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Good times create weak men (2019)
- seydor 3y ago[flagged]
- fullarr 3y agoMen is shorthand for men and women
- bongripper 3y agoHi, in this case, the title is referencing a quote and internet meme and is just referring to men. However it's quite problematic here IMO as it presents a cyclical view of history and masculinity that is both simplistic and incorrect. Firstly, it promotes toxic masculinity by implying that men are either "weak" or "strong," with the former being undesirable. This feeds into harmful stereotypes that equate strength with aggression, dominance, and lack of emotional expression while devaluing attributes like empathy, emotional intelligence, and vulnerability. It also suggests that war and conflict is a necessary component for the development of "acceptable" masculinity. This dichotomy of "weak" and "strong" men reinforces an outdated and harmful ideal of masculinity and promotes a culture that shames men, among other things, for expressing emotions.
- fullarr 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Ridj48dhsnsh 3y agoYou state your opinion as if it were a universal truth. It's fine if you believe that, but many (most?) still value traditional masculinity.
- trealira 3y agoMaybe 1000 years ago, when "man" really just meant person and there was a different word for males in particular. Nowadays, to refer to people as "man" it just sounds archaic and vaguely patriarchal, but people do it anyway because sounding slightly archaic can give your words more power.
- bradrn 3y agoIf we’re critiquing the title, let me also link this excellent series: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/ https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
- api 3y agoHard times create traumatized people with learned helplessness. Issac Newton, Albert Einstein, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Nikola Tesla, ... keep thinking of names of profoundly accomplished people in areas like science, business, sports, art, etc. Then tally up how many of them had traumatic hardscrabble origins. Not many. Most grew up middle class or better and had the benefit of good education, solid family life, and a stable society. This whole meme is bullshit, and comes from a post-apocalyptic novel where it's used as a justification to murder a prisoner of war (in context). Most people don't know its origin though. They just repeat it because it sounds "truthy" if you don't think about it very much. The points brought up in this talk are valid though, but I don't think the answer is "good times." I think the answer is a very specific type of good times, namely zero interest rates which favored a business strategy of "expand at all costs and then we'll fix it later." (Fixing it later usually involves enshittification.) There are other types of good times that favor more balanced sustainable business models, and those tend to encourage software with a bit more of a focus on quality. I think there's some survivorship bias at work here too though. There was a lot of total crap software in the 80s and 90s that we don't remember. There were lots of DOS and Windows apps with horrible UI/UX that would crash your entire machine because operating systems were much less solid than they are today. Security almost didn't exist unless you were on a Unix-type OS or VMS, and even there it was pretty basic and coarse grained. Software has objectively gotten worse in one way though: it is much more bloated today. Some of that bloat is explainable by things like high-DPI displays and larger data sets, but much of it is a result of bad architecture and perverse incentives.
- pelagicAustral 3y ago> Software has objectively gotten worse in one way though: The Javascript ecosystem.
- nonethewiser 3y agoIts bloated because hardware isnt the bottleneck. IE good times.
- api 3y ago
- randomdata 3y agoThere is no need for that sexism here.
- fullarr 3y agoThat Jon Blow video is one I always tell people to watch That video and Casey Muratori's "The Thirty Million Line Problem" video Similar theme, and really a call to action. We, as an industry, need to fight entropy and chaos. Not through regulation or authoritarianism, just every one of us needs to take the responsibility and try to make things better
- maroonblazer 3y ago>That video and Casey Muratori's "The Thirty Million Line Problem" video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk
- fullarr 3y agoSuch a banger
- BaculumMeumEst 3y agojon blow is a great example to bring up. he's extremely talented and focused on his craft, and has been churning for decades, unburdened by family, to produce his work, with very talented engineers contributing (including muratori). in the last twenty years, they have shipped two puzzle games. i don't say that to suggest it's unimpressive, but rather to point out that adopting his methodology of avoiding anything resembling modern languages and tooling comes at a cost. the cost includes a huge hit to productivity. if everyone built games the way these two suggest, there would be orders of magnitude fewer of games available. if everyone built software the way these two suggest, there would be orders of magnitude less software available. i'm sure they would be fine with that outcome. the rest of the world probably would not.
