311–320 of 808 posts
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Agile is like dieting, simple but hard and requiring a lot of discipline. Very very few companies are any good at it but done well, it's a complete transformation.
I think it's more like a cult, where it's supposed to solve all your problems and any problem you identify with it just proves you aren't doing it right.
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You're 100% right but also 100% wrong. Like I said before you're viewing it from the perspective of a developer but not from the perspective of a Business person. Instead of saying `Users cannot sing up if everything is broken` you need to see it from a Business perspective, and communicate it to them in the language they understand. For example, `From our quarterly earnings report we need to have 10,0000 new clients…
So we just have to do their job as well as our job?
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You're 100% right but also 100% wrong. Like I said before you're viewing it from the perspective of a developer but not from the perspective of a Business person. Instead of saying `Users cannot sing up if everything is broken` you need to see it from a Business perspective, and communicate it to them in the language they understand. For example, `From our quarterly earnings report we need to have 10,0000 new clients…
The corollary here that it is perfectly acceptable for business users to not understand significant parts of their own business operations. In fact, everybody should work around your shortcomings in understanding that "technical" stuff. As the guy with the MBA, you are the most important person in the room and everybody else is there to serve you.
Another way to think of it is as of user acquisition problem. You have to highlight the benefits in a way that is compelling to them. At the end of a day all progress/fiascos in a company comes down to consistent and effective communication.
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It's a race to the bottom. You could pay more for better work that gets done more slowly (fewer hours as people have families, etc,) or you could pay less for worse work that gets done more quickly. Well, iOS11 needs to ship on its annual schedule, non-negotiable. And the SVP will really complain if I ask for more money this quarter. So, cheap it is. If a bridge falls down, it's really obvious and people die. If bill…
If billions of computers become vulnerable to malicious actors and a few hundred or thousand people suffer dramatic personal damages, well that's a nice and quiet problem which will be quickly forgotten in the 24-hour news cycle. This. I do development coaching and training. I’m totally burned out because my job doesn’t matter. These companies don’t care. They hire me to “increase code quality” but that ends up being…
I've friends at ReliaQuest and I know it is a good company, but I am frustrated that the leadership at Equifax thinks that security is a minor issue that they can outsource to a 3rd party. If a company deals with sensitive financial data, shouldn't security be a core competence?
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The rate of change of technological progress is increasing, and many people just have a tendency to... crystallize. Experienced people of any age who can adapt well to change have no trouble getting a job.
My advice to graybeards: when somebody is excited about a new technology XYZ, don't say "oh, we did that 20 years ago and called it ABC". It annoys people, because generally XYZ has important differences that prevent ABC from being a drop-in replacement. Instead you can say "that reminds me of a similar concept we used to implement using ABC", and quietly appreciate that you got a leg up in understanding because of y…
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What would happen in the physical world with, say, a classified ad in a newspaper? It's on the poster of the ad to follow the law, not the paper, is it not?
Craigslist routinely takes down discriminatory housing and job ads and have been doing that at least since I started using it around 2005.
And I generally agree. The authorities should be going after the perpetrators, not the neutral platform.
The discriminators will learn what it feels like someday.
It doesn't make sense to me to discriminate against people with more experience. Can someone explain it to me? I have heard that companies like recent grads because they are (1) more malleable and (2) can be paid less. But neither of those reasons seem to me strong enough. I'm talking completely about the company's own interests. Let's address the first reason: malleability. A recent grad presumably will adopt the co…
Older employees are significantly more expensive for your employer provided health insurance in the US. Not sure how that translates to bigger co's but it's significant for small firms.
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The topic of your rant is something that it took me forever to accept as a software engineer. Nobody cares about quality. Your method is refactored to be super-fast and have no branches? Nobody cares. Elegant, re-usable architecture? Nobody cares. You've optimized an inner loop in assembly and increased speed by 30%? Nobody cares. Made it to zero compiler warnings? Nobody cares. No known crashers left in the bug trac…
I agree with you, and this is a hard lesson to learn. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. Software should really only be measured by the value it provides. If a terribly buggy piece of poorly written code still saves hundreds of man hours a week, it's a win. (Unit tests be damned) If that big ball of mud that's using 20 year old technology still prints a billion dollars a year - that's a win. (Microservic…