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Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

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Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#131

Post by rubyn00bie »

deltree7 wrote: post #69
hallway_monitor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people are assuming the worst intentions here but anyone who has worked in an enterprise knows sometimes it's useful to build tools for your use and not to share. The tool might not even be allowed, C# is probably not in the supported platforms and even if it was, getting it into the official repos can be arduous. If OP really cared about maximizing everyone's productivity of course they would share the tool…

Increasing productivity never lays people off, unless the people were originally being unproductive. That's a dumb understanding of economics and even management. Also, scaling tools to more than one user is incredibly hard. Software development is still custom / art. This tool works because it is suited to OPs workflow and his "way of thinking". In order to make it work for others, it needs lots of improvement and g…

This comment is absurd. I cannot for a second fathom how you came to believe so naively that’s productivity increases do not result in lay offs. Seriously how did you come to that conclusion? I’m just curious because it’s so disconnected from reality I can’t figure it out.

Also, your assumption about tooling is 100% incorrect as I myself have written tooling that was saving an org 35k a day, in a single market.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#132

Post by systemvoltage »

d--b wrote: post #121

No one cares at youtube whether people can or cannot make an extension that brings back the dislike count. If there is a way to do it, it might be intentional for guys like you to stay on the platform.

I use Youtube Ratings plugin that needs an API key from YT. I heard they're disabling it on Dec 15.

Youtube - please don't be assholes. Leave the API as is.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#133

Post by literallyWTF »

Hekioi wrote: post #124
hallway_monitor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people are assuming the worst intentions here but anyone who has worked in an enterprise knows sometimes it's useful to build tools for your use and not to share. The tool might not even be allowed, C# is probably not in the supported platforms and even if it was, getting it into the official repos can be arduous. If OP really cared about maximizing everyone's productivity of course they would share the tool…

We are writing software! It's our fucking job to optimize the world around us. How do you think can we, as a society, advance while doing bullshit jobs? Make me obsolete!

And then what? What makes you think the leaders/rulers of our society will then somehow “pay us back”?

You’ll just end up broke and without a job.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#134

Post by Hekioi »

mmcgaha wrote: post #100
jayd16 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming its not trivial, its hiding a useful tool from your coworkers. Why share any knowledge at all? Why mentor someone if it just gets them more work? Seems pretty toxic to me.

This isn't any different than keeping a bunch of text snippets that you use as a starting point for creating things. Text snippets may seem trivial in comparison to some tool that writes code or checks for your common errors, but when there is a bug in your text snippet, you own the bug. Let's say he gives away his tool and all of a sudden he is the guy who has to work on it when other people have problems. Now his c…

We started to share those kind of snippets in Operation manuals and knowledge sharing session.

This helps other people to grow.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#135

Post by SuoDuanDao »

willcipriano wrote: post #55
hallway_monitor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people are assuming the worst intentions here but anyone who has worked in an enterprise knows sometimes it's useful to build tools for your use and not to share. The tool might not even be allowed, C# is probably not in the supported platforms and even if it was, getting it into the official repos can be arduous. If OP really cared about maximizing everyone's productivity of course they would share the tool…

The question I have is how did incentives get so misaligned that this person feels that doubling the productivity of all their peers is unlikely to be worth the effort of presenting a tool.

I don't know the particulars of the situation of course - I imagine there's a big bump in work involved between making a tool useful for its creator and making it idiot-proof for one - but I have observed that as organisations get larger predictable performance becomes much more valuable relative to outstanding performance.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#136

Post by cfn »

Since everyone is trading stories, here is mine: I once worked in a newspaper at the start of desktop publishing (DTP) and Word. They received the news from Reuters (as an example) in some strange format and had two people employed specifically to reformat and correct that text using Word before going to DTP. I wrote a Word macro (more like half recorded, half edited) that did 90% of the work because it was painful for me to see those people speed editing that text over and over again. They were very happy but they begged me not to tell their boss as they were afraid they would loose their job.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#137

Post by literallyWTF »

jdavis703 wrote: post #90
RankingMember wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making it broadly available could also potentially just set a new floor for productivity in an industry that doesn't always reward such gains commensurate with their value, i.e. you'd get an attaboy and "alright well now you can do three times as much work for the same pay!"

Isn’t that the whole point of software engineering? You should always be engineering yourself out of your current job. If I’m dealing with the same issues I have today, a year from now, then I’d view that as a personal failure.

I hate this mindset. I’m not trying to make my job and the job of others obsolete. I just want to get paid so I can fuck off and do some other shit I want to do.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#138

Post by behnamoh »

corobo wrote: post #24

I used to use my bank's mobile web interface to monitor my balances (with Zabbix, it even alerted when I'd been paid haha) The mobile page asked for the full passcode whereas the regular page asked for specific digits which, while still automatable, wasn't as easy The code/method might have been useful to others at the time (especially your Mints and that) but I didn't want them changing it. The mobile site was, as f…

YT is similar to Coursera, edX, Udacity, etc. in that they all offer tutorial videos. But with YT as a platform, it's the viewer's job to find the best one whereas Coursera and others already review the videos before publishing. Now imagine YT that has enjoyed thousands of additional tutorial videos due to the pandemic and remote classes suddenly stops showing you what other people thought of such tutorials without offering an alternative (such as a "reviewed by YT" badge, etc.) That makes the platform shockingly unusable. I already click on fewer recommended videos and have less incentive to contribute to the platform by clicking the dislike button because I know it will all be for nothing.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#139

Post by htrp »

alberth wrote: post #82
BatteryMountain wrote: post #9

Yeah I do this. Most of what I build, nobody knows about it nor is it release into the wild. Latest example: at my current workplace we have some crappy custom compilers for our platform.... I've rebuilt them in a way that I like (and using C# instead of Java), that enables me to use it in a small visual studio code plugin that enables me with real time error messages as I code against our platform, so basically cons…

A lot of successful companies are founded this way (Eg HashiCorp, SAP, Basecamp, etc). Person sees a massive inefficiency at their employer. They know of a way to save time and money by building a tool to solve for it. That person starts their own business to sell that product to others. No better way to find product / market fit than to have first hand experience in the problem that needs to be solved.

and more importantly, they get paid in line with what the tool is worth.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#140

Post by afrodc_ »

monocasa wrote: post #81
deltree7 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasing productivity never lays people off, unless the people were originally being unproductive. That's a dumb understanding of economics and even management. Also, scaling tools to more than one user is incredibly hard. Software development is still custom / art. This tool works because it is suited to OPs workflow and his "way of thinking". In order to make it work for others, it needs lots of improvement and g…

Management commonly has a dumb understanding of economics and management. Particularly when they view engineering as a cost center.

To the untrained eye, it definitely is a huge cost center. Devs and smart people get premium dollar for their work, as they should, but for the bean counters, execs and bad managers, it's extremely difficult to simply quantify the work in such a way to see it as a value add. Especially in an executive excel sheet/powerpoint
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