- BlargMcLarg 3y agoEh, Rare was putting out multiple games in a short timespan of larger size in programming teams fairly small in the 90s. The tools themselves don't seem specific to inducing incredibly large development times when the game developers before Blow managed to do it faster and better. Your point still stands (there's research floating around proving it) but Blow isn't the best example.
- heikkilevanto 3y ago[2019]
- myspy 3y agoA lot of old articles without date tag recently.
- haltist 3y agoMost cities are built on top of the ruins of old cities. Or nature eventually reclaims the territory, e.g. Chernobyl. I think the software crisis is a non-issue. The stack works well enough for most people and most software consumers don't care if the software has bugs as long as it does the job 90% of the time.
- fullarr 3y agoRome was the global superpower all the way until they weren't Edit: However, I will concede that I think nuclear annihilation is more likely. So in that case you would be correct by accident
- defrost 3y agoMost? Is that true? What is the total number of cities today in a world of 8+ billion? No cities in Australia were built on ruined former cities .. cities such as Dublin and London appear to have been continuously cities since their founding. It's an interesting claim, is it one that you can back with any data?
- seanhunter 3y agoLondon was (almost entirely[1]) burned to the ground in the great fire of 1666[2]. The new city was built on the smoldering wreckage of the old one. [1] Pretty much the only things that survived were the tower of London and a few streets around The Cathedral of St Bartholomew the Great near Smithfield Market which most people even in London don't know about even though hundreds of people pass just one street away every day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Bartholomew-the-Great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Bartholomew-the-Great [2] https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/museum/history-and-stories/the-great-fire-of-london/ https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/museum/history-and-stories/th...
- bluGill 3y agoMost cities exist where they do for geographical reasons that have existed for longer than humans. Until the railroad (~200 years ago) you couldn't have a large city unless it had a good port as the only possible way to get enough food in to support a city was by boat. There are only limited places that support a great port so once humans start a city we can't abandon it. Today we could abandon NYC - the port itself would have to remain but everything else could move elsewhere (the port could not move elsewhere as most places don't have a way for ships to get in without massive ocean floor projects) - that won't happen because there is so much inertia of people already living there, but it could. I don't know what the natives in Australia did. however I can report without looking that if they had the numbers to build cities they would be about where the current cities are.
- Titiriti59nj 3y ago[flagged]
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoIf you think the good times are bad, wait until you see what the bad times make!
- jongjong 3y agoTimes have been bad for me all of the way and so now everyone I meet looks like they're living in some kind of delusion/trance/bubble. Hopefully bad times for these people will mean good times for me at last. It's hard for me to imagine how times could get any worse. Maybe some Stalin-like mass purges of intellectuals...
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoIntellectuals, eh? I'm in the clear then.
- pixl97 3y agoIt is statements like this that honestly question what kind of delusion bubble you live in... I implore you to study a lot of history from all over the world. History you like, history you don't like. History of democracy, history of authoritarians. History of kings and of the elected. And I'm saying this because while things may be bad for you, in general they are better for more people than ever. There is no bottom to worse, it can always get so much more worse than you can imagine, and that's even at the point where you believe it cannot possibly get worse. It really does require understanding how things to go bad to make a world that gets better.
- jongjong 3y agoI worked in crypto. It seems that if you work in that industry and actually try to improve a project, the whole social apparatus turns against you. On the other hand, I've seen plenty of scam projects where the founders keep getting funding from government organizations and they just waste all the money and keep receiving more investment even though they objectively achieved nothing. After leaving crypto, I saw opportunities dry up, people seemed to pull out of my projects for no reason, friends/colleagues I worked with closely for over 2 years stopped answering my texts, also for no reason. I also got fired for no reason after the boss had been praising my work for 6 months straight. Just a lot of weird stuff. Not sure if it's because cryptocurrency sector has stigma behind it or because of something more sinister. Anyway, it's a mistake to think that things are good for everyone. There is a lot of nasty stuff going on behind the scenes. Many people's good fortune is built directly on the back of the suffering of others, often without them realizing.
