tikhonj

48 ms·

661.
by tikhonj 5y ago
Seems like there's a structural issue at play here: the team is accountable for building a specific set of features at a specific time. High-level functionality is fixed and the timeline is fixed. If the estimate is off or something un
662.
by tikhonj 5y ago
There's a qualitative difference between the sort of informal estimates you mentioned ("it'll be hard") vs the sort talked about here—people don't treat the informal estimates as commitments! As soon as an estimate
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by tikhonj 5y ago
I recently helped somebody get Nix set up on an M1 Macbook and it seemed to work fine overall. We just used the standard installer, then mostly reused a home-manager-based config that I use on my x86-64 Macbook. Core stuff like Git and Emac
664.
by tikhonj 5y ago
I've seen this pattern before: problems encountered with a new or different technology are attributed to that technology, while comparable problems with the existing system are seen as the fault of specific teams/developers or jus
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by tikhonj 5y ago
One feature I rather like in Haskell is being able to zip with list comprehension syntax[1]: λ> [(x, y) | x <- [1..] | y <- [1..3]] [(1,1),(2,2),(3,3)] This example is a bit silly—I would just write zip [1..] [1..3]—
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by tikhonj 5y ago
And yet, in my experience, even people who recognize this focus hard to improving estimates and "accountability", but rarely seriously try to reduce dependencies. I tend to operate on the opposite principle, to the point that I be
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by tikhonj 5y ago
Seems like static typing is neither necessary nor sufficient to cause the particular problems you mentioned. Static types can absolutely help with more than local reasoning. One of the main reasons I like static types is that they give me a
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by tikhonj 5y ago
The example with pattern matching doesn't have anything to do with static types. You'll have exactly the same problem if you pattern match against positional arguments in Python: match event.get(): case Click((x, y))
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by tikhonj 5y ago
I just do \mu (or ;mu) in Emacs. We're in the 21st century, all the tools we use should have reasonable Unicode support. The fact that we collectively keep on talking about typing non-ASCII characters as a real problem is a pretty depr
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by tikhonj 5y ago
When I fix a bug, I have to reproduce it somehow to make sure my fix actually works. Adding a regression test is a way to save that work as code. Once I have a reasonable test infrastructure set up, the majority of the effort is in unders
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by tikhonj 5y ago
I mean, that's a great example of a clear rationale! If my job required interacting with machinery or hardware that had to be centrally located, I wouldn't need to be "required" to come into the office any more than I&#x
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by tikhonj 5y ago
For reference/further reading, the problem in the blog post is modeled by the hypergeometric distribution[1]. Approximating the hypergeometric distribution in your head is a handy skill for card games with any time pressure—definitely
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by tikhonj 5y ago
At the same time, I don't think anybody would have issues with claims like "smoking kills X people a year", even though it's also a relationship that isn't 100% direct. The two claims do seem qualitatively differe
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by tikhonj 5y ago
C is a domain-specific language for writing security vulnerabilities :).
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by tikhonj 5y ago
I originally wrote this as a response to some comment, but it applied to multiple different threads, so I figured I'd post it top-level instead: I found a job where I worked remotely and people legitimately cared about what I accomplis
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by tikhonj 5y ago
> Big tech doesn't hold off on making billion dollar business decisions based on the same techniques either. I've seen how large companies make ≈$X0 million decisions and probably $X00 million decisions and I suspect $ billio
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by tikhonj 5y ago
I don't know if this question is an example, but people intentionally include "obvious" questions in surveys to check whether people are actually paying attention to the survey. There's a name for these, I just don'
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by tikhonj 5y ago
My understanding is that the point of the Big Five model is that the design was the other way around—we started by looking at how answers to personality-related questions naturally clustered, then we gave names to those clusters. We defin
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by tikhonj 5y ago
I've worked at a few different teams between some startups and Target, and I can tell you that the variance team-to-team is massive . I've been lucky to avoid anywhere that's been truly toxic, but even just at Target there&#
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by tikhonj 6y ago
I'm sorry, a process that happens in front of your team so that they can judge whether you're "living up to expectations" is literally a public accountability ritual. You can't fix culture with (just) process, b
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by tikhonj 6y ago
It sounds like you believe time and productivity are fungible. That's the real problem, not people being on Reddit during "work" hours.
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by tikhonj 6y ago
This is why I find standups (and other ceremonies) patronizing and exhausting. It's like you have to publicly defend yourself and your work every single day. There's a massive difference between setting up accountability for yours
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by tikhonj 6y ago
Guy Steele used the restriction to one-syllable words to make a point. It's supposed to sound a bit off and it pushes him to define a bunch of words as he goes along. If he had started with "simple" words instead, the talk wo
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by tikhonj 6y ago
Publications have pre-written obituaries for famous people to make sure they can respond immediately when somebody famous dies. Occasionally these obituaries get published in response to incorrect rumors or simply through some kind of inter
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by tikhonj 6y ago
> Even so, the freedom to... saw/split/stack firewood when the weather was perfect, build a movie nook for my wife, go on bike rides on a Tuesday afternoon in a warm breeze, take our dog on a long, leisurely walk at a local pa
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by tikhonj 6y ago
It seems like many companies do a poor job of separating product management from project management—I believe this is actively counter-productive and explains the issues engineers complain about. On the one hand, we have "product
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by tikhonj 6y ago
> at best, clear code tells you what it does. This depends a lot on what you mean by "clear" code! You can write higher-level code with abstractions that emphasize the what rather than the how and you can write code that
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by tikhonj 6y ago
Tech companies do have a bonus system, not just in literal bonuses but also in stock grants that depend on your performance. Coupled with an engineering promotion ladder that tops out at the equivalent of a VP (or even SVP?) role, it seem
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by tikhonj 6y ago
I've never been that poor, but I've had limited funds in the past, and I can say that having even a small amount of money that you're psychologically comfortable spending on anything is a massive relief. Sometimes the best
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by tikhonj 6y ago
I've heard this before but it strikes me as a fundamentally condescending view. I've found that most people, including junior developers, more than rise to the occasion as long as they're given trust, a real understanding of

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