow keep returning to Bash, though. I enjoy it.

I think this article is supposed to commend Python as a better choice than Bash? I think the author forgot to make a convincing argument for that, though.

> The point of bash-bashing is to reduce use of the shell.

That's a tautology. I get it, we're supposed to reduce the use of bash ... but why?

> Without much real work, it’s easy to replace shell scripts with Python code.

But you're writing the same thing again? There needs to be more reason than this.

> The revised code is easier to read and maintain, runs a little faster, and can have a proper unit test suite.

Three claims. Any data to support it?

Some of the examples of "bash is bad" are also not convincing to me. Here's an example:

> An example of a shell obscurity is the way the current working directory is set. The cd command is clear enough, but in the presence of sub-shells using (), can make it difficult to discern a stack of nested shell invocations and how the working directory changes when the sub-shells exit.

So...why do you have "a stack of nested shell invocations" that all need to be working directory aware? And how would this be any better in Python? (It could be better in either Python or Bash but either one still requires the developer to avoid simple mistakes.)

I don't know. I don't get it. I feel like the author had the unfortunate experience of knowing more Python than Bash and inheriting someone else's (who also didn't have much Bash experience) crappy Bash code.

I think you're probably asking about mistakes like deleting a database? But more often companies, orgs, or teams dying has to do with engineering management in my experience. I'll name a few I have experienced and you all can decide whether or not these count as "engineering mistakes?"

- Saying nothing about it, but "secretly" moving the team to another country by changing the manager and director, and not hiring anymore in this country, even when team members quit. It took awhile but I figured out that the plan was to let natural attrition take over and for every person who quits from here, hire their replacement there.

- Different company: after being acquired, the acquiring company communicated for eight months that no changes in staffing would take place, and that once the acquisition closes, everyone will be put on exciting new projects and a new bright future will emerge. Then, after the acquisition closed, laying off a third of the company immediately. Another third chose the exit soon after. Eventually, the company died.

- Third company: after being acquired by a large competitor, the director of technology for this third company promised them a new product for four years. I'm led to understand by those closer to the situation than myself that this director then proceeded to coast on vaporware demos for those four years, claiming the need to "pivot" or "reboot" the product as necessary, and promising more and more pie-in-the-sky fantasies until finally the gig was up and he was fired. That subsidiary also officially closed its doors eventually.

Just a few from my own experience!

The 24 hour system: 23 -> 0 -> 1

How is that different than 11 -> 12 > 1 ?

Yes I get it that in normal integers, 1 is not after 12, but neither is 0 after 23.

It has more to it than just being a cultural artifact. I think it’s fascinating that ancient cultures preferred a duodecimal system: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock

What’s the difference? In both the 12 and 24 hour system the clock rolls over at the end of the period, and the period starts.

Yes this is correct. It can be 12:28am, 12:43am, 12:55am, etc. And it rolls over from 11:59am to 12:00pm.

I think most Americans would be fine with it. Hospitals, the military, and most public services like fire fighters use it already.

This is actually a great post about UX. Most sites like eBay or Expedia have location-specific versions that change dates and times among other things to the user’s format. It’s totally legit to expect that in 2022.

That said, UTC is universal also.

No way! Cities afford far more tangible and intangible benefits than rural or even suburban areas. And you're much more likely to find communities around your particular interests or persuasions than in a backwater. There's a reason why cities developed the world-changing communities they have, whether that's tech, film, music, finance, or whatever.

I'm out almost immediately. The first comment is more text than the code that it produces.

It depends ...

Related: the Stack Overflow community was initially resistant to having career-related questions on the site:

"It was always our hope that concrete, substantive programming career questions could be asked on Stack Overflow, and some early ad-hoc polling indicated that career questions might be accepted by the community, but if you look at later poll results, it's clear that the career questions came out juuuust under the cutoff point as determined by the Stack Overflow community"

From Jeff Atwood, circa 2013 at https://blog.codinghorror.com/so-you-dont-want-to-be-a-progr...

Do you know what kind of metal it is? Silver can tarnish and it can be mistaken for rust. But tarnish can be cleaned. There are over-the-counter products like Tarn-X that will work, and some household methods you can try first using things like baking soda.

Every year there's some new survey saying something different is the most important factor to happiness at work. I thought the Google research which determined that psychological safety was the most important factor was really interesting because it didn't rely on multiple-choice surveys.

I'd almost rather just read like ten mini-essays from ten randomly chosen developers who try to explain what makes them happy at work in their own words. I mean, I have conversations like that with people at work and I've never heard anyone say "salary" is the most important. Usually it's feeling proud at having solved a hard problem, or being proud of having shipped a product used by real customers. And I don't see either of these things on this survey.

I mean that’s pretty concerning for Seattle, not because people will leave but because it means that some percentage of the people who are coming to Seattle won’t care about the city since they’re just in town for four years to make half a million from some tech job and then leave for their cheap Midwest hometown again. It means they won’t really vote for or invest in Seattle’s civic health but will prioritize short term goals only.

I would rather just scorch the business on social media then take my business to a competitor. Even talking to a human, you will find poor customer experience that amounts to the same outcome. But survival of the fittest will eventually kill off such companies

Yes. SaaS has betrayed us all. We’ve learned a lesson. Our data, our computer.

Is this part of some new anti-container sentiment?

> This site is specifically targeted to software engineers

I thought it was for VCs and founders too. And PMs.

That’s great haha.

I think the hyper-focus on customer desires is a misstep. The best and most widely-adopted software in history has been software designed by a couple of visionaries (or at most a small team) who ignored what users _said_ they wanted and gave them what they needed instead.

Is it perhaps a straw man argument? I've only heard people talk about high energy consumption in specific contexts like _bitcoin mining_.

I'm glad the tech community is starting to look at their environmental impact though.

While they're at it, can they please consider how many wasted resources they use on things like inefficient test automation which is usually only inefficient because they were lazy.

Try instead: https://www.openstreetmap.org/