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Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

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Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#181

Post by eastbound »

MarcelOlsz wrote: post #87
denkmoon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the youngins are more cognisant that it's all monitored. Knowing your employer can read everything and it _will_ be used against you has a chilling effect and I'm pretty sure that's part of it.

We had such incredibly heinous group chats on our Slack that if an admin perused through the logs we'd be instantly fired and the company shut down right then and there lol. The paranoia drove everyone nuts which made it more fun.

Every healthy person I know does that. It’s as if human communication required to have secrets before people would relax about opening up.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#182

Post by exasperaited »

Aeolun wrote: post #175
noman-land wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have encountered people who are scared to post in large public channels. Part of growing up in chatrooms was an implicit bravery of saying something out loud in a room full of thousands of people. There seems to have been a shift, somewhat, in the comfort level of different generations about saying things "out loud" in large public rooms. Chatrooms have evolved in a really interesting way. I think the first generat…

> I have encountered people who are scared to post in large public channels. People weren’t assholes and/or snowflakes in those days. Implicit in being on the net was that you were fairly well behaved.

Oh lord no. I’m not sure that’s true at all! I mean in the early cool era of the internet there was a concept of a “netizen” and a window of brief joy, but the internet has always had domineering trolls, bullies, spaces where clumsy newbies were brutally flamed etc.

The main difference is that more spaces were quasi-professional and non-pseudonymous, in that one largely got one’s internet access and identity (IP address, email address, invitation) from the institution of higher learning one attended or worked for. So there were direct, two or three degrees separation consequences (my boss knows someone at your institution) in those spaces. I suppose this is what you are referring to.

(In my early era of commercial internet work I can remember a colleague shutting down an accidentally abusive scraping bot by working out who was likely to be the boss of the person running it and phoning them up)

But away from those spaces were many places that were just as bad as they are now.

The internet has always (in my time of using it, which is all of my adult life as someone who is over half a century old) demonstrated that a good culture is a question of starting conditions and quick maintenance actions.

A non-trivial amount of the worst behaviour I have personally witnessed on the internet happened before the year 2000.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#183

Post by hnlmorg »

Spooky23 wrote: post #46
hnlmorg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote work isn’t for everyone. Their point of view is just as valid as your point of view. And this is my biggest complaint about arguments about remote working. People turn it into something that’s evidence-based when actually it’s a deeply subjective topic and thus different personality types thrive in different working environments.

People have painted themselves in a corner re: remote work and get wacky in discussions about it. Lots of emo, not much fact.

My point is you cannot have any fact based discussions because statistics are generalised whereas people’s ability to thrive in office or remote work depends deeply on both the company culture and the individual.

Thus it is always going to be an emotional argument rather than a fact-based discussion.

It’s like asking someone what their favourite food is. They might be able to explain why they like the dish, but that doesn’t translate to that meal being everyone’s favourite.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#184

Post by vict7 »

optymizer wrote: post #149

I like the vulnerability displayed by the author. I'll share a moment myself: A few years ago I was the TL on a FAANG Android project, where for a few months I was doing more spreadsheet/TPM work than usual, and didn't have much time for coding. Once we had a meeting where I ended up coding in Kotlin live in front of a dozen younger devs to discuss the implementation of some feature. My work background is Android and…

I feel this is similar to how my brain works. If I am not using a skill close to every day/week then it can atrophy fairly quickly. On the plus side, it also comes back quickly (usually) if I start using it with greater regularity again.

I notice that general concepts usually stick better in my brain than specific things like your example with ‘when’. Even those are pruned down a bit after long enough though.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#186

Post by victorbuilds »

_ea1k wrote: post #22

Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help. I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but…

I've worked with teams across UK, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland over the years. The best remote collaboration I've seen wasn't about the tools, it was about the culture. Some teams just default to writing things down and sharing context. Others expect you to already know. The tool doesn't fix that.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#187

Post by saghm »

tomyedwab wrote: post #143

Well written article full of humility and vulnerability? I love it. My reaction: you don't need to feel ashamed of not knowing something, there is far too much to know and I'm still learning new techniques and concepts 37 years in, so I would never judge you for it. I would also not judge you for having your own preferences and opinions. I too prefer working in an office to remote work, but when I say this out loud o…

I don't take issue with what you've said about remote work despite very much having the opposite opinion to you because you phrased it as your own personal opinion.

