231–240 of 322 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Congrats on it taking just a few months. Some of us spend years in the "lifestyle" hole before waking up and getting a grip on finances.
I eat at restaurants everyday. I know I shouldn’t but it’s hard to change lifestyle...
If you're a dev, don't work for a company where software development is viewed as a cost center--you want your work to be viewed as something that brings in revenue. (Learned the hard way when I worked at a large bank.)
I think that these days, the best large banks do not view software development as a cost center anymore. I'm hearing more and more from people in banking that banks these days are basically IT companies with added security constraints.
Mandatory developments, impositions of central banks, national vat's, auditings and bussiness as usual is seen as a cost. You must do this developments. These are fixed costs and banks tend to minimize them.
New products that inovate/diferentiate one bank from another are seen as strategic and costs are seen diferently. What banks optimize in the fixed costs, banks spend in the proof of concepts.
The danger of overly ambitious goals is their brittleness, and when they break, they break all the way. Much like "the best camera is the one you have", the best diet is the one you keep, and the best course is the one you'll attend. It's better to set yourself up for modest success than spectacular failure. ------- Community matters. Relationships with other people matter. When I thought strong work would scratch my…
I think the calcified disinterest in some of us comes from being raised in (and eventually leaving) a Western religious and conservative environment.
My personal hunch is that it mirrors an experience my friends have described about sushi and coffee, neither of which I enjoy. Apparently, bad versions of those things are unpalatable if you don't know what would make them good. If you start there, you wonder "why the hell does anyone consume this". But once you've had the very good versions, you "get it" and know what you should be experiencing when you go back to the lesser versions, and more easily "forgive" their imperfect representations of a thing you enjoy.
I've definitely had that experience with religion. I grew up in a family that was ambivalent to such things, failing to understand why anyone would care at all. Then as an adolescent I saw all the horror, at home and abroad, wrought by religion, and rejected it as superstitious mumbo-jumbo at best, and a pretense for violence, bigotry, and a return to the stone-age at worst. When I finally managed to encounter a packaging that let me see what might be good about it, I was grateful to finally understand what the fuss was about, even if I'm not all the way bought in.
I now have approximately the view that Sam Harris[1] does:
"I still considered the world’s religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble."
[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery...
Never write something in e-mail that you wouldn't be happy seeing forwarded to the person you're talking about. Always keep records of what you've said and agreed, people will have a different recollection of events down the line, and a written record is very handy at that point.
I have a good one: Give negative feedback in private email, then it gets forwarded to multiple layers of management behind your back, then a single quote from this email out of context is cut-n-pasted into your perf review few months later by management. (Happened in big advertising company that also runs search engine).
How to successfully roll out a product/site. Released "Version 2" which was an entire newly built system that we worked on for an entire year (we also thought we were "agile" btw). This completely crashed and around 10K users were unable to use the product for almost 2 weeks. We did plenty of things right but we also failed. Biggest Lessons learned: 1. Release features and changes in manageable incremental chunks 2.…
Sadly, after more than 20 years building software, _NEVER_ trust a business person. My faith in humanity had to have me bitten by this the hard way more than once.
Yeah, I'm surprised that they trust each other at all. What keeps them from bashing each other with sticks? When I see business people smile at each other and shaking hands, I cannot make sense of this in my mind. What's the point of smiling when both people couldn't care less if the other person dropped dead on the spot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Our code is self-documenting. If you need documentation then the code isn't written well enough" -Assholes who don't know what it is like to work with mature code bases.
"Our code is self-documenting. If you need documentation then the code isn't written well enough" -Assholes who don't know what it is like to work with mature code bases. - People who don't know how to write clean code
When you tutor someone, don't tell them what to do step by step. When they ask you how to solve a problem, don't solve it for them. It's tempting to explain in minute detail something you are good at, but if you always tell people how to do their job, they will become dependent on you. Let them figure it out on their own. When there's a bug in their code, point it out, but don't tell them how to fix it. If you always…
This is how people develop their own problem solving skills. When I was a junior developer, that was one of the skills my team leads / senior developers really focused on. Super important to be able to think / problem solve for yourself.
If you're going to go above and beyond, you should seriously question why you are doing so. When in doubt, do it for yourself.
Great question! 1. As a younger man I done a business deal on a handshake and then got ripped off after putting in a year of work - always get it in writing! 2. Companies are not loyal to people, people may be loyal to people, but never think an organisation will be 3. I ran up some debt as a student until I figured out personal finances, which boils down to; increase income, reduce expenditure, save and invest the r…
I agree with but I'll be careful. When you are young (20-30), you are better off investing the money in yourself. So I say do spend reasonably but on things that might grow you. I learned the hard way that renting an expensive duplex with a garden did wonders to my mood and productivity. You might spend more but you get in returns.
Also don't be a cheap jerk with yourself. Nowadays, I value experiences more than gadgets (like I'd go on a trip to a close city than put 12 hundreds on an iphone) but do these things. When you are old, you can still do them but being young was different. Even when in budget.
So I say be careful but don't be greedy and while interest can pile up on money you save, that trip you have done or that money you spent to go to a conference might pay up x1000.