261–270 of 322 posts
It took pushing my marriage to nearly the point of breaking to realize that my obsession with work, lack of participation in the house, and aggressive/demanding interpersonal communications was only leading to a dead end.
The closer you get to death: - you care less about work and money - you care more about family and relationships
Someone told me something along the lines of "Every event in your life can change your life entirely - you get into Harvard or you don't, you get the job or you don't, you win the tournament and go on to become a champion, or you give up on the sport when you lose. Every little decision can be a fork in your life, though most aren't." Sure, it's oversimplified, sure some "bad-seeming" things are good in the long run,…
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
Management thinks he’s brilliant. Everybody else thinks he’s an insane asshole.
Just because you know people who can say this with sincerity and gravitas doesn’t mean there aren’t assholes.
There are always assholes.
I had a startup, co-founder persistet on bad tech, never stood up to him. Startup failed - and all for the wrong reason. I basicly had two choices: speak up or leave and I did neither, dragging along. I will never do that again!
Grokking is not enough, go through the details. Spent weeks debugging a silent memory corruption on an 8-bit processor due to the incorrect usage of strtok in an SCPI parser.
Have you read Stranger in a Strange Land? I suspect someone else has taught you that word and they did it badly. To grok is to understand something at a profound, visceral level.
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…
> 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 rest, avoid liabilities as far as possible 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 expens…
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…
> When there's a bug in their code, point it out, but don't tell them how to fix it. It's funny, I've learned the opposite lesson the hard way. I used to just point out bugs, like I was a tutor hoping they'd realize the problem on their own and fix it correctly. Unless it was an obvious brain-o (i.e. the developer knew what they were doing and just flubbed), this resulted unerringly in a "fix" that (a) didn't solve t…
a) it doesn't scale
(you are now doing the other devs' job)
b) it only works if you are infallible
(if there's a bug in your fix the other dev is going to say "colanderman told me to do it this way")
I know that it is tempting to just tell people what to do, but it's not a long term solution.