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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?

#261

Post by deltree7 »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #131
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…

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.

Most people have a poor understanding of 'increasing productivity' especially what OP is talking about.

If I build a tool, that makes someone else irrelevant, that increased my productivity, but not the person who is now irrelevant. Yes, that person gets laid off. So, your tool leading to firing a legal assistant is not what we are talking here.

If I build a tool, that makes every other developer more productive, then the team can build more features or fix more bugs.

Show me one software team that doesn't have a backlog of bugs and features that would not benefit from increased productivity and leading to laying of people in the team.

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

#262

Post by SuoDuanDao »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #235
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you for paying people to do work that doesn't add value and consuming crap that doesn't make us happy? Because I said nothing about 'purging' or any solutions at all for that matter. I just pointed out that these three problems are in an important way just one problem. I'd actually seriously like to know, do you want people to have to do work that doesn't add value?

I think what he's saying is that we will probably never build safety nets strong enough to provide for those who had their jobs automated away. They will be condemned to a miserable life of poverty, provided with just enough to keep them from rioting on the streets. Source: I used to be on SSI disability. This is income for those that are so disabled they are never expected to be capable of working. The average SSI p…

That may or may not be true, depending on any number of factors. But that the current state of affairs is neither desirable nor possible as a long-term steady state seems to me self-evident. And yet to my great surprise, this has turned out to be one of the most controversial things I've ever said on HN.

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

#263

Post by RankingMember »

wutbrodo wrote: post #254
literallyWTF wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's always going to be people who don't care about/ take pride in/find meaning in their work. That's a totally legitimate way to approach it, but it's sort of an orthogonal discussion to the one we're having. It's also pretty weird to "hate" that others have managed to find meaning in their work, and discuss the manner in which they do so. I don't get much enjoyment out of cars, but if I noticed that I _hated_ it…

I think the judgmental language is a large part of the reason for the reaction, as the parent seems to be making a blanket judgement of those who aren't engineering themselves out of a job, saying they'd "view that as a personal failure". The blanket nature and talk-down tone of "You should always be engineering yourself out of your current job" is also not likely to win broad support.

To re-use your metaphor, it'd be like a car nut telling you your quality as a person is less for not liking cars as much as they do.

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

#264

Post by nxrabl »

varsketiz wrote: post #120
pavel_lishin wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commenter complaints about negative, unproductive responses to things they've posted; immediately gets negative, unproductive response.

Why do you consider it unproductive? I think the perspective provided is very reasonable - if something did not work once, maybe you shouldn't stop doing it forever. What do you think would be a productive response to this complaint?

The perspective is reasonable, but the tone is sarcastic and combative. Much as we might wish otherwise, humans are not beings of pure logic, and when we are 'attacked', especially in public, we shut down and become unresponsive to even quite reasonable feedback. Your rephrasing of the comment does not come with this emotional barb and is infinitely better for it.

I've seen the argument that in order to engage on the internet you should be thick-skinned and prepared to take a certain amount of sharp criticism if you put your work forward for comment, and that's all true, but equally, as commenters, what are we here for if not to present our own thoughts and ideas in a convincing way? If someone makes a comment in a way that they know is not going to be seriously considered by the person they're responding to, all they're doing is showboating for folks who already agree with them.

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

#265

Post by [deleted] »

jayd16 wrote: post #51
version_five wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you care? He's not actively harming his coworkers, he's doing what is asked of him work wise, and his colleagues presumably are too - and are themselves getting apparently slack jobs if there is 6hrs per day of easily automated work. Imagine if your coworker told management about an efficiency hack that made you responsible for 4x the output per day. Would you rather work with that person? Personally, I wou…

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.

[deleted]

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

#266

Post by softwarebeware »

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…

One of the big reasons not to share tools that would otherwise increase productivity in a corporate settings, is that people are petty a*holes. They will fall into at least three big negative buckets.

1. Those who will see it as a personal insult if you write something useful and you will then have a target on your back as they work to block you and hurt your career so you never show them up again.

2. Those who could care less about improving productivity and in fact would rather that everything is tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming so that at least it's mindless for them to go about their day.

3. Those who see everything they don't understand through a lens of fear and hatred. They will not understand your tool OR why it is helpful, and will instead see it as an alien invasion or viral infestation in their workspace, and will work concertedly to resist it.

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

#267

Post by matheusmoreira »

Amorymeltzer wrote: post #129

Not the same sort of thing as OP's example, but a while ago I found something simple and neat that made me think about code a bit differently. I shared it. The first few comments were negative — not ideal but certainly okay! — but then the author started getting harassed off-site. I was contacted and immediately deleted the post. Start to finish, the whole process took maybe 30 minutes, but it was sadly instructive a…

> the author started getting harassed off-site

Because of a post here on HN? What happened?

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

#268

Post by ClumsyPilot »

gleenn wrote: post #253
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody cares about 'the company' - "In US the average share holding lasts just 22 seconds" Management can break the law, leave with their bonuses, and years down the line 'the company' gets fined. Employees are the ones that might be there for decades, but the anglosphere shareholder model allocated 0% stake to employees. TThere are alternatives: Codetermination in Germany is a concept that involves the right of work…

The average is probably horribly misrepresented. There are a ton of super long holders, which hold for decades, and a crazy high number of HFTs running that hold for microseconds. I bet nobody is actually close to the average, 22 seconds is extremely slow for software trading and extremely fast for a human. If you're using the holding duration as a proxy for people caring about companies, I think you are probably inc…

Very, very few people hold stocks for multiple years, so they have no reason to care about the company's long term future:

"There are different ways of slicing it, but Reuters calculations based on New York stock exchange data show the average holding period for U.S. shares was 5-1/2 months in June, versus 8-1/2 months at end-2019."

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

#269

Post by technofiend »

peterangular wrote: post #175
notreallyserio wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see not wanting to support a tool. I've written tools that automate processes in useful ways but the interfaces aren't perfect and you need some base knowledge to understand how they work. I don't want to spend my time improving and supporting those tools. I wrote them to reduce the amount of work I have to do, not add yet another responsibility. I've also made the mistake of sharing my tools only to find cri…

> I've also made the mistake of sharing my tools only to find criticism but no offer to help make improvements. Fuck em, wasting my time. Have experienced a ton of this too. One of the biggest internal tool mistakes of my career was to ship a tool like op's: Got yelled at for using company time to work on non-sanctioned work only to have the person yelling at me end up using my tool for 6 years. Colleagues would get…

To prevent someone taking credit you add a splash screen when the tool starts with your name on it. Same with the help -> about section.

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

#270

Post by [deleted] »

technofiend wrote: post #269
peterangular wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've also made the mistake of sharing my tools only to find criticism but no offer to help make improvements. Fuck em, wasting my time. Have experienced a ton of this too. One of the biggest internal tool mistakes of my career was to ship a tool like op's: Got yelled at for using company time to work on non-sanctioned work only to have the person yelling at me end up using my tool for 6 years. Colleagues would get…

To prevent someone taking credit you add a splash screen when the tool starts with your name on it. Same with the help -> about section.

[deleted]
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