- ergonaught 3y agoWeird title (one of these "true but wrong" things humans keep doing when they reason by analogy), but the post itself meshes with things I've been saying for a few years in order to explain the otherwise inexplicably awful and continually worsening quality of software coming out of companies with effectively infinite resources. I think there's an additional aspect, though: insufficient supply of "people who care" coupled with compensation levels attracting too many people who don't. That maps better to the weird title, I suppose.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago> I think there's an additional aspect, though: insufficient supply of "people who care" coupled with compensation levels attracting too many people who don't. That maps better to the weird title, I suppose. You can care as much as you want, but if the people responsible for making the final decisions and cutting your paycheck don't care, your ability to write good software in that place is limited.
- nsxwolf 3y agoI have 4 tickets in this 2 week sprint. I lose a couple of productive days for scrum ceremonies and meetings. The last 2 or 3 days must be spent scrambling for code reviews and QA sign off. With the time that’s left I can make the software as good as I want.
- munk-a 3y agoThat's a terrible bastardization of agile. Agile and related practices aren't about delivering increased volume of work but just about making the team more responsive to changes. If you feel like you're always rushing to finish a sprint either your manager is pushing on the gas to squeeze past a deadline (a good sign of bad management) or you're in over your head and not performing at the level expected of you. In either case a manager should see this and work out a solution that lowers your workload. Down your road lies early burnout.
- 3y ago
- herval 3y agoI don't think this is in any way related to "good" or "bad" times, but rather something much simpler: software made by way too many people is invariably bad. Software made with the wrong incentives first (promotions, pleasing the board) is invariably bad. That's it, really, and it's completely orthogonal to "good" or "bad" times.
- nradov 3y agoIs the Linux kernel bad? It was made by many people. How do we tell how many is too many?
- herval 3y agoit had many contributors, but organized through very few reviewers, and in a very organized fashion. It's a good example of reasonably well executed software IMO - nobody pushing code to get promoted or pushing for growth hacks in the codebase. I don't think there's a specific number that makes a software team suddenly "too big", but you can clearly see how different the dynamic is when you're in a team that's too big
- jakeinspace 3y agoLittle monetary incentive, plus a hyper competent benevolent dictator.
- xorcist 3y agoLinus pretty much set the culture for Linux development, it is strongly guided by the taste of a handful maintainers. You could never take something from the two week sprint people and get it merged, it would be scrutinized in minute detail by maintainers that have an opinion on exactly how the whole is put together and understand every part under their watch. So you could argue that Linux in reality is developed by only a handful. The orbiting thousands of developers is the force multiplier. Once in a while someone drenched in the culture slowly dissipates to the inner circle. That's how it survives. By way of a strong culture. The downside is that it can also be a bit unforgiving. Linus style of project leadership is quite well known, but the guy has very good taste and is in it for the long run. That's the secret to making it all work. That, and the luck of being at the right place at the right time.
- InsiderTesla 3y ago[flagged]
- threeseed 3y ago> Why it has worked flawlessly since the first iPod with a monochrome screen and quarter of computing power of modern watch, but can’t be done in a flagship product of the most advanced operating system in the world? Because of the mythical man-month. Apple's operating systems have grown from just iOS/macOS to include ipadOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, audioOS with a myriad of new capabilities. They are also behind the scenes migrating a lot of older Objective-C code to multi-platform SwiftUI which explains why Music.app in particular has seen so many regressions. Now their development teams have grown but not proportional to the overall scope. And that's not going to change because teams simply can't scale linearly for ever and Apple likes smaller teams. So there are inevitably going to be far more times where quality ebbs and flows as priority shifts. But hey that answer is only a paragraph and not a provocative answer about society collapsing, men getting weaker or some other incoherent nonsense.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoI just wish everybody and all the shareholders could freaking understand this. Cut the infinite exponential growth bullshit, they should be expected to slowly and carefull craft quality products and systems and release like a new generation whatever like no sooner than like 3-4 years. I hate this new year, new phone/laptop/whatver crap. Its wasteful and sloppy ultimately and makes it hard to be familiar with their actual range of products in tangible way
- CJefferson 3y agoWhat do you mean by “understand”? Do you think this would increase profits? Or at least keep them the same?
