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Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

mattwynne.net

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Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#31

Post by yebyen »

rgblambda wrote: post #29
sverhagen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that often the fate of Cucumber(-like) projects: you start with the promise of high abstractions that the whole company can work with or reason about, you invest a bunch of time to bridge the gap to the underlying implementation, then it turns out that those business folks aren't really interested in it, so developers hold the bag, and bridging the abstraction gap becomes a cost with little benefit?

>then it turns out that those business folks aren't really interested in it It's weird how business folks can just go "nope not doing that" to a process that was created to give them more say and doesn't make sense without them.

I guess they're used to getting their way regardless of whatever language they express it in. After all, "holding the bag"? Developers are certainly holding one kind of bag, but since we're already talking about Cucumber, I don't think that expression necessarily means the same thing to all people.

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#32

Post by regularfry »

ludovicianul wrote: post #20
UweSchmidt wrote: post #7

I have used Cucumber in various projects, but haven't yet had the pleasure of seeing it all work out. - No one wanted to "collaborate", or check a "documentation" based on the Cucumber code . Yes, it's code, it lives in an IDE, in git, and non-technical folks just generally don't deal with that world. No one in my projects ever even brought such an idea up. Non-technical folks looked at our Cucumber code as in "what…

This is why we need better tools which will give benefits for the added complexity. If you need to create both the feature files AND the code, it's just complexity with little benefits. But frameworks like https://github.com/karatelabs/karate or https://github.com/Endava/cats are hiding this complexity and remove the code layer entirely. Which, in my view, this is where you need to be in 2023, particularly for API te…

I'd completely disagree. Not necessarily for cats, which I wasn't previously aware of, but in my experience there's no benefit to having karate in the mix.

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#33

Post by nemo44x »

ceejayoz wrote: post #30
Gigachad wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens outside of America. I believe it’s to avoid the risk of the employee maliciously causing damage after being given the news.

Yes, but in the US, pay usually stops immediately when the login stops working. In much of the developed world there's a guaranteed notice period and severance, and often limitations on what situations you can fire for.

Generally pay is tremendously higher in the USA. Tech companies, although not compelled to, grant severances if you aren’t “fired for cause”. Also in most other places you have to give like a 3 month notice if you want to quit.

It’s frustrating hiring Europeans for this reason but at least they are significantly cheaper to pay than in the USA.

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#34

Post by Dalewyn »

rqtwteye wrote: post #24
Dayshine wrote: post #15

The American way of firing people with no notice and cutting off their logins instantly is so strange. Is saving a tiny bit of money that much more important than a smooth handover? Or are employees just not willing to work their notice periods? It sounds like in this case it's actively going to hurt the business.

There is also paranoia. A lot of people believe that a laid off employee will immediately go against the company and do some kind of sabotage or leak secrets.

It's not exactly paranoia given there have been many examples of the fear becoming true.

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#35

Post by bluGill »

rr888 wrote: post #26
UweSchmidt wrote: post #7

I have used Cucumber in various projects, but haven't yet had the pleasure of seeing it all work out. - No one wanted to "collaborate", or check a "documentation" based on the Cucumber code . Yes, it's code, it lives in an IDE, in git, and non-technical folks just generally don't deal with that world. No one in my projects ever even brought such an idea up. Non-technical folks looked at our Cucumber code as in "what…

We tried it once and the semi-tech SMEs had no desire to write cucumber code so it ended up being the developers who hated writing in a second language. No real benefit.

The ideas behind BDD are sound, but I've never seen it work out in the real world.

In reality we as programmers need to turn what the stakeholders want into code. They will talk in meetings: we better take notes. They will write things down [in English or whatever language they speak], but it won't be code. There will be conflicting requirements, and we as programmers need to understand the topic well enough to make reasonable decisions on the easy stuff, while going back on the harder stuff - easy and hard is as the decision makes see things not as a programmer sees them: better know that too.

Once you figure out what stakeholders want turn it into code. It is useful to have integration tests for scenarios that they care about (some of them are stupid - the last version of an embedded product I worked in had a 5 length array, and it turns out some customers needed 7, and later analysis proved that 7 was the mathematical max anyone would ever want. The current version is C++ using a vector so the potential length is unlimited (limited by free memory), but we still have a test proving 7 works because the mistake in the past burned enough people)

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#36

Post by bluGill »

pydry wrote: post #25
sverhagen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that often the fate of Cucumber(-like) projects: you start with the promise of high abstractions that the whole company can work with or reason about, you invest a bunch of time to bridge the gap to the underlying implementation, then it turns out that those business folks aren't really interested in it, so developers hold the bag, and bridging the abstraction gap becomes a cost with little benefit?

I find that the "gherkin" syntax is not really expressive enough to express requirements in a way that is interesting for the business. The business therefore always loses interest.

It is great for removing ambiguity, but business executives don't want to think on that level any more than they have to.

It is terrible for simplifying things. Most people really know "I want ta safe self driving car", they don't want to figure out when it is acceptable to hit a kid on the road (think gory video games were people throw babies in front of your car for one case where it would be acceptable).

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#37

Post by bluGill »

ceejayoz wrote: post #30
Gigachad wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens outside of America. I believe it’s to avoid the risk of the employee maliciously causing damage after being given the news.

Yes, but in the US, pay usually stops immediately when the login stops working. In much of the developed world there's a guaranteed notice period and severance, and often limitations on what situations you can fire for.

Laid off in the US generally implies there is some severance pay. We do not get any details, but I would assume he gets some severance pay that he isn't talking about (he probably cannot, and it is possible given the details that he doesn't even know yet)

There is fired for cause cases where the login stops working at the same time as your pay stop, but for cause means you screwed up, and your pay probably should have stopped several months ago but it took time to investigate to ensure you really were that bad.

Granted small companies will often say "sorry we are out of money, don't come back Monday".

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#38

Post by rom-antics »

Dalewyn wrote: post #34
rqtwteye wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also paranoia. A lot of people believe that a laid off employee will immediately go against the company and do some kind of sabotage or leak secrets.

It's not exactly paranoia given there have been many examples of the fear becoming true.

In this case it was one of the founders of the company. If you can't trust the founders, who can you trust?

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#39

Post by willcipriano »

Dalewyn wrote: post #34
rqtwteye wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also paranoia. A lot of people believe that a laid off employee will immediately go against the company and do some kind of sabotage or leak secrets.

It's not exactly paranoia given there have been many examples of the fear becoming true.

Has it not happened in Europe for some reason?
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