UTC is better than most, but leap seconds are still awful. Computers should use GPS or TAI everywhere. Dealing with time zones and leap seconds is for human readability and display purposes only.
And also, it’s actually a complicated question. A one-man boycott doesn’t do anything. If you work at a FAANG, work for a better world when you’re off, and go whistleblower when they do something really evil, I find no fault in that at all.
The other consideration is that pretty much every company you could work for as a software developer is going to try to take advantage of your work. Most companies are morally bad at best and morally terrible at worst. If you discourage any good person from working there, the problem will only snowball from there.
If working at FAANG gives you the resources to support things you’re passionate about, and you’re willing to stand up for your values when they do something bad, there isn’t a problem with that IMO.
My point wasn’t that FAANG isn’t exploitative (my bad if it came off that way, I didn’t mean for that), it’s that everywhere else is also exploitative to some degree (most probably less so than FAANG, there are definitely a few that are worse though), and that it could still be reasonable to work there for some people.
Bioinformatics isn’t used only for medical research or within big companies. Sub-topics like metagenomics, that are helpful in many areas of research, require high level of technical knowledge, that the life science people don’t have.
Agreed. Just working for somebody bad doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve given up, though. I mean, they made a movie about Schindler, and we all know who he worked for.
Why not? Unlike Schindler you don’t have to worry about how many beatings are necessary to keep up appearances, and you might have a specific role that exposes you to very little evil at all. Meanwhile, you can donate some of that big wage to people like EFF, or volunteer using the flexible schedule.
You can do all those things while also not supporting FAANG
Depends. If you can find another employer that’s more ethical (which is not guaranteed just because they’re smaller) and pays as much with as flexible a work schedule, yeah, you should probably do that. Otherwise it might indeed be necessary.
I don’t know, are we doing concequentialist ethics here, or deontological? I feel like we’ve reached the level of splitting hairs where we need to decide. For the purpose of actual advice people reading might follow, I’d say just try and be a good person, and don’t let perfect be the enemy of better.
And go bankrupt when something happens on the way to work because they slipped and fell on the ankle.
Thanks, but I’ll take lower pay over financial bankruptcy.
Yeah, that’s true. It amazes me how some of my team in NYC will make double what I make, but live like I lived when I was a student, and be amazed that I own a car.
I was kind of assuming that, since FAANG are American, but I’d guess they probably have foreign employees as well.
Canadians make pretty much the same as Europeans, I think. The Americans have a bunch of monopolies, and are characteristically weird and nationalist about who they share the spoils with. (I know, it’s not all of you guys, but it’s definitely some)
Nah. It doesn’t say not to plan. It says to prefer responding to change over planning. Which means both happen but responding to change is more crucial. Or put another way don’t let your plan get in the way of responding to change.
I’m sure you were being sarcastic, but I get kind of tired of the Agile strawman and people shitting on it. It’s not a complex philosophy yet people extrapolate so much (too much) and then get annoyed when their assumptions don’t pan out well. even performing sprints is an extrapolation, so this meme gets it wrong too.
It’s somewhat amusing how Itanium managed to completely miss the mark, and just how short its heyday was.
It’s also somewhat amusing that I’m still today helping host a pair of HPE Itanium blades - and two two-node DEC Alpha servers - for OpenVMS development.
My last job offered free beer after 4pm on fridays.
It was smart as fuck if you think about it. For the small price of a few crates of beer, you got 20+ people talking in their free time, and on the weekend, without additional pay. It was officially off-work but since most of your coworkers were there, there was a lot of work-related exchange going on.
I have to say, I’m getting more and more frustrated by the bad code I have to write due to bad business circumstances.
I want clean, readable code with proper documentation and at least a bit of internal consistency and not the shoehorned mess of hacks, todos and weird corner cases.
Don’t just put “TODO”. If they’re in the final pull request, they need to mention a ticket that’s intended to fix that TODO. If you/your team decides it’s not important, then remove it and close out the ticket. Either way, you’re required to do something with it.
This is such a perfect demonstration of how useless Microsoft’s ecosystem is. It’s better than being forced to work in an Apple exclusive environment but “we’re a windows shop” is one of the biggest red flags an employer can have.
NP, dude. As someone who learned JavaScript in the dark ages, when IE had to be a consideration for everything you did, writing a JS program now is trivial.
One floor of my office building is a very well known gaming company. They’ve been remote since I started my job in 2021, but they have started coming into the office recently. I’d say 75% of the people I’ve seen get off at that floor have appeared to me to be LGBT+.
I accidentally typed “git gud” one time and Steam notified that I have completed all achievements of Dark Souls 1-3 at the same time (I don’t even own the games)
One of my previous employers once told me (abridged)
It’s not like old times when we could slowly work to get a perfect result.
Nowadays, we need perfect results, fast.
They were asking me to do technical content writing for their website.
I quickly realised that it’s actually the threshold for calling something “perfect”, that has lowered over time.
Clearly, I was not fit for that work, because instead of just plagiarising and paraphrasing stuff from other websites, I insisted on reading up on material from multiple sources, understanding it well and then writing it down myself. That makes it pretty slow.
That was a year before ChatGPT, or I would just have used that thingy.
I agree. We’ve let the standards for what is good drop.
I think it’s mainly because the “just works” mentality has become infectious among engineers. It’s one thing when just starting out, but as you learn more and gain experience you should care more.
People do the designing and architecture and programming just because it all pays well, not because they have a love for the craft.
I think the second, slightly less strong reason is because many engineers do not know how to effectively communicate with management when something will result in terribly written software and just do it anyway. Another skill I see less and less amongst my brethren.
People do the designing and architecture and programming just because it all pays well, not because they have a love for the craft.
True.
I like programming and tend to pride myself in making good code, but when I see other’s attitude at work, it makes me reevaluate what I care about.
Perhaps this is the reason of the memetic difference between corporate code quality vs OSS code quality. When I contribute to Open Source (at least to other’s projects), I see myself try to be as considerate as possible of multiple factors that I wouldn’t even care of at work.
many engineers do not know how to effectively communicate with management when something will result in terribly written software and just do it anyway.
I imagine this is partly a result of bad and misinformed managers too though. There’s a lot out there who have 0 clue wtf you do, just that you make computer do thing yet still act like they know your job better than you
spoilerNot a programmer, but I see this all the time in other fields. And all it takes is someone in upper management only being focused on time or costs, or someone in middle management acting like they know better than everyone else.
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