- neysofu 3y agoI'm pretty sure Apple shareholders are doing just fine.
- johnnyworker 3y agoMaybe they think they are. But they still have to live in the world full of products that are worse than they need to be. In a world that is spiraling into derpification all you can buy is crap that you have to then fix with more crap.
- 0xbkt 3y agoThis read, for some reason, reminded me of Farnam Street's “Why Life Can’t Be Simpler”[0]. [0] https://fs.blog/why-life-cant-be-simpler/ https://fs.blog/why-life-cant-be-simpler/
- darkwater 3y agoA bit off-topic but watching the linked video and the videos inside it, it's worth noting how in 2019 Elon Musk was still considered some kind of good reference in the tech and engineering world. This has changed dramatically in the last 4 years. And by the way, we are not going back to the moon in the next 12 months, unfortunately.
- blueflow 3y ago> it's worth noting how in 2019 Elon Musk was still considered some kind of good reference in the tech and engineering world Is that so? Elon has always been promising much, but rarely delivering.
- Danjoe4 3y agoRarely delivering? That's just not in line with reality. Tesla has produced over 2 million vehicles, and has produced the best electric car since its inception over a decade ago. SpaceX has reusable rockets which is an insane feat of engineering. Elon over-promises on deadlines, but he always delivers.
- blueflow 3y agoWhere is the hyperloop?
- tempaway38641 3y agohyperloop was only ever a sketch of an idea and a competition. there are lots of valid criticisms of musk but thats just a cheap shot
- blueflow 3y agoParent said "but he always delivers" and i disproved with counterexample.
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- RyanAdamas 3y ago"You know how many bosses I have, Bob? "How many?" "Eight. I have eight bosses, Bob!"
- suoinguon 3y ago[dead]
- jongjong 3y agoMany companies these days appear to be struggling to produce software that is not glitchy and they cannot seem to find people who can write bug-free code (at least not to the same standard as before). Many of the bugs we see today in software are related to glitches caused by some deep framework, library or engine issue which most developers cannot make sense of and tend to hack around instead of fixing the root issue. When I started my coding career, most bugs were pretty obvious and easy to reproduce; some feature either worked or it didn't work. Nowadays, a lot of the bugs manifest themselves as vulnerabilities, strange flickering, state not being saved correctly or rolling back, app slowing down to a crawl after prolonged use, or weird issues that seem to rarely happen and are difficult to reproduce.
- greenthrow 3y agoThis article is not great. People ship buggy products all the tine. Yes even companies like Apple and Microsoft. Windows Vista at release was a complete disaster. You don't need bizarre, all-encompassing theories to explain it just because you don't know the actual reasons. That is a very bad intellectual trap to fall into.
- dzonga 3y agoyeah - the title is kinda clickbaity. though it's a true saying. the art of making software that works is truly, LOST. yeah, paychecks are nice. but damn ... nothing works anymore. all the big major tech companies with all their leetcode engineers can't make stuff that's simple and works. the middle layer of tech companies is even worse. e.g at $job we can't even make search controls that work on consumer apps - bugs everywhere. look at an app like hinge -- that can't sync your unread messages with a badge. such a simple problem.
- bigbillheck 3y ago> the art of making software that works is truly, LOST. I don't think it ever existed.
- pixl97 3y ago>nothing works anymore. Kids these days... Back in my day nothing f*ing worked and we liked it! I'd like to load up a PC with Win 3.1 and some of the apps back then and let people today use it. Not only would you realize how much software sucked back then, but it required rebooting the entire PC to get the thing functioning again.
