521–530 of 754 posts
One of the main sources of burnout if feeling that your work is meaningless and only benefits the company owners.
Even if we are unaware of it.
The advice of doing things you love as personal projects might not be enough.
Because pop-technology is void of any sort of spirit, culture or enthusiasm. It's all buzzwords, sale pitches and wheel reinventing put in a new wrapper and walled gardens. What restored faith in technology for me personally is libre software hacker movement. It's just so fun to enjoy technology without all of that fake sillicon valley culture. It's fun to _own_ technology and understand it and be able to hack it and…
Interesting is that I got the opposite experience. As all the libre stuff I have been working on started to be used and contributed to by the very forces it tried to destroy. Why is it so great to work on free software when it ends up being used to sell more AWS subscriptions and by some Facebook library to sell more ads I realized libre movement is a mirage.... you cannot change the capitalist forces by writing a bu…
Libre software is more fun to work with because you own it; it's open it's free and has community of people working on it. It's not some bits in the cloud that do stuff when you click a button and the only power you have is support email that will be replied by a robot — it's an actual open project that you can feel. Even if you are not a programmer you can hire someone to create change for you.
Sure sometimes it's ugly, and sometimes there's conflict; sometimes it's insufficient and out-dated but it's much more spiritually empowering when you own the software and have the freedoms that come with libre software.
It's much easier to enjoy technology when it's actually there.
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All accurate and objective and good for everyone to know early rather than late. Moving a bit further from the specifics, it's worth noting that this is not a natural state of affairs. Humans evolved to be in groups of about 30-100 people who they knew their whole lives and thus making catastrophic deception nearly impossible. Likewise vast sums of wealth did not exist nor total social and fiscal isolation surrounded…
I agree with the OP comment, and also with this one. It is important to understand two things in coping with the state of the world in my opinion. 1) The reality is you need to find validation and fulfilment outside of work, because in our current society you are just a drone. 2) Don't be depressed because it seems like this is how it's always been. It hasn't. Our work culture is broken. People never used to be so fa…
Alternatively, it extends the reach of companies further into the home environment, and may exacerbate the existing trend for people not to switch off, which in turn makes it harder to achieve a good life-work balance. Imagine having a pressurised call-centre type role from home. Some people may feel greater pressure to appear 'corporate' in the home environment, others might not mind their kids or cats interrupting a Zoom meeting. Not everyone can create a suitable WFH environment in a nice spare room.
Whether this actually happens depends on corporate culture, the personalities and goals of the managers and employees, whether a crunch is on, and many other factors. But I'm not convinced that a tighter integration between work and home is necessarily always going to be a positive, from a mental health perspective.
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I agree with the OP comment, and also with this one. It is important to understand two things in coping with the state of the world in my opinion. 1) The reality is you need to find validation and fulfilment outside of work, because in our current society you are just a drone. 2) Don't be depressed because it seems like this is how it's always been. It hasn't. Our work culture is broken. People never used to be so fa…
> Working the land, being close to home, running a family business, belonging to a small town of people you all known, having the social safety net of many people that are close to you and your family, being an independent contributor in the town's economy, etc. etc. This is how things were a few hundred years ago. Let’s not overglamorize rural poverty. This life came with 20–40% infant mortality and a very high rate…
> The local nobles took every liberty with peasants: robbery, beatings as sport, rape, murder. The roads between towns were plagued with bandits.
You are cherry-picking examples that are in no way representative of the life of most humans.
Plenty of evidence shows otherwise.
I'm having similar issues, and i think i found a way out: stop playing their game. Don't make enterprise software. Don't write unit tests. Don't accept pull requests. Simply write software for yourself and have fun doing it. Forget refactoring code into modules, just fucking code. Don't worry about deployment with k8s, just copy the Python script to your production folder and run it. Fuck all that shit about git bran…
Thats exactly what i did while working on dreaded big data. Got myself a microcontroller, implemented a small arm console and write fucking low level C code optimized the heck of cpu cycles for tiny games, no code reuse, no interfaced, no deadlines, no refacto, no security, no network, no politics. Barely version control (with appropriate "update" commit messages). Kept me sane while doing those things at work.
- Implement a CPU and peripherals in an FPGA
- Throw together an OS
- Make a handheld game console
Why? Because it would be fun to remind myself of the "first principals" (not talking physics here) and play around with it.
For now, I'm playing around with Raylib [0] and Allegro [1] which are C game libraries.
