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HamsterRage

@ HamsterRage @lemmy.ca

Posts
3
Comments
81
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Why Great Engineering Orgs Thrive on "Normal" Engineers

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  • In the very first real programmer job that had, back in 1986, the IT department estimated that they had a 51 man-year backlog of development work. That would have translated to two or three calendar years of work. Probably more, considering how crappy estimates always are, and the always under-estimate.

    It turns out that this is pretty much the industry standard. Virtually ever place I worked for the next 35 years had a similar size of backlog. And that backlog isn't standing still, either. All you can hope is that 3 more years worth of new requests don't come in during the two years it takes to complete what you already have.

    Some of those new things are going to have a higher priority than stuff that's already in the backlog. The reality is that some item that's down at the low end of the list is going to get bumped down, again and again, and never get done. Or it's going to someday become an urgent priority that can't wait any more.

    So the pressure is always intense for the developers to go faster, faster, faster. And the business doesn't understand or care about good engineering practices, even though the shit hits the fan when a critical bug gets released to production. And God help you if that backlog of 51 man-years has grown to 70 after a year because of the technical debt you introduced trying to go faster.

    The fight to rein in scope is constant. At that first job, the head of the department told us, "to build Volkswagens, not Cadillacs". It was laughable, because they were struggling to keep up while building Skodas.

    You can't just add more programmers because the productive backbone of the development team is a group of programmers that have all been there for at least 5 years and they are domain experts. It's going take at least 5 years to bring new hires up to that level of knowledge.

    And that's all three sides of the project triangle: scope/quality, resources and time. You can't meaningfully add resources, scope's already stripped down to bare bones and the time is too long.

    And the truth is that every one of those projects in that 51 man-years backlog is important, even critical, to some aspect of the business. But the development process is unfathomable to muggles, so can't you just go faster? Can't you wring a bit more productivity out of those domain experts?

  • What's your favorite thing to come out of Monty Python?

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  • "My nipples explode with orgasmic delight".

  • The Right Skills

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  • Except I'm not actually talking about spelling, per se, but about attention to detail. Spelling errors in a resume is just sloppy rubbish.

  • The Right Skills

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  • As an IT/Development manager, I only had one role that I hired for where the skills for getting the job matched the skills for doing the job: Business Analyst. Not job entailed presenting information clearly, both written and verbally. So I expected the resume and cover letter to be organized and clear.

    Programmers, on the other hand, I wouldn't expect the same level of polish. But I would expect a complete absence of spelling errors and typos. Because in programming these things count -- a lot.

    A lot of the people that applied, and that I hired, did not have English as a first language. So I gave a lot of latitude with regard to word selection and grammar. But not spelling. Use a goofy word or two, but spell them right.

    I figured that most people were highly motivated when writing a resume -- about an motivated on you can get. And if not level of motivation cannot get you to take care, then you'll just be a bug creation machine if I let you touch my codebase.

  • To Americans of Lemmy: What food item(s) from Europe can you not live without?

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  • Proper pickled onions and Branston pickle.

  • To Americans of Lemmy: What food item(s) from Europe can you not live without?

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  • Bob's Red Mill makes an adequate substitute. It's not as uniform as McCann, but it is good.

  • Australia moves to ban billionaires from buying elections

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  • Nope. Collusion is not allowed.

  • Australia moves to ban billionaires from buying elections

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  • The PACs aren't the issue, it's that they are allowed unlimited spending. In Canada, where I live, third party spending is capped at $350K per registered partisan group.

  • Self-documenting Code

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  • The reason for leaving in the password.trim() would be one of the few things that I would ever document with a comment.

  • Can I offer you a tan egg?

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  • What about the Nutria? Literally named like it's food!

  • When can we expect 500TB drives to be available?

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  • This is true, but.....

    Moore's Law can be thought of as an observation about the exponential growth of technology power per $ over time. So yeah, not Moore's Law, but something like it that ordinary people can see evolving right in front of their eyes.

    So a $40 Raspberry Pi today runs benchmarks 4.76 times faster than a multimillion dollar Cray supercomputer from 1978. Is that Moore's Law? No, but the bang/$ curve probably looks similar to it over those 30 years.

