Blah. Yet another "new-fangled technologies have no place" post. Granted, there's a grain of truth to the core thought. As I've become more experienced, I've seen more frameworks and libraries that re-invent the wheel and solve problems that have already been solved long ago, albeit in a trendier manner.
But at the end of the day, software engineers are technologists. Our job is to create and consume technology. Being afraid of new technology is counter-productive.
I didn't read that in the article. Being a technologist means know when NOT to use a technology as much as knowing when to use it. There're way too many developers who read links from HN and try and push the javascript framework of the weak on everyone at their job without fully comprehending the consequences of their decision. That's not being a technologits, that's being stupid.
> There're way too many developers who read links from HN and try and push the javascript framework of the weak on everyone at their job without fully comprehending the consequences of their decision.
One good question to ask yourself when evaluating a framework is this:
If the project/company dies out tomorrow, and we're tied to this thing, can we take it in-house and pick up maintenance?
If the answer to that is no, not even long enough to migrate to something else, then boy, you'd better be damn sure that the team that develops it isn't going to go away or lose interest. Hence my skepticism with many, many Javascript "framework of the week" projects. There's just far too many out there that have died out after a year or two for me to blithely accept whatever the new hotness is.
The industry that still argues about which text editor from the 1970s is the best tool to code in has a problem with rapid paradigm shifts?
I use emacs and avoid IDEs.
That said, I have no interest in the emacs vs. vi debate. I don't care what tools you use, as long as you don't do things in a way that force me to use specific tools (e.g. enterprise environments that becomes IDE-dependent).
As for me, I don't like mindless churn. This industry desperately needs to improve. It's running at about 5% (if that) of its real potential. But the constant fire drilling that comes with moving from one well-sold crappy technology to another well-sold crappy technology is really irritating, and it's part of why so many good programmers tend to move up into management.
Reinventing the wheel is only a part of the problem. The other is that the wheel is spinning in the same place. And I even suspect that the cart is no longer there.
I was just answering your question. Some might think that context matters. As in, what happened to Pao just comes with the job while what happened to Eich was purely personal.
For better or worse, this is life for top executives. Example: the president of the US's popularity is correlated with the economy in spite of the fact that they have very little control over it. It's not uncommon for one executive to do something totally reasonable under hard circumstances only to get ousted anyway while the next person gets the credit for their actions.
What he took was proprietary infrastructure-related code that didn't involve any of Goldman's trading algorithms. His claim is that it was so tangled up with the open source code he wanted that he had to take it out to get it.
I have to say: working in a civil work environment makes a huge difference in terms of job satisfaction and job performance. Civility works for the business, the worker, and the customer. Nobody really benefits from incivility except for the arrogant power-monger over the very short term.
Most of these "safe space" environments are filled with arrogant people who, while not being outright rude, can belittle you passive aggressively and it can sometimes be worse than someone just calling you out on your bullshit.
A friend of mine worked for a startup that's mentioned on HN quite a lot, (I won't say the name). The lead developers used git and IRC chat a lot. After being hired my friend began to test a new product they were working on and submitted some changes to github, they accepted the pull request and my friend submitted a few more finding all sorts of bugs. At this point the lead developers started to argue about how the changes were unnecessary and that my friend needed to learn more about how their product worked, what was rude is that they were publicly arguing while leaving him out of the conversation. No words directed at him, just conversation about him. A few weeks later they realized their project really did have a lot of bugs and pushed through a large change with many of my friends bug-fixes in it without giving him credit or even so much as a thank you.
The lead devs would pal around and make inside jokes and ask my friend to do all sorts of work while leaving him "out of the loop" as if he were some "lackey" for them to boss around and not really part of the team.
Not too long after he started working there the team told him he needed to attend a "conference on sensitivity in OSS" halfway across the country. My friend couldn't make it and then he was basically interrogated by the lead devs as to how he feels is the proper way to treat people. He said he was treated as if he was in trouble and felt like he was being accused of a crime. About a month later he left the company after being continually snubbed by his superiors and not receiving any appreciation for his work.
Personally I get this feeling with a lot of "safe space" organizations I've contributed too. The leaders are arrogant and passive aggressively rude, treat you like crap and belittle your work, then act high-and-mighty because they've never said a curse word.
Re. civility, I've had very good results in reducing stress between both parties by clearly separating the defects in the work from the person / people involved. I think that's the key because I've had terrible experiences when that did not happen, when I was either blaming or blamed (seemingly) by teammates personally for any mistakes. Still, I'd rather receive any honest feedback than none at all, even if it is presented incorrectly and callous. Holding back feedback to be nice can grow problems and erode trust.
The vast majority of my friends and acquaintances that are in the tech industry have changed jobs with work environment (co-workers they like, friendly environment, etc.) as among the most important factors, even above compensation. That seems to be universally true of almost every developer or engineer I've come across. Work environment is a huge factor in where someone works and how long they decide to stay there or whether or not they decide to leave. Given that, engendering a friendly work environment seems like one of the most cost-effective ways to bring in and retain talented engineers.
This is a personal anecdote - my dad used to run a company that sorted second hand clothing. He had a huge warehouse, where people would stand in one place and literally pick clothes out of one basket and then sort them into several smaller ones, by colour or type. The atmosphere in the warehouse wasn't exactly perfect,but employees could talk to each other and they had a radio playing music. Based on some observations, he introduced a complete ban on casual talking and he took away the radio. Sure, for the employees it must have been much worse. But the productivity increased by 50% - an average amount sorted per day per employee was 400kg, after the change it went up to 600kg, which in the scale of things made a HUGE difference at the end of the month. The company could process a lot more with the same number of people. And yes, sure - people would get unhappy and leave, but it being rather easy manual labour - there were always 50 other people willing to take the position.
I'm not defending my father, I think the way he ran the company was horrible for the employees, but it's just the personal anecdote showing that working in a nice/friendly environment doesn't necessarily make you more efficient. They could chat, so they spent time chatting,not doing what they were paid to do.
You can get away with treating your employees like that if they only need to do menial work. But still, I wonder how sustainable was the increase in productivity? Because one explanation for that increase could be the fact that the employees felt they were being punished and were afraid to lose their only source of income, thus having to show work. Otherwise they would have left immediately under those conditions.
Another question is, could your father had had the same increase in productivity, or even more, if he had used other strategies, like productivity bonuses for the team?
Being nice and respectful is not something that you try to do despite the relentless market competition. It's something that you must do precisely because of that competition. The reason being, unless you can have a good working culture, you'll end up with a group of desperate people that have no where else to go. Good luck trying to come up with any creative work or idea with a company full of desperate people.
Did they get a raise as a consequence of the higher output ?
Since we are social animals then preventing talking between us make things harder for us at some points, ie the job gets harder, so that could be an argument for higher wage.
This seems like an ideal situation for pay by the piece, which would have probably increased productivity per hour (not necessarily per dollar of pay) even more. Also it would have rewarded specialists and reduced the turnover implied by 50 people in line. I wonder why that wasn't attempted.
No, I'm suggesting shareholders are the real victim. They are the ones paying agents to maximize their wealth while those agents pursue their own agendas instead.
I'll say one thing: I think that there really are a number of business groups with vested interests in skewing the science one way or the other. On one hand, you have the Koch brothers who want you to believe global warming is a non-issue and that everything will be fine so keep burning all the fossil fuels you want. On the other hand, green energy companies such as Solar City who have a vested interest in convincing everyone that the world will end unless you install their solar panels on your roof.
I'm not certain I really agree with either end of the spectrum.
