You lot have a bit to learn about leadership. It has much less to do with code than you would think. A leader of a technical squad needs enough technical knowledge to properly contextualize what their team is dealing with, but that's all. Leadership is about setting up team members such that the whole group succeeds. It's about soft skills and knowing how any action or decision will impact how people feel about the situation at hand. It's about wrangling a team such that they behave cohesively.
Agreed. At this point in 2020, this much text for this elementary of a morality problem is a waste. I was really hoping for something more earth shattering than how humans have a hard time finding the bounds between themselves and others.
Agreed. This is indeed how it works. Changes in company culture trends somewhat lend to the perception of newer programmers that they hold competency beyond what they do, which contributes to the overall problem of software being hard and an unstable industry.
I used to not be able to code, and now I can. By that I mean I used to not grok the purely abstract domain of encoding meaningful computation and only the concrete domain of when I type a certain sequence of keys in ${languageX} and press some other stuff, stuff happens.
Now that I better understand the abstract domain the concrete domain of programming languages translate, I am much better able to pick new tools up and understand whether or not they should be picked up.
> If 90% of your insight into social interactions comes from clickbait social media sites selecting the most egregious stories and videos from around the world, of course you're going to think "stupidity is expanding"
Agreed. Isn't this the majority of people though? And if this is in fact the majority of people, then doesn't it mean that stupidity is in fact expanding?
I don't think any of us are going to hit upon the end-all-be-all decisive proof either way, but I think there's value in considering how everyone perceiving it getting larger may be the definition of it getting larger.
Hasn't been my experience that most people are stupid. I mean yeah, most people I ever met were quite helpless in various semi-emergency -- or just unusual -- situations but that doesn't make them stupid. It makes them kind of pampered and not well prepared, nothing more.
I think what you describe can be attributed to our brain noting the negative things much stronger in its memory while it always writes off the usual / slightly positive events as "normal".
In short, we get outraged easily, but it's hard to make us positively impressed in a lasting manner, it seems.
Tech is bad because our hypothesis of "nature will help us adapt to our disregard for foresight" is proving false. Across the board: economic, social, manufacturing, education, environmental -- everything is giving us plenty of evidence that we are headed in the wrong direction.
All meaningful measures of human wellbeing are going down at increasing rates. We are making mistakes at a rate that outpaces our ability to learn from our mistakes and we doubling down on the strategy that got us here in order to get us out.
The line about us not knowing the future and needing to take the best guess we have and building more on it than we are confident in its correctness is illogical and clearly disordered.
> How curious to know that it's all in the brain rather than a psychological cause such as anxiety
I'm not sure this model of thinking is fully correct. In a way, it's like saying that muscle cramps are all in the muscle rather than in their lack of hydration or their being overworked.
The substance of thought, emotion, and cognition is synapses firing, neurotransmitters transmitting, and neural connections being made. Like muscles, their movements flow as a result of environmental inputs, and environmental inputs that are stronger create stronger adaptations towards them.
The article doesn't say that it's all in the brain.
My experience matches this to a tee. Engineers who take initiative and ownership are the ones most likely to know the function of the revenue generator's vital organs and how they interact in a system. Execs, product folks, designers, and people managers may understand at the level a 5th grader understands bodily anatomy, but the engineers necessarily must know it on a surgeon's level. For startups.
I will say though, that the executive layer above our heads is not to be totally dismissed. They do have vision into things that we can lack, namely people and culture stuff that has significant impact on the company's long term trajectory. Or maybe big acquisitions and whatever. But the people stuff is what generates all the perceivably asinine people management stuff because if you get rid of the average nonautonomous employee, you have no one left pretty much. Hiring good engineers is HARDDDDDDDDDDD unless you can just bury the problem with cash.
The best potential solve I can personally see still hinges on having the right people. For any unit of people at any scale doing anything, a leader who can effectively recognize who to empower within what boundaries feels like it's by far the most crucial thing. I'm not sure there's even a way to have a pilotable thing made of individuals without having a conductor. If you just build out the org in a way where it can be conducted and put good conductors in place then they will be able to tell you wtf is going on at the level you need to know about and effectively translate your intentions into implementation.
Feels like this is the why behind the whole "idk y'all figure it out" style of startup engineering nonleadership that's becoming common these days. People just flat out don't know what they're doing, and even when they know it, they obscure it for self-serving reasons. If you have a leader setting this example via doing anything but having technical field vision and directing as a respected and well liked military officer would, then you will have an engineering org that is optimized for bleeding money.
Some may consider velocity to be part of the problem's domain considerations while others may not. If you consider that part, then Next is a great choice if you are novicely advanced at frontend web.
It does come with a lot of preoptimizations that may not be necessary for the job (as the job is currently defined), but the thoughtful way they're implemented makes having them in there anyway not all that costly. The directory based build stuff that auto code splits, does SSR, and static site generation is high value with a very low learning curve. Not only does it not require a lot of load on the meat to use the bazooka of Next for an anthill of a problem, but it also doesn't really add any load on the metal. And the fact that these features do a great job of covering your ass should business demands pivot under you makes Next a rare kind of contender.
It's a bad choice if all you need is some small piece of an already-existent architecture, but if you need something as the main frontend body for a long-lived app, I've found Next to be the best thing I've ever used by a significant amount.
> Marianne Bellotti
the author is a woman.