The Failed Commodification of Technical Work

You don't see people worshipping Cooking for Dummies, so why are we so cult-y about Scrum or The Phoenix Project. What's with the weird zen/Kung fu kind of vibe of it, as if they have just discovered sliced fknin bread?

Sadly, I genuinely think that for some people the Phoenix Project is an eye opener. Their enthusiasm on just discovering how to be a professional in the role they have been half assing for decades bugs the living crap out of me.

To me, reading TPP felt like reading a patronizing self help book. I found it nauseating, shallow, bland, and anyone expressing even a tinge of enthusiasm about it feels like an affront to my sensibilities.

The more general aspect of Amdahl's law is captured by certain scaling laws and limits generally related to communication (see full bisection bandwidth) and certain architectures (e.g. Cray) meant to optimize for this

How simple is it to run a business, a website, organise a travel around or pay a bill nowadays, compared to 1994 or 2004?

At times, I can't help but feel that the previous generation had a more leisurely pace of life, which led to a more fulfilling lifestyle. Nowadays, time seems to pass at a rapid pace, with high levels of stress.

Allow me to share two experiences:

a) The other day, while at the bank, I witnessed at least three individuals over the age of 60 struggling to complete simple tasks, aimlessly wandering around and pleading with the staff for assistance. These tasks are supposed to be easily accessible through online banking, but due to certain exceptions, the system did not support their specific needs. As a result, they were forced to make appointments, with the earliest available slot being three to four months away. One of them needed to withdraw money from a blocked account to purchase wood and heat her home, but the bank's staff refused to budge, insisting that she wait three months to solve the problem.

b) Just two years ago, my father was in Sicily and could not find a way to make a simple phone call back home. Yet, in the 1970s, all he had to do was walk into the bar in the area with a few coins.

Not to mention that while once upon a time your average person could fix the lights, the car, the heating, the non-automatic door, etc. by themselves now they need to call the professionals.

Worldwide, sure. I'm speaking about the US.

>And if we stop with the racism

That would be up to you. I haven't said anything that's racist.

>are you sure it's not the programming that made these guys upper middle class?

That would be even worse. It would mean that the white men who lived childhoods of lesser means and found success in the tech industry, presumably under the guidance of seniors who themselves (under your hypothetical) were more likely to be first-gen professionals, looked at black and brown kids in similar situations and thought, "Fuck you, got mine."

You can even make proxy-projects that target netstandard2.0 but reference .NET Framework and with certain compat shims the code will just run on .NET 8 unless it relies on some breaking changes (which have mostly to do with platform-specific behavior, there have been no breaking changes for the language itself since I think C# 1 or 2? some odd 20 years ago).

As for the runtime itself - the application can restrict itself from being run by a newer version of runtime but you can absolutely do so. The lightweight executable that just loads runtime and executes the startup assembly may complain but just try it - build a console app with 'net5.0' target and then run it with latest SDK with 'dotnet run mynet5app.dll' - it will work.