- Roark66 3y ago>Docker and Electron are the most hyped new technologies of the last five years. Both are not about improving things, figuring out complexity or reducing it Docker is really useful though. It let's you run a completely different set of software than your os stack without the overhead of virtualisation. I find it very useful and I learned programming with basic and 6502 assembler so I have no problem understanding all the abstraction layers down to metal. As for electron it's just a Web browser packaged as an app. In general I agree that "good times create weak people (not just men)" But I very much doubt we can blame the current state of software quality on "good times". Perhaps some of it can be blamed on the fact we didn't really have to optimise a lot of software for performance because new faster hardware would become available like clockwork. But the main problem of today's software quality is not slowness, but as the author shows, crappy ui design and implementation. I have my own theory why that is. Its "agile". Yes, there is good stuff in agile, but designing the UI for an app the user interacts with all the time should be properly designed from the start with a lit of forethought. Not split into 2 week long sprints and 3 day long features people are pushed to undervalue time required for. If we do that, this is the result. If you're a startup running out of cash go for agile. Of you're making devops tools go for agile, but for the UI design? No way.
- dudefeliciano 3y agoInterestingly enough it seems that there are more and more UX designers than ever yet the UX of so many applications keeps getting worse. Anecdotal experience/rant: UX designers seem to increase complexity (maybe to justify their position?) of apps, rather than simplifying. And often "common sense" loses in favor of an over engineered solution.
- pixl97 3y ago>Interestingly enough it seems that there are more and more UX designers than ever yet the UX of so many applications keeps getting worse. Lets say you have a population of 1,000 people and 1 doctor. Then lets say you increase the amount of doctors to 3, but by that time your population is 5,000. Yea, you have more doctors than ever, but you also have more problems than ever. And we also see in the medical community more people want more treatment for more things. More staff, less time. It is really easy as the end user to say "Oh, I could have made this much more simple for my workflow". But that's the thing, it's your workflow, you have no idea if that's the average users workflow. You have no idea if the 3% of the customers that pay by far the most money have a different workflow. Complexity typically increases and keeps increasing till market saturation occurs. It's very unlikely we're anywhere close in software saturation (hell this could involve near complete replacement of people in most jobs). Competition means even if you want a simple app, another 'simple' app but with more features is apt to out compete you.
- nness 3y agoApple does own about three-quarters of the digital music market — so you could argue that UI bugs are not good signal to base organisational failure.
- numeromancer 3y agoI wonder if anyone has done a study of the relation of market share to software quality. It seems as though there is an inflection point of the market share measure above which software quality declines significantly because the fear of being outdone is diminished.
- BoxFour 3y agoApple's slightly buggy music app and Twitter's slow load times are strategic prioritization. If they wanted to, they would write fast and/or extremely reliable software. These companies understand that minor imperfections won't deter users and allocate resources accordingly. In contrast, there are certainly platforms where reliability directly affects revenue. They prioritize stability and speed, proving that near-perfection is possible when it's a priority. Finance, for example, has a fair amount of these. This article simply highlights a common modern business strategy: understanding and leveraging user tolerance to prioritize resources effectively.
- syndacks 3y ago[flagged]
- langsoul-com 3y agoI feel like this topic, last generation was better than now, has been going on forever. For the software argument, you don't need to know how to write a compiler or how the language itself was built to code any more. And that's fine. The block of knowledge required to do software dev has simply shifted. Instead of low level, it's mid to high level. About the software being bad part, I wouldn't really say it's on the devs. But rather as things became more cog in the machine, deadlines and rush work became The norm. Even if it's bad, it's expected to finish something by the marketing departments launch. See cyberpunk on first release, clearly not ready at all, despite everyone working overtime for over a year. Yet, it was still released. It's not like the game devs didn't care, but rather what are they gonna do about it? Their all real option was to soften the blow as much as they feasibly could.
- tempaway38641 3y agoThis is all looking at it from the wrong direction. Software only needs to be good enough to do its job. In the OP they're complaining about a recent iTunes release ... so what if its buggy? Apple are still raking in the cash every minute of the day. There is more software being produced now, all the time, then there ever has been before. It just has to be good enough. There are javascript errors on the page? But does it mostly work? Then just forget about it. The whole thing will get rewritten anyway next year and then there will be new bugs to ignore. That JIRA backlog will never go away. This may sound pessimistic but I'm just being pragmatic. Software has bugs, and now all around us there is a crap-ton of software all the time. It just has to be good enough. Or even 'barely good enough' will do in a lot of cases. This is how the world works because producing perfect software is ridiculously expensive.
