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I don’t belong in tech

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Re: I don’t belong in tech

#191

Post by s_q_b »

karmajunkie wrote: post #182
s_q_b wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is never right to attribute negative characteristics to an entire race or gender. Anyone who does so under any circumstances will find me speaking in opposition. -------------- EDIT in Reply: 1. Your comment is, however unintentionally, quite interesting. Never have I seen someone so self-righteously accuse another of self-righteousness. The closest analogy I can devise is an infinite regression of ignorance, a pe…

> Never have I seen someone so self-righteously accuse another of self-righteousness. Either you don't hang around HN much or you're just prone to hyperbole. > Overt racism is a heuristic I use to determine whether to take a person's other viewpoints seriously I'm curious whether it was the tacit acknowledgement of the dominance of white males in technology or some other device in the writing which triggers this refl…

1. Both.

2. The "dominant" vs. oppressed false diachotamy gives you away as an ideologue with whom I cannot have a productive discussion. At one time or another we are all the oppressed and we are all the dominant.

This ridiculous caste system isn't some static hierarchy that was ordained by God or an inevitability of our history. Race, class, and gender are societal constructions which must be actively sustained to survive. Yet you insist on utilizing the very same categories drawn by racists, which only reinforces the persistence of hierarchy you claim to despise.

Finally, dismissing every contrary argument by attributing identity-based motives to your opponent is facile. Categorizing all those who disagree with you as stooges of some eternal shadowy "dominant" cabal is the exact type of unscientific babble that constitutes every conspiracy theory.

Most importantly, it is also a very convenient way to turn every argument into an ad hominem based on the race/gender of the speaker.

This is what happened:

I read a post written by someone who broadly stereotyped millions of people in a racial and gendered fashion, and I raised an objection. It was very simple.

The question is, why are you so desperate to make this about "white male dominance"? This is about what the author stated.

Is it because you realize your vacuous arguments cannot stand on their own merits, or because you are too insecure to confront the intellectually arid world view which you clutch like a safety blanket? Or do you merely think that the "dominant" persons (as determined by you) simply have no right to a voice at all?

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#192

Post by chris_wot »

Illniyar wrote: post #172
Slartie wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, so maybe THAT is the reason why one of our customers had funny cases of thousands of his customers being double-billed on card payments by the payment processing provider! As a developer (of the cash register software, which wasn't at fault in this case), I was kinda amused by the whole thing. But I can assure you, the higher-up business people weren't amused at all.

Heh. We had tons of double billing from payment processors, we never could get a straight answer from the gateway as to why it happened. Most of them came from.a gateway called CyberSource. Also, lots of customers have weird banks where they see both an authorization (I.e. hold) and the actual capture, and they mistake it for two captures. Usually it helps to educate them about what is an authorization.

Man, a bank that doesn't know the difference is a bank I'd be withdrawing my funds from!

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#193

Post by chris_wot »

tptacek wrote: post #156
d0100 wrote: post #82

Anyone else bothered by her phrasing of "he’s trying to be helpful" followed by "Bless his little heart"? Why would anyone publicly address their SO in such a patronizing way? This just bothered me more than it should.

You're right: it bothered you more than it should. We should leave strangers to their own relationships; they're not for us to litigate.

I was forced to look beyond those comments to try to understand the substance of the article. It bothered me, too. In fact, the author makes some great points, but ultimately I found that if you remove the emotion from this article it led to someone complaining they want to do things the right way, the first time. That's admirable, but the attitude behind it is that nobody in tech does this and the author is incredibly badly misunderstood by everyone in IT.

That annoyed me in The Fountainhead, and it bothers me in this prose also.

I think there is a big difference between being bothered by someone's comments and litigating them :-)

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#194

Post by magnetic »

Illniyar wrote: post #176
Slartie wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, so maybe THAT is the reason why one of our customers had funny cases of thousands of his customers being double-billed on card payments by the payment processing provider! As a developer (of the cash register software, which wasn't at fault in this case), I was kinda amused by the whole thing. But I can assure you, the higher-up business people weren't amused at all.

If your using Java, there's a popular apache http framework[0] that automatically retries a failed request unless you specifically instruct it not to. That bit us in the A$$ with double payments a few times. 0- https://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-ga/httpclient/ap...

If you rely on http to ensure the one-and-only-one type of paradigm, I have bad news for you (because you won't be able to distinguish failure vs success case when you hit a timeout: did it not receive the request or did I not receive the ack?).

You should embed a transaction ID to ensure idempotence of your API call. Then you can make the request 1, 2 or 3 times without any risk. The receiving end will realize the transaction ID already transitioned state and won't cause multiple payments to occur.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#195

Post by combatentropy »

The writer complains about the tech industry and anticipates any replies. Her tone is feisty. She cites general scenarios as proof, and by the end she is inconsolable. After years of experience, I think she is the kind of person who somehow attracts you to help her but who will stab you in the chest when you try.

It sounds like she has had a few experiences that wounded her deeply, and she has decided to protect herself by closing up. But I think her experience is limited. There are places you can work that let you craft great code. They typically are not in the tech industry as she defines it, "companies and professionals who view code as a core part of their business and their self-understanding, both internally and externally." And I'm not sure she will find a company that actually encourages good code, only one that gives her space to code how she wants --- not because they appreciate good code but because they don't understand it. Their programming team is a black box, and whatever estimate you give they have to just have to accept, like when your mechanic or your doctor tells you it will take such-and-such.

