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It's really unfortunate that this is what's passing the bar as a non-technical talk at /\C. Some of the LC talks are given by brilliant people, but talks like t

It's really unfortunate that this is what's passing the bar as a non-technical talk at /\C. Some of the LC talks are given by brilliant people, but talks like this make me think they've got a very weak review process for management talks or business talks. After watching it and taking some notes, the biggest problem with this talk is that he loads a bunch of untrue and unfair garbage up front to pander to the local culture of dismissive shitbirding on everyone else outside of the room. Skip to 22m in to skip all the predictable Chris-Allen-makes-fun-of-everyone preamble and get to the meat of his talk, the substance of which I agree with. For those who can't stomach it even at 3x speed the way I just powered through, I've got a summary: - Businesses make bad decisions about the longevity or sustainability of their business practice. They're compose of directors and VPs trying to work on a quarterly OKR schedules for wins to justify their outrageous 200k-250k salary options, so it's a vicious and competitive environment. - Businesses then try and skip the part about building a sustainable tech org by appealing to, "We hire the best." This is expecting great engineers to parachute in from Valhalla to go to war for you. It's unrealistic. - Between this style of technical evaluation and absurdly fast product cadences (all free of consequence, no liability expressed or implied), organizations don't feel they need to care too hard about building deep skill in anything but their most core business interest because most of the work is "trivial" (and to his credit, Chris includes a lot of his own work in this). - Businesses could actually improve infrastructure to eliminate this trivial work, but this requires more sophisticated tools, techniques and designs and these are considered risky. - This is then used as a justification to remove all technical mentorship and tutelage from the system and only hire specialists. - And then the industry forms a tight orbit around tools and practices that are deleterious to anything but a short-turnover org like the modern Google. And for the record, Chris is one of those folks in the community who's made a reputation for being dismissive and cantankerous. It's his natural personality to make even good and insightful points like this hard to watch. It's too bad the lambdaconf folks didn't give him feedback to just cut his talk in half. If he had started at 22m it would have been a HELL of a talk. Instead he needs to erect an effigy and shove it in a wicker man with bees to appease his (and perhaps his audience's, given the laughter?) love of punching down on folks with less formal CS knowledge.

coolsunglasses 9y ago
>love of punching down on folks with less formal CS knowledge. I care more about practices and tools, really. Stuff like being comfortable with patching a library, reading the code you use. I don't have any formal CS knowledge, no credits, no degree. I don't really understand type theory beyond the basics of cardinality and whatever I had to learn for the book. It's a shame you dislike me so much, we very much agree on things like the value of training and education.
- KirinDave 9y ago
  Chris, you called my wife stupid because she was pregnant and said the reason I was supportive of women in the industry is because her stupid pregnancy hormones splashed on me, because I was being stupid. This is not the way to make friends and influence people. Still, I've given you as fair as shake as I can. I'm not the only person who found the first half of your presentation to be off putting. Unlike them, I extracted some of your key points and laid them out in a tl;dr. > Stuff like being comfortable with patching a library, reading the code you use. This is where our agreement diverges. Many people will not or cannot engage the open source world. Given how many folks don't use licensing, I'm always skeptical of working for them for free as well.
  - coolsunglasses 9y ago
    Holy shit what? The last memories I had of interacting with you that could be related to what you're talking about: - You talking to me about potentially working at your company - Soliciting pictures of your greyhounds - Congratulating you on either the pregnancy or the birth of your child I checked out our shared Twitter history, we talked a fair bit in the past but I wasn't able to find _anything_ like this. I used this search: https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=kirindave%20bitemyapp&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=kirin... I mean this sincerely — are you _sure_ you didn't get me confused with someone else? I was definitely a dick from what I can see from the Twitter history and I apologize. However, I cannot remember and cannot find myself ever saying or implying something as horrendous as what you're describing here. >This is where our agreement diverges. Many people will not or cannot engage the open source world. Oh! Don't need to! People use OSS regardless of engagement with the wider community. I'm talking about stuff people do on their work hours like vendoring a library and upstreaming a patch. I'm not talking about off-hours. For people that are uncomfortable with or contractually unable to upstream a patch, knowing how to hack on the libraries you use is still a big improvement. Many don't!

coolsunglasses 9y ago

>love of punching down on folks with less formal CS knowledge. I care more about practices and tools, really. Stuff like being comfortable with patching a library, reading the code you use. I don't have any formal CS knowledge, no credits, no degree. I don't really understand type theory beyond the basics of cardinality and whatever I had to learn for the book. It's a shame you dislike me so much, we very much agree on things like the value of training and education.

KirinDave 9y ago
Chris, you called my wife stupid because she was pregnant and said the reason I was supportive of women in the industry is because her stupid pregnancy hormones splashed on me, because I was being stupid. This is not the way to make friends and influence people. Still, I've given you as fair as shake as I can. I'm not the only person who found the first half of your presentation to be off putting. Unlike them, I extracted some of your key points and laid them out in a tl;dr. > Stuff like being comfortable with patching a library, reading the code you use. This is where our agreement diverges. Many people will not or cannot engage the open source world. Given how many folks don't use licensing, I'm always skeptical of working for them for free as well.
- coolsunglasses 9y ago
  Holy shit what? The last memories I had of interacting with you that could be related to what you're talking about: - You talking to me about potentially working at your company - Soliciting pictures of your greyhounds - Congratulating you on either the pregnancy or the birth of your child I checked out our shared Twitter history, we talked a fair bit in the past but I wasn't able to find _anything_ like this. I used this search: https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=kirindave%20bitemyapp&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=kirin... I mean this sincerely — are you _sure_ you didn't get me confused with someone else? I was definitely a dick from what I can see from the Twitter history and I apologize. However, I cannot remember and cannot find myself ever saying or implying something as horrendous as what you're describing here. >This is where our agreement diverges. Many people will not or cannot engage the open source world. Oh! Don't need to! People use OSS regardless of engagement with the wider community. I'm talking about stuff people do on their work hours like vendoring a library and upstreaming a patch. I'm not talking about off-hours. For people that are uncomfortable with or contractually unable to upstream a patch, knowing how to hack on the libraries you use is still a big improvement. Many don't!