- Joker_vD 3y ago...Let's just take the iTunes examples again: the previous version already existed and was good enough to do its job. Why spend the effort on a new, worse version? The Apple would still be raking in the cash, even more of it since they wouldn't have spend some of it on this pointless endeavour. By your dint of logic, we could have just stopped programming tomorrow altogether and most of the things would be just fine, and we could spend all this huge amount of human effort on something else (something presumably more important). That'd be quite pragmatic, wouldn't it? So why do we not?
- tempaway38641 3y agoNever ending competitive upgrade treadmill, aka innovation. Even if you dont want to release an upgrade, the layer below that you rely on still will, and then you'll have to keep up.
- naasking 3y agoIt seems like a mistake to conflate an upgrade treadmill with innovation.
- zdc1 3y agoUnrelated, but the night mode on this page is quite devious
- manxman 3y agoGood times may create weak men, but authentic experience is what develops real character growth and wisdom and NOT the kind of synthetic fraudulent experience that is all too often synthesised today. Synthetic experience is about as useful as tits on a bull.
- coderustle 3y agostrong man read hacker website
- expertentipp 3y agohacker website creates weak men
- datadrivenangel 3y agoweak men create valuable startups?
- expertentipp 3y agoweak men create wobbly startups
- datadrivenangel 3y agoWobbly startups create nauseated men, half of whom go on to become strong men! (survivorship bias). The system works!
- deadletters 3y agolook at my strong fingers that type the good things
- AlexandrB 3y agoSomewhat off topic, but whenever the "Good times create weak men" idiocy comes up I always think of this F. Scott Fitzgerald quote about WWI: > "That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers." > “General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.” > “No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.” [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9044972-see-that-little-stream-we-could-walk-to-it https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9044972-see-that-little-str...
- jonstewart 3y agoThe rebounding of casual toxic masculinity/macho-ism in Tech, as demonstrated in the title, makes me sad. As a stereotypical nerdy kid who got into computers in the 80s, I saw Tech as a refuge where who you were didn't matter nearly so much as what you could do. To a large extent, I think the money to be made in Tech after 2009 has attracted kids to CS who in another time would have majored in business. The only saving grace is that the popularity of CS as a major seems to be drawing in talented women and minorities who haven't been exposed to programming.
- huytersd 3y ago[flagged]
- arnaudvalette 3y agoThree affirmations made from a borderline perspective, no arguments given. Macho-ism is a psychopathetical ideology, it's the worst part of being human. It's the reason of wars and absurd conflicts, and everything bad that has come from it. You don't need theories to conclude about its toxicity.
- argentier 3y agoThe reasons for war are rarely absurd, and are about groups competing for limited resources. Saying it's anything to do with 'macho-ism' (which is certainly nothing like an ideology, if it is anything at all) is smug feminist nonsense.
- arnaudvalette 3y agoI would love to hear a full analysis from your part on the question of "are the reasons of war absurd" because I am not convinced by your argument about "groups competing for limited resources" and honestly it felt like a clumsy generalization of some facts (which could be made-up). Well, macho-ism is an abstraction constructed/used in order to communicate about some system of ideas or ideals related to "having pride in one masculinity". I am not interested in discussing whether or not this is a cause of war or not (but obviously it is a cause of conflict). My previous comment was a parody of its parent (even if I tend to agree with what is said in it), the desired effect was to reveal how intensely absurd was the previously evoked " parent".
- scotty79 3y agoI think it's the other way around. Strong man create hard times because of all the fighting between themselves about principles and honor and what not. Only after they eliminate eachother, weak man that remained can build good times on the cinders. But the good times inevitably spawn new breed of strong men. Which again ruin everything. Decades after World War two were so prosperous because so, so many brave, strong principled men killed each other in World Wars. So the weak men that were left were finally free to build the prosperity in relative peace. That adventage we had is gradually lost as new generations replenished the stock of strong man, so the world seems to be ripe for another war and devastation cycle.
- expertentipp 3y agoI like strong men fighting because then I can have sex.
- avgcorrection 3y agoThen be a hard man and sack the decadent city.