Do you have a link to your console hardware?
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This is something I see people railing against all the time here. I'm young and new to the industry so I've never experienced anything other than open-plan offices. So maybe I just don't know what I'm missing out on but the idea of private offices/cubicles is really unappealing to me. I really like collaboration spaces, being able to see people's faces, being social, bouncing ideas off each other, pair programming et…
Back when I had a cubicle, I had a second chair and a white board in my cube, and people would come for a visit when they wanted to talk about something, and we'd draw on the whiteboard, and we were social and bouncing ideas off each other. Now, I'm in an open floor plan office, and when the guy who sits literally next to me wants to talk to me, he sends me something over slack. I think people don't want to disturb e…
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That sounds complicated. Though I'm not sure if this is a valid example to counter my view. I can't comment on the exact situation you went through. It could be that that complexity was a side effect of having to solve far more complex and frequent issues more easily as opposed to doing simpler and rarer things more easily (unless of course changing button colours is a frequent modification). It's also possible that…
No it wasn't! That's the whole point. What some people consider to be "good engineering" is a different set of standards , a different set of qualifiers . Let's go back to 2012. I was yet again doing web stuff. We had this hodgepodge of jasmine, junit, eslint and selenium and couldn't commit unless it all passed But the tests broke more then the code itself, because it was . So more time was spent on fixing and babys…
I don't mean, dogmatically follow unit tests (actually my statement wasn't predicated on unit tests). If you have a better approach that can validate the software is correct then I'm all ears. If you have a better collaboration tool than git, I'd be happy to try it. With all due respect, what I can't do is take your word for it that you can build software that works (covers all functional and non functional specs), and they continue to work as more code is added, and is worked on by more than one or two developers, and that you can continue to validate and roll out more software over the years even when the original developers aren't around. It's difficult, costly. It can work, it's just not the best way. The industry will evolve and come up with better tools and processes than we have today as we did before yesterday. Only thing I took from the couple examples you gave is that you've had the misfortune of working in some terrible teams. Though I still don't see how you'd be better off without the rest of the usual practices we have today. The guys who couldn't code the tests, I can't imagine them building a non trivial software well either. I'm not defending any one process. I just don't agree that we don't need any process, and that we should just write code that (seems to) works.
Always assume money brings out the worst. Always assume your relationships will change. Life becomes easier.
Because pop-technology is void of any sort of spirit, culture or enthusiasm. It's all buzzwords, sale pitches and wheel reinventing put in a new wrapper and walled gardens. What restored faith in technology for me personally is libre software hacker movement. It's just so fun to enjoy technology without all of that fake sillicon valley culture. It's fun to _own_ technology and understand it and be able to hack it and…
Interesting is that I got the opposite experience. As all the libre stuff I have been working on started to be used and contributed to by the very forces it tried to destroy. Why is it so great to work on free software when it ends up being used to sell more AWS subscriptions and by some Facebook library to sell more ads I realized libre movement is a mirage.... you cannot change the capitalist forces by writing a bu…
Instead of providing libre computing all the way to the end users, many developers are writing unpaid applications and libraries that will be locked down into some devices or SaaS.
> I realized libre movement is a mirage....
No, the mirage is to think that we either fix the whole world in two decades or the fight is lost.
> you cannot change the capitalist forces by writing a bunch of software
Every single bit counts and makes a shift.
Because pop-technology is void of any sort of spirit, culture or enthusiasm. It's all buzzwords, sale pitches and wheel reinventing put in a new wrapper and walled gardens. What restored faith in technology for me personally is libre software hacker movement. It's just so fun to enjoy technology without all of that fake sillicon valley culture. It's fun to _own_ technology and understand it and be able to hack it and…
> Because pop-technology is void of any sort of spirit, culture or enthusiasm. It's all buzzwords, sale pitches and wheel reinventing put in a new wrapper and walled gardens. This is sad but true, though. Those buzzwords are marketing techniques, and those riding the trains of trends and buzzwords are the one getting the spotlight because human naturally follow blings and other human attentions are indeed power. It's…
It's in the spirit of "look at this cool thing you can do".
I'm sure you're familiar with free(libre) software already and "libre hacking" is just that - some relatively useless fun programs or tools that people share under libre license.
My favorite example that I use every day would be doge[1] project that just prints a doge meme based on your terminal history whenever you startup your terminal. It has no real purpose other than make you smile an appreciate technology from the novelty point of view.