    You can see a similar curve when you look at data transmission speed and volume per $ over the same time span.

    And then for storage. Going from 5 1/4" floppy disks, or effing cassette drives, back on the earliest home computers. Or the round tapes we used to cart around when I started working in the 80's which had a capacity of around 64KB. To micro SD cards with multi-terabyte capacity today.

    Same curve.

    Does anybody care whether the storage is a tape, or a platter, or 8 platters, or circuitry? Not for this purpose.

    The implication of, "That's not Moore's Law", is that the observation isn't valid. Which is BS. Everyone understands that that the true wonderment is how your Bang/$ goes up exponentially over time.

    Even if you're technical you have to understand that this factor drives the applications.

    Why aren't we all still walking around with Sony Walkmans? Because small, cheap hard drives enabled the iPod. Why aren't we all still walking around with iPods? Because cheap data volume and speed enabled streaming services.

    While none of this involves counting transistors per inch on a chip, it's actually more important/interesting than Moore's Law. Because it speaks to how to the power of the technology available for everyday uses is exploding over time.

  • Avoiding if-else Hell: The Functional Style

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  • You might want to think about it a bit more before putting it to work. The comment with the streams example is far, far better.

  • GOP sues to block voters in key battleground state from fixing ballot errors: report

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  • I think that the idea is that more Dems use mail-in ballots than Reps. Hand in hand with tactics like restricting the number of polling stations in minority neighborhoods, it's just another component of putting their thumb on the scale.

  • Trump is 'hanging himself' with his own rope as campaign spirals out of control: analyst

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  • My question is how much "likely" translates to "voted". It seems easy to respond, "Yes", when asked on the phone, but requires a bit more enthusiasm to actually go stand in line and cast a vote.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Actually...yes. At least for the "war criminal". I think the point is that you can't hide your inner feelings from the feather. So if you genuinely, in the deepest depths of your heart, have no qualms about bombing civilians then you're fine.

    I think this points out the fundamental relativistic nature of morality and how the feather copes with it. Everyone has some sort of moral compass, and the feather measures how true you were to it. And really, what more can you ask of anyone? Decide, for yourself, what is right and what is wrong and stick to it.

    Putting aside the fact that a toddler probably lacks the intellectual or emotional development to have a truely personal morality, I cannot imagine that someone who "broods" all their life over kicking a kitten when they were three is anything other than the nicest most moral person you'll ever meet. I don't think that have any trouble with Anubis and Thoth.

  • TIL the theme to Sanford and Son has lyrics. And they were sung by Ella Fitzgerald

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  • TIL the theme to Sanford and Son has lyrics. And they were sung by Ella Fitzgerald

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  • Also, the final note on the bass is a mistake, but they left it in.

  • Trump is 'hanging himself' with his own rope as campaign spirals out of control: analyst

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  • Agreed, but I don't know the mindset of those people and how to think of them. Do we just take them out of the voter pool? Are they potentially swing?

    My take on 2016 was that the Dems were deeply unenthusiastic about Hillary - and who can blame them - so they didn't show up to vote. On the other hand the Reps were stoked about Trump so they turned up at the polls.

    Swing voters? I don't get it. I cannot see any rational person sitting in the middle comparing Trump and Harris and picking Trump as a better presidential option. Irrational people? My gut tells me they they are probably sitting and the far ends of either camp.

    My guess is that the people closer to the middle aren't actually swing voters, but they are far more likely to have their enthusiasm to vote influenced than the true believers.

    The big question, in my opinion, is how much - or how little - the polls reflect the enthusiasm to go out and vote. My impression is that Dem enthusiasm in high right now, while not so much for the Reps. It's possible that a 50/50 poll may hide the fact that a big chunk of one of the 50% is much less likely to actually vote.

    I'm Canadian, so I see the news but I don't have day to day experience with US voters. Of course, neither do the 90% of Americans that don't live in those swing states.

  • Trump is 'hanging himself' with his own rope as campaign spirals out of control: analyst

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  • Isn't that true about all US elections? There are no "undecided" voters, just Dems and Reps and the result is always based on who can motivate their voters the most.