- beej71 3y agoOn a flight back from overseas recently, I was impressed how the entire process was plagued by bugs the whole way through, from cosmetic to functional. Nothing to do with flight controls, as it should be, but little things like HTML tags printed on my boarding pass, self check-in kiosks failing for me and everyone around me, in-flight entertainment systems needing rebooting... I figured none of these things stopped me from paying them, so they have no reason to fix them. But like the PDF with the HTML on it--no one even looked at the output. No developer, no QA, no test users. Or if they did, they didn't care. They just shipped it. I'd have been embarrassed, but since having a dev fix it would apparently be a net loss to the company, it would have been wrong to do.
- pixl97 3y agoIn my line of work I happen to get insight into just how many applications most companies have. Just how many millions of lines of code are floating out there. And you're right, most companies tier their application importance. "Does the business die if this doesn't work" gets the top tier. "Does it make us money" comes next. Then after that point the amount of oxygen left in the room starts dropping significantly. And you think "Well, if I was working on that low tier project, I would want to do a good job". And that's the thing, if you start doing good work there, you're going to get yanked off that team and moved up to something more important. You end up with either a dead sea effect on unimportant projects, or so little time for them it cannot possibly be polished.
- jakelazaroff 3y agoDoesn't your last line belie the rest of your comment? There may well have been similarly embarrassed people who worked on these things, but were either prevented from or simply incentivized not to fix them.
- beej71 3y agoFor sure--I mean, the system actually exists this way, and not for no reason. I _wish_ the quality were better, but I can totally see why "good enough" is king, especially when times are good.
- eimrine 3y agoAre there problems like this in FOSS? All I can remember is unfamous 12309 Linux bug which might affect system if the user uses to much IO operations like copyng 100 files from A to B while copying 100 files from B to A especially if A and B are different disk drives. Haven't experienced the bug since 10's though.
- hereforcomments 3y agoI work for a large company, global leader with 100k+ employees. Originally I was hired at the business side to build internal applications. These were grey zone apps as I wasn't part of the IT and dev team and did not follow all the company guidelines. I was free to use whatever I wanted to build apps. One of these makes over £150k annually, another one is has 700+ internal users. My tech stack and process was the following: -Python-Flask backend -Object oriented plain vanilla JS frontend with Redux state management (yes, it works without React) -MySQL db -Docker -Good enough documentation to be able to hand it over at any point of time if necessary -Test cases for critical things -Deployed everything to an on-premise server with using WinSCP I really enjoyed the whole process as I only had to focus on the actual business problem and very actively worked together with the stake holders. The results: bug free apps that I rarely have to touch; great satisfaction and feedback from both clients and internal users; short product to "market" time. Recently I joined the company's dev team. Mate, it's hell. We have to use React for even an app that has a login page, upload page and report page. The db is Snowflake that makes everything freakin' slow. We have mindlessly have to follow the company guidelines to pass all the "cloud gates" before we can go live. We have to pass Snyk, Sonarqube, use Azure Dev Ops, dev-qa-prod environment, 80% test coverage, less than 3% code duplication (nobody cares if it screws up readability); use Jfrog and god knows what, there are 15 different criteria that we have to pass. The result: extremely sluggish development; slow application; the whole thing can break at 10 times more places; and it does break; the process seems more important than the actual app that we are building; user satisfaction is awful; no time for running experiments or deeply explore the problem. We add such a complexity to so tiny apps that I could build over 1-2 weekends that it suffocates the application itself. I'm looking for the way out, I'm sure there are better places but I'm really thinking about setting up my own company where I could use more common sense. If it's a large app then let's follow a strict process but when it's almost like a toy project then let's keep it simple and only invest in sensible amount of energy. I've seen here the post about John Carmack notes what he accomplished on a single day, I have never got close to that but I was so productive, adding multiple features on a single day and that made me so satisfied. And now it's all about the "gates".
- germinalphrase 3y ago“ I've seen here the post about John Carmack notes what he accomplished on a single day…” Anyone got a link?