I would advise her to look for a job where tech is an ancillary part of the business, perhaps a programmer at a hospital, college, or niche-but-profitable industry. Or, as others here have suggested, working more on back end than web front end. No matter where, she still should ask lots and lots of questions of the company, preferably of the employees themselves if she can get a hold of them. There are pockets of good, but like anything in the world they are diamonds in the rough, and you have to do some digging to discover them.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#196

Post by wycats »

tptacek wrote: post #8
dublinben wrote: post #2

The writer sounds like a crippling perfectionist. The world isn't perfect, and neither is any real program. It's an important step in your personal development to recognize and deal with that. Perhaps they would be happier as a designer, where they can make everything fit into perfectly neat boxes.

Or maybe they'd just rather do computer science than software development. There are lots of branches of technology work that prize understanding over shipping.

Shipping without understand is no virtue, and as far as I can tell, there's no hard conflict between the two.

The entire official story of "lean" is "build, measure, learn", which is fundamentally about developing a process for shipping while deepening an understanding.

The hermeneutic circle (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutic_circle) cited by Dave Herman of Mozilla Research and Brendan Eich (about JavaScript) is a process of iteration that prizes a deepening understanding interleaved with lessons learned from shipping.

I didn't interpret the OP to be saying that she wanted to gain a perfect understanding before shipping, but rather that she preferred a style that focused more than the tech community average on deepening understanding.

And I don't think she needs to go to a different branch of technology to get that. Maybe app development needs more of it.

Steve Jobs famously talked about the interplay between understanding and building: https://wycats.svbtle.com/theres-a-tremendous-amount-of-craf....

I think we could do worse than to think about this topic more.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#197

Post by Illniyar »

magnetic wrote: post #194
Illniyar wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your using Java, there's a popular apache http framework[0] that automatically retries a failed request unless you specifically instruct it not to. That bit us in the A$$ with double payments a few times. 0- https://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-ga/httpclient/ap...

If you rely on http to ensure the one-and-only-one type of paradigm, I have bad news for you (because you won't be able to distinguish failure vs success case when you hit a timeout: did it not receive the request or did I not receive the ack?). You should embed a transaction ID to ensure idempotence of your API call. Then you can make the request 1, 2 or 3 times without any risk. The receiving end will realize the t…

Obviously. But youd be surprised, some gateways don't let you send your own transactionId. Or at least they ignored it for determining duplicate requests. Though that was several years ago.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#198

Post by khedoros1 »

morgante wrote: post #36
jameshart wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today's "quick MVP we can incrementally improve" is tomorrow's "unmaintainable legacy codebase." But sure, it'll be different this time.

Legacy codebases make money. The engineer anxiety about them is myopic and ignorant of business realities. If you can code something quickly and well enough that it doesn't immediately collapse under its own weight, you have succeeded. The fact that a codebase has existed long enough to become "legacy" means it did a good enough job to stay alive.

> If you can code something quickly and well enough that it doesn't immediately collapse under its own weight, you have succeeded.

Well, yeah, for the first version. But when is the first version also the last one? Not in many good situations. Crap that doesn't immediately collapse under its own weight will probably immediately collapse as soon as you add more weight to it in version 2.

A lack of anxiety about the structure of the product is myopic and ignorant of engineering realities. There's got to be a balance. Too little anxiety, and you lose customers to competitors that spent more time to build a quality product, structured so that it's easier to grow. Too much anxiety, and you're in a "perfect is the enemy of good" situation, and you'll lose customers to competitors that were able to iterate faster and with a proper balance.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#199

Post by karmajunkie »

s_q_b wrote: post #191
karmajunkie wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Never have I seen someone so self-righteously accuse another of self-righteousness. Either you don't hang around HN much or you're just prone to hyperbole. > Overt racism is a heuristic I use to determine whether to take a person's other viewpoints seriously I'm curious whether it was the tacit acknowledgement of the dominance of white males in technology or some other device in the writing which triggers this refl…

1. Both. 2. The "dominant" vs. oppressed false diachotamy gives you away as an ideologue with whom I cannot have a productive discussion. At one time or another we are all the oppressed and we are all the dominant. This ridiculous caste system isn't some static hierarchy that was ordained by God or an inevitability of our history. Race, class, and gender are societal constructions which must be actively sustained to…

>> You deliberately manipulated your audience by playing on their fears of being deemed discriminatory, their anxiety over real ethnic tensions, and perhaps most egregiously, you intentionally encouraged gender stereotyping of women for your own purpose of obtaining attention.

> The question is, why are you so desperate to make this about "white male dominance"? This is about what the author stated.

You were the one who came out of the gate gunning for that argument. The author merely referenced her own early misgivings about her place in the industry, which were (and remain) entirely valid, especially considering the piece was about her own experience.

Using a lot of words to say the same thing repetitively doesn't make your argument any stronger. It just makes it a little harder to parse.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#200

Post by s_q_b »

karmajunkie wrote: post #199
s_q_b wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Both. 2. The "dominant" vs. oppressed false diachotamy gives you away as an ideologue with whom I cannot have a productive discussion. At one time or another we are all the oppressed and we are all the dominant. This ridiculous caste system isn't some static hierarchy that was ordained by God or an inevitability of our history. Race, class, and gender are societal constructions which must be actively sustained to…

>> You deliberately manipulated your audience by playing on their fears of being deemed discriminatory, their anxiety over real ethnic tensions, and perhaps most egregiously, you intentionally encouraged gender stereotyping of women for your own purpose of obtaining attention. > The question is, why are you so desperate to make this about "white male dominance"? This is about what the author stated. You were the one…

My position is stated. I only debate in good faith.
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