Viewing profile — mr_crankypants

I can follow your hypothetical right up to the point where the union official commits career suicide by trying to piss off every member single member of the union in a single strok…

How often do labor unions campaign to impose salary caps on their own members? The very idea seems out of character.

A preceding B does not imply that A causes B, it only implies that B doesn't cause A. Which doesn't really reduce the world of possible causal relationships by all that much, since…

Local governments, too. In my neck of the woods, there are departments that have to make do with whole teams of low-skill employees because, while a more skilled person could do th…

I suspect that that fact and our beliefs around it are being reflected in market prices, albeit with some heavy discounting for the uncertainty inherent in there still being so man…

It seems that the endgame we're unwittingly asking for is WALL-E .

I honestly think that both of those are weak reasons. The first is a problem for other generations; on our own time scale we should focus on the problems that affect us on our own …

It might depend. In the case I experienced, sales, marketing and support were already in place and quite successful beforehand, and the acquiring company did an admirable job of te…

> I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do?" I also can't think of a single large so…

There is one thing I really like about story points: Disagreement about them drives a whole lot of useful conversation, and can reveal communication problems and misunderstandings …

Scrum, in particular, is a fascinating beast. Looking at how it was in the early days, you can see that a huge motivation was to try to get the non-development bits of the process …

The problem there is that most "libraries" are actually frameworks. The difference I'm drawing being, libraries just provide a mess of utility functions. Theoretically, even if you…

I don't know what Moore would say. Personally, I've retreated to the back end - used to be full stack, but I'm just sick to death of how overcomplicated front-end work has become. …

The more time I spend dealing with blowback from excess complexity being imported in the form of 3rd-party libraries that offer complicated solutions to simple problems, the more I…

The problem here is that pharmaceutical companies' marketing departments have a deep conflict of interest. They're incentivized to encourage doctors to use the drug that makes thei…

I honestly wouldn't bother for programming, per se. It's great for learning facts, so, if you wanted to, I suppose you could use it for something like memorizing a pile of library …

Wow, that's a lot of flashcard time. According to Anki, I'm averaging 10 minutes a day on my language vocabulary deck. It does happen in a series of short, 1-2 minute bursts when I…

One potentially nice thing about formats like Cap'n Proto is that they don't eagerly parse the message. You can just lazily grab the values you care about, which can be a big perfo…

I find that the human benefits of using something like protobuf outweigh the human benefits of using JSON. The machine benefits are just a cherry on top. Protobuf - or, more specif…

It's perhaps less a limitation of JSON and more a limitation of JavaScript itself[1]. But still, given that easy consumption from JavaScript is the ultimate primordial reason for c…

According to https://www.gamespot.com/articles/this-is-how-much-the-witch... , 240 is just the number of in-house staff. The full count of people who worked on the project came to …

Teams were so much smaller. Ultima IV was about as big-budget as a video game got. Here are the credits for the DOS version: https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/ultima-iv-quest-of-t…

It seems, though, that it's even worse than that for games. Every so often you see an article to the effect of, "Authors of that indie game everyone was talking about this summer e…

And I guess my concern is that doing something like this is probably solving the wrong problem. I've worked with people who write messy, tangled code in giant methods, and my exper…