"Olympic medal winner" is like a golden ticket in the fitness trainer industry. There's a lot of rich people who would be willing to pay over the odds to be trained by her.
She sounds like a person who would have a hard time fooling herself into taking the money. There's little if any good a professional athlete can do for regular person who wants to get/stay fit. She's good at taking health compromises to the extreme in exchange for performance. The exact opposite of what a regular person needs.
> Isn't programming more or less a group endeavor now? It is still more solitary than many other jobs. On the other hand, I hate that it becomes more and more a group endeavor - I would love if it stayed much more solitary as in former days.
Agreed, Pair Programming is over-hyped as well as this new "mobbing" concept. It affects productivity and makes people who prefer to work by themselves unhappy.
Pair programming and mobbing are tools which may be appropriate for some situations.
Unfortunately when tool use is mandated without applying critical thinking, it often results in a great deal of waste. Mandated collaboration is also very susceptible to abuse as it typically provides an additional layer of obfuscation to shield low performing leechers.
> Isn't programming more or less a group endeavor now? It is still more solitary than many other jobs. On the other hand, I hate that it becomes more and more a group endeavor - I would love if it stayed much more solitary as in former days.
Agreed, Pair Programming is over-hyped as well as this new "mobbing" concept. It affects productivity and makes people who prefer to work by themselves unhappy.
Doesn't have to be pair programming. Just having two employees next to eachother working on different parts of the same project can make it a social workplace. If you aren't into it the other person will probably get the hint and not talk too much.
I guess this is the overtraining hampering growth I've heard about as a kid. Being an olympic level athlete makes a lot of hormones to whack.
Great read. I have a "free spirit" in my family, a really gifted man who just couldn't settle. He's now in his 60s and does mosaics for people all around the UK. He doesn't own a house and is constantly staying with friends and family. He tried working in construction jobs and other things, settling with a family and buying a house. However after his divorce and other things he is most happy with his campervan conver…
I'm the "free spirit" in my family. I regularly take months or even years off between jobs, travel a lot, and I've never wanted to own a home. Usually, I'm fortunate to earn enough between travel stints to pay my own way, but I still end up camping out with family for a few months every few years, after relocating from another state or country. If I didn't have family to lean on once in a while, I'd be forced to stick with jobs longer than I can usually stand to. I'm really not that far off from a situation like Twigg's, except that I can tolerate the office work a little better.
This is very interesting. I've always wondered about how tech jobs require endless preening and showing-off for what are often not exactly jobs that require a lot of intellectual ability.
"You want a job in ML ? Yes, learn these absurd frameworks, publish a few papers in so-and-so conferences. Then we'll let you do some clickrate optimization for our website. "
No wonder, tech in the US has a diversity problem. Not everyone wants to be this way.
She sounds like a great person and I hope things work out for her. It's hard to find the right context for her without painting her in a bad light. Some people are eager to call her (or people like her) lazy, conveniently ignoring the fact that nobody really wants to live this way. Society as it is designed now doesn't know what to do with people like her, so they're either ignored or just given shelters and... That'…
She sounds like a great person and I hope things work out for her. It's hard to find the right context for her without painting her in a bad light. Some people are eager to call her (or people like her) lazy, conveniently ignoring the fact that nobody really wants to live this way. Society as it is designed now doesn't know what to do with people like her, so they're either ignored or just given shelters and... That'…
Can you point to a solution besides giving them shelter and just sort of tolerating it? I mean, there’s different mechanisms for shelter — family, public housing, NGOs, etc, and we can talk about how to tweak those knobs as a culture — but I can’t think of what else cultures have done, besides various levels of housing people who just want to float.
My comment implied that I'm not sure what else could be done or what should be done. I do feel it should be talked about. What are the root causes? What do these people actually need? What are they lacking? Who are they in the first place? Why are they where they are?
>It was a far cry from winning medals for Twigg, and beyond that, she said the solitary nature of programming troubled her. I would like to know what HN thinks about the 'solitary' nature of programming? Isn't programming more or less a group endeavor now?
> Isn't programming more or less a group endeavor now? It is still more solitary than many other jobs. On the other hand, I hate that it becomes more and more a group endeavor - I would love if it stayed much more solitary as in former days.
I don't mind the "group" aspect so much as long as it's supportive, focusing on the team's goals and giving people space/creative freedom/thinking freedom.
Now, Pair programming as in "sit next to your colleague for hours per day" is just BS
"She took a break at age 26, and that year she grew an entire inch" What's that again? I've never heard of anyone growing after the age of 18.
it might just be coincidence since some kids still have a final push of growth with that age.
But children pushed into extreme sports (or "voluntarily pushing themselves") often fail to grow. You can see this with ballet dancers who start too early or gymnasts starting too early.
Great read. I have a "free spirit" in my family, a really gifted man who just couldn't settle. He's now in his 60s and does mosaics for people all around the UK. He doesn't own a house and is constantly staying with friends and family. He tried working in construction jobs and other things, settling with a family and buying a house. However after his divorce and other things he is most happy with his campervan conver…
Knulp, a short novel from Hermann Hess, is a good literary take on such caracters.