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Nobody needs to spend inordinate amounts of time rewriting 18-year-old C++ code just to put appointments in their diary. FFS use GCal or Outlook like any normal

Nobody needs to spend inordinate amounts of time rewriting 18-year-old C++ code just to put appointments in their diary. FFS use GCal or Outlook like any normal human being. Or if decades-old technology turns you on, use a Filofax or a PalmPilot. The reason I mention this is that nearly every post I read by this author, who seems unaccountably popular on HN, stinks of some tech-fetishist with poor communication skills who insists on doing everything by the most difficult and convoluted means possible. This is not the sort of attitude we should be idolizing in an entrepreneurial culture. I would love to be a fly on the wall in the HR meetings and hear the other side of the story, because I would certainly not want someone like this on my team, however gifted or experienced they are.

mjburgess 6y ago
> tech-fetishist with poor communication skills who insists on doing everything by the most difficult and convoluted means possible > unaccountably popular ...Hacker news?
vikasg 6y ago
+1 In a startup you want to actively screen for candidates like this. Someone who idolizes technological "purity" above all else and looks down on business will never be happy at a startup that needs to get shit done quickly. It's a lose-lose situation. They'll eventually grow resentful and quit, or you'll have to manage them out. Better to avoid the whole thing in the first place, no matter how great a programmer they are otherwise.
- mellow2020 6y ago
  > a startup that needs to get shit done quickly Stuff like "name a dog in our org"?
- JamesBarney 6y ago
  I am totally the type of person who values software expediency, and has a lets just get shit done attitude. But people like the author who have the opposite attitude are also invaluable. There are parts of your code base at an organization that need to work, where doing the expedient thing is doing the wrong thing. People who went told to don't worry about that just ship the damn thing, fight back so your entire organizations infrastructure doesn't fall down on itself. It's more about finding the right person for the job.
XelNika 6y ago
> Trouble is, I had an ancient machine in the flock. It didn't seem like it at the time, but my main serving system was magpie, a RHEL 6 box from 2015. I can't tell if this part is hyperbole. RHEL 7 isn't a resource hog and a server from 2015 is probably a blazing fast multicore Xeon. The machine itself is almost certainly capable. > To get away from it, I'd have to migrate to another box. That meant picking out new hardware at the hosting company. If a hosting company won't allow a customer to install a new OS on their dedicated server, it's a shitty hosting company, particularly when that OS first released the year before they started renting. From the list of things that had to happen, maybe this was about not having downtime, but firstly a single host is not enough for HA and secondly it would be easy to just get a VPS for a month to use as a temporary host while upgrading. I think you are right that this is a person who insists on doing it the hard way. I wonder if maybe these blog posts are a way for the author to process events and vent frustrations, and not intended for HN readers to dissect, but I would expect her to use her custom diary software for that sort of thing instead.
dgellow 6y ago
> Nobody needs to spend inordinate amounts of time rewriting 18-year-old C++ code just to put appointments in their diary. They seem to be quite happy doing that project, so why do you care if that’s their thing?
stickfigure 6y ago
Not sure if you realize this about your writing style, but... you kinda have the same shtick. Not a criticism, I find it all pretty entertaining.
busrf 6y ago
I am not sure if you got the point of the linked story. The C++ appointment software is a trivial fun side project. The point is that she had to quit her terrible job to even get into the right headspace to do anything useful on this trivial fun side project. Besides, have you never written anything for a side project that scratches a personal itch that hadn’t already been done dozens of times in better ways? I find her stories illuminating and well written. Sometimes we spend lots of time on things that we realize could have been done in much simpler ways. Sometimes we make mistakes that we later realize are super dumb. It happens to everyone who writes software for a living. I’m happy that Rachel writes about the messy stuff. We need more “from the trenches” stories like hers.
dang 6y ago
> stinks of some tech-fetishist with poor communication skills who insists on doing everything by the most difficult and convoluted means possible That crosses into personal attack and that is not ok on HN. Please don't do this sort of name-calling here. (Edit: looks like you did it here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280952. Please make your substantive points without stooping to this.) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mjburgess 6y ago

> tech-fetishist with poor communication skills who insists on doing everything by the most difficult and convoluted means possible > unaccountably popular ...Hacker news?

vikasg 6y ago

+1 In a startup you want to actively screen for candidates like this. Someone who idolizes technological "purity" above all else and looks down on business will never be happy at a startup that needs to get shit done quickly. It's a lose-lose situation. They'll eventually grow resentful and quit, or you'll have to manage them out. Better to avoid the whole thing in the first place, no matter how great a programmer they are otherwise.

mellow2020 6y ago
> a startup that needs to get shit done quickly Stuff like "name a dog in our org"?
JamesBarney 6y ago
I am totally the type of person who values software expediency, and has a lets just get shit done attitude. But people like the author who have the opposite attitude are also invaluable. There are parts of your code base at an organization that need to work, where doing the expedient thing is doing the wrong thing. People who went told to don't worry about that just ship the damn thing, fight back so your entire organizations infrastructure doesn't fall down on itself. It's more about finding the right person for the job.

XelNika 6y ago

> Trouble is, I had an ancient machine in the flock. It didn't seem like it at the time, but my main serving system was magpie, a RHEL 6 box from 2015. I can't tell if this part is hyperbole. RHEL 7 isn't a resource hog and a server from 2015 is probably a blazing fast multicore Xeon. The machine itself is almost certainly capable. > To get away from it, I'd have to migrate to another box. That meant picking out new hardware at the hosting company. If a hosting company won't allow a customer to install a new OS on their dedicated server, it's a shitty hosting company, particularly when that OS first released the year before they started renting. From the list of things that had to happen, maybe this was about not having downtime, but firstly a single host is not enough for HA and secondly it would be easy to just get a VPS for a month to use as a temporary host while upgrading. I think you are right that this is a person who insists on doing it the hard way. I wonder if maybe these blog posts are a way for the author to process events and vent frustrations, and not intended for HN readers to dissect, but I would expect her to use her custom diary software for that sort of thing instead.

dgellow 6y ago

> Nobody needs to spend inordinate amounts of time rewriting 18-year-old C++ code just to put appointments in their diary. They seem to be quite happy doing that project, so why do you care if that’s their thing?

stickfigure 6y ago

Not sure if you realize this about your writing style, but... you kinda have the same shtick. Not a criticism, I find it all pretty entertaining.

busrf 6y ago

I am not sure if you got the point of the linked story. The C++ appointment software is a trivial fun side project. The point is that she had to quit her terrible job to even get into the right headspace to do anything useful on this trivial fun side project. Besides, have you never written anything for a side project that scratches a personal itch that hadn’t already been done dozens of times in better ways? I find her stories illuminating and well written. Sometimes we spend lots of time on things that we realize could have been done in much simpler ways. Sometimes we make mistakes that we later realize are super dumb. It happens to everyone who writes software for a living. I’m happy that Rachel writes about the messy stuff. We need more “from the trenches” stories like hers.

dang 6y ago

> stinks of some tech-fetishist with poor communication skills who insists on doing everything by the most difficult and convoluted means possible That crosses into personal attack and that is not ok on HN. Please don't do this sort of name-calling here. (Edit: looks like you did it here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280952. Please make your substantive points without stooping to this.) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html