This blog post does pretty much the opposite though; its analysis of remote work is pretty much entirely just generalizations of their own experience, but phrased as if they're objective truth. It was an especially weird editorial choice to make use of the "general" second person given how much outside of that one paragraph was written in the first person. In an article that's ostensibly trying to be humble and vulnerable like you mention, it just comes across as patronizing. I can't say I'm surprised that the author might have been judged for expressing this opinion because it's not about their personal preference, but a judgement of its own.

I think a lot of people genuinely struggle with the idea that sometimes how something is said can matter just as much as what's being said. Being correct and being respectful are orthogonal concepts even when talking about objective truth rather than opinions; if someone asks what 7 times 9 is, there's a difference between telling them "63" and "Well, obviously it's fucking 63, duh!". For a subjective topic like remote work that some people's lives have been quite significantly affected by, it's even more important to put some effort into understanding how one's words will come across, because if the phrasing is poor, people aren't necessarily going to feel the need to go out of their way to try to give it the benefit of the doubt. I can't know what exactly the author was thinking when writing that paragraph, but I also can't distinguish between whether they have the same viewpoint as you but communicated it poorly or if they genuinely think that there's some sort of objective truth than I'm worse at my job working remotely than I would be working in person. Given the amount of care I've put into addressing many of the exact issues they've raised due to needing to work remotely because of a medical condition of an immediate family member, it was quite hard for me not to have an immediate strong angry reaction to how flippant they seem to be with what's at best their phrasing of their opinions. My point is that it's a lot more work to actually care about how one's point comes across than it is to claim that people are overreacting after the fact, and it's worth considering how much of the reaction the author mentions having gotten in the past is reflective of this.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#188

Post by baq »

sailfast wrote: post #145
noman-land wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have encountered people who are scared to post in large public channels. Part of growing up in chatrooms was an implicit bravery of saying something out loud in a room full of thousands of people. There seems to have been a shift, somewhat, in the comfort level of different generations about saying things "out loud" in large public rooms. Chatrooms have evolved in a really interesting way. I think the first generat…

The problem in my opinion is that folks afraid of posting treat chat channels like email and official record instead of a conversation. I like to post ideas, brainstorm, engage if I have a minute to respond to someone with a thought - kinda like being in an office - whereas many others seem to use it to blast out information after a lot of polish and they form a culture of announcements and no engagement, and get str…

> The problem in my opinion is that folks afraid of posting treat chat channels like email and official record instead of a conversation.

They would be right: HR will get access to everything you ever posted in a company chat if they have a reason to check. Some people don’t care, some… do.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#189

Post by saghm »

Aurornis wrote: post #169
_ea1k wrote: post #22

Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help. I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but…

> how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. IRC selects for people who like chatting and communicating via text. I think the mistake made with remote work was assuming that everyone could easily work that way. The best experiences I had with remote work were pre-COVID, when the teams working remote were carefully selected for having good remote work abilities and anyone who couldn’t handle it was kicked…

Doesn't this basically just apply the same assumption in reverse, that most people can work in an office equally well? So much of the discourse on this topic (from either side) seems to just boil down to generalizing ones own work experience as the norm and making inferences based on that. Maybe the reason it's so contentious is that people's experiences with remote versus in person work are not going to be expansive enough to be able to draw any conclusions about whether one of them is "better" for arbitrary groups of people, and we should just recognize that outside of teams one has personal experience with, we're just as likely to be incorrect as we are correct about how they'd work best.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#190

Post by Aeolun »

Aurornis wrote: post #169
_ea1k wrote: post #22

Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help. I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but…

> how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. IRC selects for people who like chatting and communicating via text. I think the mistake made with remote work was assuming that everyone could easily work that way. The best experiences I had with remote work were pre-COVID, when the teams working remote were carefully selected for having good remote work abilities and anyone who couldn’t handle it was kicked…

> Then something changed during COVID and remote work was treated as something everyone could do equally well.

I think the realization was more that some people are simply there, either at the office or at home. Of course the experiment worked fine. Those people were already not doing much. Not doing much in a different location makes no difference.

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