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Fuck You Startup World

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Re: Fuck You Startup World

#71

Post by testudovictoria »

km3k wrote: post #39

This article explains well why I avoid startups. I've considered joining some, but always get turned off by the interview phase. The ones that bug me the most... > Fuck your crazy work hours In my opinion, if you're working crazy hours, you've already failed, likely due to poor management of the project. The only exception I see is if you don't really have a life outside work and are working on a project that you're…

>I want to get work done and move on with life, not play silly office games. Open space floor plans kill my focus.

I always found the people against cubicles but for open floor plans strange. In reality, it's pretty much impossible to build offices for every employee. Cubicles were supposed to be the fix for that. You have a open office with space and partitions to separate you from other people. Then someone said that open offices offer substantial collaboration for employees. The people who were drones in a cubicle farm bought into it, because I supposed it was a change from the Office Space type scenery.

But now all we get are interruptions with no recourse. We have desks that are fixed to other desks or desks that are clustered together where the only thing that separates you from your neighbor is your monitor. Everything is open, so now the collaboration areas (they're meeting areas, but calling it collaboration areas make it agile or some crap like that) aren't fully enclosed. Everyone in a 30 foot radius gets to sit in on the meeting as well!

From the other side, I get management types telling me to keep my voice down, because I'm disturbing the collaborators. Never mind that I'm trying to get work done by hammering out details with other devs and testers - their meeting that encroaches on my space in always more important. So much more important that their jokes, their laughs, their applause, their voices, and any other other form of noise have no upper noise limit. No sweat though, it's not like I'm working or anything.

Heaven forbid I do anything like open personal email, bank account info, etc. The person to my left, to my right, behind me, and that small cluster of 5 people in that collaboration area can see my screen as plain as day.

But cubicles are somehow terrible.

Re: Fuck You Startup World

#72

Post by Florin_Andrei »

testudovictoria wrote: post #71
km3k wrote: post #39

This article explains well why I avoid startups. I've considered joining some, but always get turned off by the interview phase. The ones that bug me the most... > Fuck your crazy work hours In my opinion, if you're working crazy hours, you've already failed, likely due to poor management of the project. The only exception I see is if you don't really have a life outside work and are working on a project that you're…

> I want to get work done and move on with life, not play silly office games. Open space floor plans kill my focus. I always found the people against cubicles but for open floor plans strange. In reality, it's pretty much impossible to build offices for every employee. Cubicles were supposed to be the fix for that. You have a open office with space and partitions to separate you from other people. Then someone said t…

> Then someone said that open offices offer substantial collaboration for employees.

> From the other side, I get management types telling me to keep my voice down, because I'm disturbing the collaborators.

> But cubicles are somehow terrible.

As someone who grew up in the Eastern Bloc, I find this kind of Doublethink almost... nostalgic? Ahhh, the good old days, when we were all following Dear Leader's flawless directives!

Re: Fuck You Startup World

#74

Post by bichiliad »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #36

> Fuck your crazy work hours. Yeah! > Fuck you drinking culture too. Yeah! > Fuck your open space floor plans Yeah! > Fuck the transparency trend, the post mortem and the 5 whys. Yea---wait, what? Those other things are reasonable complaints, but wondering why things go wrong and trying to stop them from going wrong for the same reason tomorrow is, you know, good.

To be fair, "5 whys" is more of a feel-good rule of thumb way to determine the root cause of errors, but it's rarely as effective as you'd think[1].

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys#Criticism

Re: Fuck You Startup World

#75

Post by ixtli »

ch4s3 wrote: post #63
ixtli wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, we (engineers) could all take a cue from workers of the past and organize to demand an end to abusive labor practices. Seriously guys, just because we're making 10x the salary of a miner doesn't mean we're not also generating 100x the money for our employers without being allowed to take part in decisions that effect our lives.

You probably aren't making 10x what a miner makes. Mine foremen make around 95K[1]. A regular miner makes somewhere in the range of 40k-55k. Do you make 400k as a software developer? I'm making a broader point here, in that you aren't as seperated from blue collar workers in terms of your economic interests as you may think. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=mine+sallaries&oq=mine+salla...

Huh. Didn't realize this.

Re: Fuck You Startup World

#76

Post by CobrastanJorji »

bichiliad wrote: post #74
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #36

> Fuck your crazy work hours. Yeah! > Fuck you drinking culture too. Yeah! > Fuck your open space floor plans Yeah! > Fuck the transparency trend, the post mortem and the 5 whys. Yea---wait, what? Those other things are reasonable complaints, but wondering why things go wrong and trying to stop them from going wrong for the same reason tomorrow is, you know, good.

To be fair, "5 whys" is more of a feel-good rule of thumb way to determine the root cause of errors, but it's rarely as effective as you'd think[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys#Criticism

I concur. Incidents have many causes and different levels of failures, and "5 Why" documents make it too easy to target an easy or politically convenient solution without needing to mention the other failings.

Postmortems in general are fantastic, though. "Here is what (not who, what) went wrong, here is the list of things that made it go wrong, and here are the steps we're taking to make sure that this can't happen again or will not be as bad when it happens again."

Re: Fuck You Startup World

#78

Post by Ezhik »

andrepd wrote: post #14

>I never had to shift a bit in a C array in my life! And I never got a compilation error on a white board, when I need an hash set in Java I just use HashSet- I don’t fucking care about the complexity of this code block because I can afford another EC2 instance! So fuck you. No, fuck you for making everything run so slow on our pocket and desktop supercomputers.

...I said, as I shared this article in a JavaScript-powered desktop team collaboration application, and went back to writing a JavaScript-powered server-side application in a JavaScript-powered text editor.

Re: Fuck You Startup World

#79

Post by jeffbax »

ch4s3 wrote: post #63
ixtli wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, we (engineers) could all take a cue from workers of the past and organize to demand an end to abusive labor practices. Seriously guys, just because we're making 10x the salary of a miner doesn't mean we're not also generating 100x the money for our employers without being allowed to take part in decisions that effect our lives.

You probably aren't making 10x what a miner makes. Mine foremen make around 95K[1]. A regular miner makes somewhere in the range of 40k-55k. Do you make 400k as a software developer? I'm making a broader point here, in that you aren't as seperated from blue collar workers in terms of your economic interests as you may think. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=mine+sallaries&oq=mine+salla...

Yeah, but you get to make it without hugely-out-of-your-control health complications. Developers can get fat eating a lot of pizza, but they can run it off. Harder for a miner to avoid all the hazards with the job. As much as I hate the open workspace, I also would prefer being at a computer than doing manual labor in a claustrophobic mine.

Re: Fuck You Startup World

#80

Post by cafard »

cmollis wrote: post #3

awesome. so awesome. (actually I did have to shift bits once in a C program..I did some AND'ing and OR'ing. I felt like a man.)

I think that I last had to shift bits in a C program back when WordPerfect (4.2 and 5.1) used an XOR cipher for encryption, and used bit-shifting and (I think) XOR-ing to give you a 16-bit key for quick rejection of bad passwords. (At least, I think that's what the key was for.)

On the other hand, I last read a book in a week last week. It was a novel, not very long or very complex; but it was a book and it took less than a week.

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