141–150 of 195 posts
They should get measurable, direct compensation for the value created for others — be that saved time, joy or something else.
I feel there’s this quasi-apologetic approach to selling software when there should only be respect for those who can create value for others by their own creative and productive ability.
Companies isolate devs from customers by using Product Managers. PMs interview customers and then decide what to build. By the time the tasks get to the dev it’s hard to understand the motivation and impact. The best companies I’ve worked at put the engineers and customers in close contact so they understood the impact and shortcomings in their work. Alternately you need to foster a culture of shared purpose where yo…
I've seen more engineers completely disinterested in anything customer related (and even calling users stupid!) more than I've seen PMs isolating devs. Every time I ask a PM if I could interact with a customer (not asking for permission, but to hook me up) they were delighted. Every single time. Another way to solve this problem is to have engineers on customer support rotation of some sort. This way, engineers get t…
This sounds great in theory, in practice working on any non-trivial software means there are parts you know little-nothing about. Having spent time on support duty I'd end up pinging team members for help (disturbing people without having a sense of priority since I don't do support), budding into other people's stuff without the capacity or desire to follow it up long term.
The best way I saw to get devs into customers shoes is to let developers be involved in client rollout - like ship then on-site and see how people use the feature they wrote.
But frankly even then, devs shouldn't be making a lot of these ae user facing decisions, send the UX guy.
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It isn’t financial instruments doing that - it’s people. Be thankful that it allows this to happen somewhat transparently and peacefully, rather than at the hands of pinkertons, criminals, or the military - which is how historically it has happened.
> It isn’t X doing that - it’s people. That's quite a silly argument since you can very literally replace X by anything and get a true statement.
Wildfire burns down your house (assuming no intentional negligence?) - fire burned down your house.
Tsunami happens and wipes out your village? That was a tsunami, not people.
Neighboring countries army invades? Yeah, that’s people.
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It isn’t financial instruments doing that - it’s people. Be thankful that it allows this to happen somewhat transparently and peacefully, rather than at the hands of pinkertons, criminals, or the military - which is how historically it has happened.
The financial instruments (and the underlying rules of the economic system) are the enablers here. You're probably right that it's probably better than what came before, but that doesn't mean we can improve on the system we have.
Every system has exploitable loopholes and will become unbalanced once enough people start gaming it. Some of them (especially new ones) are easier than others.
It’s easy to say ‘this is terrible’, but that can easily turn into rejecting a known system with adjustments and corrections for bad behaviors that isn’t perfect into a system that gets gamed even easier by bad actors and turns into an even worse (but different) mess. See 90% of all revolutions ever.
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> It isn’t X doing that - it’s people. That's quite a silly argument since you can very literally replace X by anything and get a true statement.
Definitely not true. Wildfire burns down your house (assuming no intentional negligence?) - fire burned down your house. Tsunami happens and wipes out your village? That was a tsunami, not people. Neighboring countries army invades? Yeah, that’s people.
Example: It isn't democracy doing that, just people. It isn't autocracy doing that, just people. It isn't socialism doing that, it's people. It isn't capitalism doing that, it's people.
Therefore democracy = dictatorship, and socialism = capitalism. It's all the same, it's all people in the end, so it's no matter.
Patently absurd.
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Definitely not true. Wildfire burns down your house (assuming no intentional negligence?) - fire burned down your house. Tsunami happens and wipes out your village? That was a tsunami, not people. Neighboring countries army invades? Yeah, that’s people.
Anything man-made, as should be obvious. Example: It isn't democracy doing that, just people. It isn't autocracy doing that, just people. It isn't socialism doing that, it's people. It isn't capitalism doing that, it's people. Therefore democracy = dictatorship, and socialism = capitalism. It's all the same, it's all people in the end, so it's no matter. Patently absurd.
The problem is that people are involved, and you’re not realizing what that means - people inherently are corrupt, self interested, short sighted, power hungry, etc.
I'm a CS associate professor. I teach a course which consists in contributing to a free software, in third year at my uni. A few years ago a couple of students decided to make a contribution to GNU ls. The change was to have the output color independent of capitalisation (it is based on filename extension). Their code was accepted. It was a tiny tiny contribution, but it's probable that these few lines of code are an…
With others from a few large free software projects & communities (Open edX, OpenStack, Framasoft, Mines-Telecom...), we are in the initial stages of producing an online course / MOOC about contributing to free software. If you (or anyone else reading this :) ) are interested in contributing or joining the project at this early stage, please let me know. : ) My email is on my profile.
Presentation site (draft): https://larrybotha.gitlab.io/mooc-floss/ Repository: https://gitlab.com/mooc-floss/mooc-floss
> Sometimes I wonder whether it'd be possible to earn a living off mammoth. Although there's an option to donate - I currently get a grand total of £1.15 a week from regular donations - it's not something I push very hard. There's no shame in making the source available but using a license that requires payment for commercial use, like the Prosperity [1] license. [1]: https://prosperitylicense.com/
Whereas, if it's a permissive license like; MIT, then I'm personally more likely to be much more forgiving and even try and fix problems.
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> (central banks interventions are useless without bank and other financial intermediaries participation, it would be like pushing on a string). Yes, the only thing financial intermediaries would be missing is the actual funds (largely paid by the middle class) to bail out corporations for the second time in less than twenty years. > Don't be fooled by the contemporary contempt against finance. There has been contemp…
Pretty sure you’re blaming the wrong people. I’m not now and have never been in finance - but blaming banks or traders for the Fed’s actions is prima facia ridiculous. And throwing in the whole ‘greed is good’ stereotype doesn’t help.
Blaming the fed for the bailout is like blaming firefighters for putting out a fire instead of the arsonist. That’s a pretty strange understanding of accountability.
While the world economy burned to the ground and families went hungry, the financial industry awarded their executives with billions of dollars in bonuses. If that isn’t greed, what is it?