michaelochurch

16 ms·

91.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
Train an X programmer on Y, and you'll most likely get Y written as X for quiet some time, until they gain experience, if ever. Most companies are run by short-sighted mediocrities who don't look more than 3 months into the futu
92.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
What alternative would you suggest? Hiring adults and trusting them to get their work done.
93.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
You're missing one side of the equation. Some of those technical decisions matter a great deal. Some don't, but language and tooling choices affect careers. If we (at hypothetical company X where I work at a given time) become a S
94.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
We've seen big growth and interest in the Chicago Haskell group as well. I'll support Luke's claim. We've had over 30 people for the last two meetups (in March and May). There's a lot of interest in the next Meetu
95.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
I've seen startups killed by New Guy CTO Who Really Likes Java. It's rarely a tool that kills a company, though. It's an attitude. It's not the tool's fault. If you use some Java (perhaps you need to be on the JVM,
96.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
But picking Haskell as a start up is suicidal. Unsubstantiated FUD.
97.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
Five minutes is not enough. It takes 20, at least. You have to be in a quiet environment where you can focus on the sound. Also, I've found better results with isochronic tones. Binaural beats pretty much mandate headphones and, even t
98.
The 1 Percent's New War on Us All(salon.com)
6 points by michaelochurch 11y ago|0 comments
99.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
First of all, some kind of periodic status meeting is a necessary evil. Everyone hates giving status reports and justifying time. It's humiliating and time-consuming. It probably has to happen. If you don't have a scheduled, forma
100.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
Flat hierarchy is a big one. Many startups use it to convince junior hires that they'll be two hops from the CEO when, in fact, that CTO has 75 reports and the junior engineer is actually two de facto levels below where he was told
101.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
High-trust and low-trust understate the severity of the phase change, which is more accurately described as a shift from trust-density to trust-sparsity. You go from a state where people spawn with the "bozo bit" off to one where
102.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
You can blow up the runtime with integer division by zero, however. λ 1 `quot` 0 *** Exception: divide by zero With `1/0`, it uses `Double` because `(/)` requires a Fractional type. Also, partial functions like `head`
103.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
I'd agree that having an awesome team gives you a lot of other advantages, and actually FP is a huge opportunity to build that team for start ups. FP tends to attract the kind of people who make up a great team. Yes, absolutely. It&#
104.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
First, I think that people aren't becoming less uncivil but that environments are getting worse. If anything (although this is probably an artifact of increasing age and status) people seem to be getting better, on the whole: fewer mea
105.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
2 cats. Singapore has mandatory quarantine and that, along with transportation, is expensive.
106.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
I strongly doubt it. Singapore has interesting leadership that isn't afraid to be controversial, but engineer salaries there are terrible. A senior engineer in Singapore makes $47,000 according to Glassdoor (compare: $95k Chicago, $113
107.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
I bet that NIMBYKiller 3D would be a popular FPS in California. Bonus points for realism in the burning hedges-- if you "New Game+" it and have the flame-thrower when you get to the Atherton level.
108.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
The Bay Area has a lot of trophy spouses who cover up the shame of unemployability by "serving" on the sorts of boards and councils that have the power to go hard-core NIMBY and fight progress and make it impossible to develop a h
109.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
I heard a manager at Google admit that he gave the shittiest work to state-school grads, not because they were less capable (they weren't, and he admitted as much) but because the Ivy Validation (as in Google being the Ivy League of yo
110.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
It works as long as you know which locks you need in advance. You'll get much better concurrency than with the one-lock model when there's a low probability that two processes need any of the same locks (e.g. locking a whole table
111.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
I doubt that it's going to be anything like 2008's financial market crash. VC-funded startups just aren't that important. Housing prices and interest rates affect everyone; VC is just a game for rich people playing with other
112.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
Scrum isn't so bad for juniors, but when you get older and want to tackle more ambitious projects, you won't want to be justifying mere weeks or days (sometimes even hours) of your own working time. These methods take management s
113.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
Investors use age as a primary factor. Companies can't, for the reasons you described.
114.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
You're getting downvoted for speaking painful truths. There is a lot in software that takes more than 3 years to learn: machine learning (real ML, not tweaking off-the-shelf algorithms) and compilers and the like. The problem is that t
115.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
I laugh heartily when management types say they want someone to be "more of a team player". A team player-- that is, a unionist-- is the last thing that Silicon Valley investors and executives want.
116.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
It's quite simple: a young and single engineer will cost less and work more. An older and married (or with kids) engineer will cost more and work less. However, that older engineer will achieve more in an 8-hour day than the Commodit
117.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
31. The fact that 39 is "definitely old" is fucked up. Age discrimination isn't about competence (programmers peak much later than 40) but control. It exists because the VC man-child oligarchy (oddly enough, software inherits
118.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
This whole anti-"negativity" thing is just an attempt to impose Bay Area passive-aggressive culture on every participant in the discussion, even though we "in tech" come from (and ought to come from) all over the world.
119.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
Well, over 90% of getting funded by VCs is stuff that happens before birth, so yes, that is literally true.
120.
by michaelochurch 11y ago
I think that it's an uncanny valley effect. A hotel room looks somewhat like a home, but it's definitely not a home. It's great not having to do your own cleaning, but the space feels over-cleaned and sterile. Also, hotel r

More ›