71–80 of 757 posts
Everyone lies, all the time. even when they think they're not lying they often are.
The people who get the most done are not the smartest, or the most skilled, but the ones who are most familiar with the organization they work in. To outsiders it looks like they end up with compromised solutions, but to insiders it looks like they achieved the impossible.
To me this has always been a management issue. Usually the business willingly allows for this to happen. Consequence is that you build an extreme dependency on this person. Knowledge needs to be built into the organisation through hard work, like documentation, processes and collaboration.
We have one diva who build the vast majority of the system. He is smart and likes algorithms, but doesn't write particularly easy code to follow (he values cleverness over simplicity). Any suggestion that it could be improved is met with a bit of an argument. And he isn't much of a team player compared to the other devs.
But he knows the system inside out....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only that, but the incredible depth of pretty much every field. Not every practitioner dives deep, but the masters of any job leave me speechless.
Having worked filling shelves in a supermarket, I disagree that it applies to every field.
The most challenging and important problems to solve in an engineering organisation are rarely technical in nature.
I think this has become a cliché here (a true one, however). The interesting question is what sort of jobs contain a lot of challenges that are technical in nature.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I manage a team. The reason I don’t promote or give raises to people who overwork is because I don’t want to encourage behavior that inevitably results in burnout. What I instead do when people overwork is I give them extra paid time off. Stayed in the office for a couple of extra hours yesterday helping a customer? Great, please make sure to take Friday afternoon off. You had to work extra last week to meet a deadli…
A rare but cool approach. Surely tracking extra time in such a way is a bit of extra effort?
That almost all software is unreliable and SaaS products only work because there are engineers behind the scenes fixing it all the time. The Wizard of Oz nails it: "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" https://youtu.be/YWyCCJ6B2WE
On the contrary, my job taught me that desktop software can be extremely reliable and does not actually break all the time. Many of my customers use versions of my app that are a few years old without any troubles. When the user is in control of their environment, software doesn't suddenly break. That's not to say software doesn't have bugs. Only that bugs don't appear suddenly. Most bugs are caused by two things: (1…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only that, but the incredible depth of pretty much every field. Not every practitioner dives deep, but the masters of any job leave me speechless.
Having worked filling shelves in a supermarket, I disagree that it applies to every field.
That money is debt. In a very fundamental, literal and practical sense, debt or credit (i.e. someone owing somebody something valuable) is what money is . The traditional definition of means of unit of measure, means of payment and unit of value describe how money is used , not what it is . Like, knife is a sharp edged tool used to cut things vs knife actually is steel. (This also being my main reason objecting crypt…