Viewing profile — GrumpyYoungMan

No, they are managers; management and leadership are different things. Being a manager is a set of things that a person is authorized to do on behalf on their employer, "hire, comm…

Having had to estimate peak user traffic patterns, bandwidth usage, etc. for continent-scale services, Fermi estimation questions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem ) ar…

> " I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. " It was truer in the 1980s-1990s, when programming was not…

We're already seeing it if most are incapable of recognizing it. The chip folks aren't doing ridiculously complicated things like https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductor-technology…

There's a very old paper by Cem Kaner about the meaninglessness of "100% coverage" where he included an appendix where he enumerates 101 different possible types of code coverage: …

In what way? RF test equipment is costly and so is building a home electronics lab.

> " ...stuck with hardware out of passion... " At least you don't hate your job, I hope? The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own…

> Fred Brooks "throw one away" philosophy Everybody remembers that soundbite but nobody remembers that he changed his mind about it later and switched to advocating iterative refin…

> " FPGAs reconfigured during program execution to speed up hot paths " The IEEE conference on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines ( https://www.fccm.org/ ) is in its 34th…

Developer testing is checking whether the code does what the developer themself thinks it should. QA testing is checking whether the code does what the customers / users / rest of …

My frequent "senior moments" are what make me senior. ( ba-dum-tish )

Terry Pratchett's Going Postal seems particularly apropos these days as we have Reacher Gilts aplenty in tech news headlines. Obscure and a bit dated but Bruce Betkhe's Head Crash …

The problem with that quote is that all of us reading this are telescope operators, not astronomers. The quantity and quality of our telescope photos is what we are paid for so we …

The things you list illustrate @aplamers point that software "doesn't really kill people". If you asked the average person on the street, they might just barely remember the Boeing…

> " How many centuries did it take for civil engineering, for example, to become the codified, standardized, and respected calling it is now? " But the software industry is not sta…

Software "engineering" doesn't kill people instantly in a flashy way, sure, but it has become more like leaded gasoline, a widespread low-level harm whose effects are increasingly …

"Is the company consistently profitable or not?" and "Are revenue and profits growing over time, stable, or declining?" are very important questions to answer, particularly if stoc…

Casual of research shows that the ACM's Code of Ethics can be traced back to its Guidelines for Professional Conduct in Information Processing dating back to 1966 ( https://www.acm…

TDD is a development methodology, not a testing methodology. The main thing it does is check whether the developer implemented what they thought they should be implementing, which …

Early in my career, the raise and put it entirely towards retirement savings. Later in my career, the free time.

Debuggers are great until you have to work in a context where you can't attach a debugger. Good old printf works in every context. By all means, learn to use a debugger well but do…

The *.home.arpa domain in RFC 8375 has been approved for local use since 2018, which is long enough ago that most hardware and software currently in use should be able to handle it…

The fabs propped up the corpse of Moore's Law by throwing mountains of cash at expanding transistors into the third dimension: finFET, GAA, CFET, etc. That has kept the party going…

The issue with scrum and agile is that it became a managerial and reporting process to force teams to hit a management imposed deadline instead of what it was intended to be: a too…