- superkuh 3y agoThere is a inverse relationship between ease of developer experience writing a program and ease of user execution of that program on an arbitrary platform slightly different from the developers. This is taken to the extreme in two languages that otherwise are very similar in origin and use: Python and Perl. Python is a great language to write things in. It's super popular and always getting new features. But it is one of the worst languages for people who aren't the developer to try to run what the developer wrote. It is just implicitly assumed these days that the system python install simply won't be able to install or run the dependencies the developer used. But it's not just dependency hell of a normal type. In python you need a dependency manager manager (conda/poetry/pyenv to a lesser extent) to set up the container in which you'll use your actual dependency manager in isolation (pip, pypi, etc) to try to set up the depencies needed for the python script(s) to run. An even within the multiple layers of management overhead python changes from version to version (even minor version sometimes) and a python script written 10 years ago won't actually run today and vice versa. Perl is notoriously not a great language to write (and maintain) things in. It also no longer popular and doesn't get lots of new features. But it is one of the best languages for people who aren't developers to run what the developers wrote. The system perl on your distro will be able to install the dependencies without breaking anything and run the script, usually from disto repositories, but at worst from cpan which is universal. A perl script written today can be run on a system perl install from a decade ago and vice versa.
- nunez 3y agoI am dealing with this right now. iOS has a feature called "Focus." Focus enables you to create different views of your home and lock screens and silence/allow calls and notifications. iOS also has a basic automation framework called "Shortcuts" that lets you build workflows that trigger based on a variety of conditions. two of these conditions is being able to trigger a shortcut when you start or end a workout on Apple Watch or when you start a drive. These shortcuts fire maybe 30% of the time. When it doesn't work, it doesn't tell you anything about why it failed to trigger. Every time this happens, I want to trade all of my Apple shit for Android and Windows kit. I almost did that today, even. I would rather use software that doesn't have features than use software that does...but they don't work.
- cyclotron3k 3y agoThat's infuriating. But I'm saddened to tell you things are not much better in the world of Android. I frequently use timers to make sure I don't overcook the spaghetti or beans ("Ok Google, set a timer for X minutes"), and it works about 80% of the time, only to betray you with direst consequence. And it's not that it's just not hearing me; it'll register the instruction and show confirmation on the screen, but then no timer actually starts.
- nunez 3y agooh wow. Timers not going off is a big deal. I experience many issues with iOS, but timers not firing is not one of them.
- commandlinefan 3y agoIt's because "productivity" matters. Quality does not.
- throw4847285 3y agoI love the specific combination of petty complaints and melodramatic title. "The Roman Empire is falling! We don't do the little folds on the tunics in our marble statues as well as we used to."
- imtringued 3y agoIt pisses me off. I have had worse problems. Legacy Java Enterprise Edition projects are at the top of that list, and they keep coming back and haunt you years later. The other problem is that C/C++ and Python have terrible build systems. I respect CMake, because it works, but the DSL and documentation is terrible. Using raw make is awful, because you need to generate dependencies.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- honkycat 3y ago>Docker and Electron are the most hyped new technologies of the last five years. Both are not about improving things, figuring out complexity or reducing it If you can't figure out docker and how it simplifies things, you aren't ready to write shitty think-pieces. As if manually installing things across 40 people's workstations is simpler? It is really not that hard and shows a lack of experience and resistance to adopting new techniques, which is BAD for a SWE. If you can't figure out Docker, you're pathetic. --- Also hate the "Good times create weak men..." because it is implies an "unlike me" that I find very cringe.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago"Amazon can't make a screen with two checkboxes: I mean, yeah, Amazon was never known for producing quality software. Yet, I insist, the task is SO trivial, it's so impossible to fail that it only demonstrates how bad people understand or control their tool. Twitter newly rebuilt UI takes 7 * longer to load first tweet, giving you essentially the same stuff but much later and with much more effort: I don't have numbers, but I've heard Gmail rewrite also made it much slower with no apparent new functions. It's still pretty drastic if you put GMail next to Fastmail, or Twitter next to Tweetdeck, both of which didn't get any full rewrites in the last decade, so you can see how fast even Web UI could be if we weren't constantly climbing up the abstraction ladder. Docker and Electron are the most hyped new technologies of the last five years. Both are not about improving things, figuring out complexity or reducing it. Both are just compromised attempts to hide accumulated complexity from developers because it became impossible to deal with."