61–70 of 97 posts
"Always Be Coding" -- people who spend their time on work/passion project/open source projects are somehow valued more than those who spend their time on work/non-technical pursuits.
Which could be good or bad, depending on whether you agree with the statement that ignorance is bliss. For instance, if you had asked me 5 years ago whether owning a self-driving car would be awesome, I would have answered with an enthusiastic yes. Now, as a novice-to-journeyman software engineer, if I had to own a car at all, I'd buy one made before computers became a fundamental component inside most vehicles (got my eye on a 1976 Chevy Silverado, but I digress).
Call me paranoid, but I can't help but feel it's only a matter of time before some hacker gains control of a highway full of cars and demands X # of bitcoin from their occupants or he'll drive them all off a bridge.(1) I can't un-see that image in my head, and it terrifies me. Security professionals need to be right every single time in order to be successful at their jobs. Hackers need to be right only once to be successful at theirs. It's a Sisyphean task trying to keep people physically safe in a digital age, let alone keep their privacy intact.
Which brings me to my other point- technology being used by those in power to maintain and expand that power by weakening our expectations of privacy:
-Social media platforms are being co-opted to derive insights about everyday people that even they don't know about themselves, and these insights are being used to manipulate their behavior at the voting booth, at the shopping mall, etc.(2)
-Governments are creating "social credit scores" based on how well a citizen tows the official party line, who they associate with, or the opinions they express. And these scores can affect everything from their job prospects to their ability to get a loan to their very geographic mobility.(3)
-Facial recognition technology is being deployed in traffic cameras and even in wearable technology to make it easier to pick "undesirables" out of a crowd.(4)
I don't mean to single out one single country. If this technology exists, there's a greater-than-zero chance in any country that sooner or later a leader will come along who will seek to use that technology for their own gain.
Sorry to get so dark, I don't mean to sound overly dramatic. I never thought of myself as a tinfoil-hat type of person, and I hate that I'm essentially slowly turning into one. Technology does a lot of good too, I'm just genuinely scared for the future.
Sources:
(1) -https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
(2) -https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ... -http://business.time.com/2012/07/31/big-data-knows-what-your... -https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-cambr...
(3) -https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit -https://observer.com/2018/02/america-isnt-far-off-from-china...
(4) -https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-police-go-robocop-with-...
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Are you a veteran who has experienced this? Because this sounds completely wrong to me. An experienced developer typically has no problem picking up new languages/frameworks/tools/etc. There isn't much value in familiarising oneself with arbitrary and invented things, of which there are many in our industry, and they are ephemeral. No, the real value is in knowing and understanding the discovered things. And since th…
I think a lot of the frustration comes not from the new languages/frameworks themselves, but all the endlessly re-invented support tools that surround them. For example, learning React itself is great because you can pretty quickly see how it cleans up your UI layer. It doesn't take that long and adds real value to your projects. Oh, but now you need to learn all the corner-cases of NPM, and now you need a new test f…
How many people post negatively about Java in terms of productivity and cite boilerplate as a productivity-killer, despite the massive advantages a JVM stack brings?
A lot of issues have already been discussed, but one I haven't seen is the constant reminder that people and the Internet are terrible. Ignoring people that censor beheadings on YouTube and the Dark Web, I am very vividly aware of things Goatse, Blue Waffle, 1 Guy 1 Jar, Ogrish, early 4chan's \b\ and those mental images are very much burned into my brain. Maybe its not every aspect in the tech industry or maybe its c…
We will tell ourselves fun stories about how people being jerks just means they are no bullshit people who care about getting things done.
- Alpha male posturing - People expect you to care about your job.
> - People expect you to care about your job. What I think is funny about this is that the actual expoiting slave driver bosses will accept sometimes that you do what you get paid for and then go home. They won't tell you so, but if you are able to read faces you can see them smile a little with respect if you refuse to get exploited. But some of the engineering colleagues will never accept that. 24/7 is the requirem…
However, if it impacts them negatively in any way (i.e. They overpromised) you will find that respect doesn't help.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you a veteran who has experienced this? Because this sounds completely wrong to me. An experienced developer typically has no problem picking up new languages/frameworks/tools/etc. There isn't much value in familiarising oneself with arbitrary and invented things, of which there are many in our industry, and they are ephemeral. No, the real value is in knowing and understanding the discovered things. And since th…
I'm an experienced developer and I have no trouble learning things. If anything I'm faster than an inexperienced developer because where they're learning a new concept (e.g., "closures") I'm just learning the local spelling of it and flavor. However, I do get pissy when I have to keep learning things, and never get to exploit them, always having to learn a new thing for every single project. Having started in the web…
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Former ops engineer here. Get out of ops. In the current climate, it is rare you'll find a role that compensates you for being on call frequently and the toll it takes on you.
This a thousand times. Ops is undervalued and expected to deliver a lot in today’s workforce. You get better respect and compensation for SWE. I wouldn’t reccomend this career unless you’re unable to do software engineering.
In short, work is just like college group work. One person does 90% of the work while the others do about 10%.
This leads to developers being biased towards building and working with new things, and is a lot of the reason that we see flavor-of-the-week style platforms and libraries that add very little value.