badman_ting

If your arm gets broken, you don't "suck it up" and say "that's life", you go to a doctor and get treated. It's no different when your brain gets broken.

People say this sort of thing a lot, but it strikes me as unhelpful. The stigma against seeking help for mental health exists and is real, whether you think it's absurd or not. And that stigma often exists in the very people who need help, so just saying "oh you're being silly" is super not empathetic. It's actually not that different from the founder you mention.

Furthermore, 5 separate doctors will all concur that my arm is broken. But they will not concur that I have schizophrenia, or borderline personality disorder, or whatever. There are a number of reasons why that is, but my point is that none of this is as cut-and-dried as a fracture -- not the diagnosis, not the treatment, not the patient's acceptance that something is wrong.

I'm not a founder, just a techie with mild depressive tendencies. I think the advice to talk to someone when you feel it coming on is the best - if you talk to someone about the specific things bothering you, it can help avoid the scenario where the things loom so large in your mind that you can't get past them. Talking about problems somehow brings them back down to human scale and can help you realize how much you've built them up in your head. It's remarkable the number of times in my life that I have dreaded something that ended up being totally not that big a deal.

There was nothing named "Bolt" before Mr. Benton's product came around? Really?

The first time I went to Mexico, I was excited to get a fresh coconut, a hole cut in the top with a machete and a straw inserted. It was much less refreshing than I expected, so I don't understand this trend.

Probably correct. But, it doesn't feel that way.

Right, this strikes me as a situation with real potential for "the cure is worse than the disease".

Right. The point here is actually reducing the pool of candidates to those enthusiastic enough, and with enough time, to do projects in a way that fits the template this interviewer is looking for. I don't doubt they had success hiring people this way, rather the problem is in the false negatives as you point out.

I worked at a place that had people whose responsibility was the workflow, precisely so that developers could focus more on writing code. Then people started doing their own projects (good) so they wouldn't have to use .NET anymore (good) but they never took the time to get the workflow right (bad) and each new project worked slightly differently or was built on a completely new and different platform (bad) so now everyone has a more complicated workflow than they used to, and they're all different.

No automated testing, no CI, no reasonable way of deploying code and certainly no rollback, who has time for such frippery? I left.

Anecdotally it seems like a lot of the people let go were in SDET roles.

I hope this person is OK but that strikes me as unrealistic. Ageism is a real problem for software developers, but also that 15 years at MS could just as easily be viewed as a negative than a positive.

It's really not bullshit, I think. The stuff about fear rings totally true to me, it aligns perfectly with my experiences. But, I know that being on the other side of it, it can sound like a bunch of hokum. (That's part of the reason why people keep living that way - the logic is pretty watertight.)

I've read books about it too, and not been helped that much beyond perhaps gaining some insight, or setting expectations of what happiness is like. But that doesn't invalidate the information in the books, it tells you that merely reading about happiness does not make it so. You can read all the books about how to be a great basketball player, but you won't improve until you actually get on a court and shoot some shots.

Yup, it's about labor costs.

It's not like I disagree but discussing this aspect of every new thing that comes along is rather tiresome.

Wow, gotta disagree there. I found that having projects on Github was impressive to potential employers 100% of the time I brought it up. Before I had them on there (in particular, two small personal side projects) it was much more difficult to prove that I know stuff because I commit to private repos.

Oh, brother.

This is very thorough, and I'm sure it's helpful to a lot of folks. So thank you to the author. For me, it's probably a syntactical issue, but I find things such as the below too hard to comprehend.

What did we get just by doing this? Let's see:

    λ> :type EitherIO
    EitherIO :: IO (Either e a) -> EitherIO e a

    λ> :type runEitherIO
    runEitherIO :: EitherIO e a -> IO (Either e a)

OK, looks like a pair of parentheses moved. I have seriously no idea why that is interesting or useful. Conceptually what's going on is probably not complicated, but that syntax makes it inscrutable to me. (I could be wrong and the problem could be at a deeper level of understanding.)

Very strange comment, I'm sure execs expected all of this when the deal was done. Their expected outcome probably does not look "catastrophic" to them.

Actually, I would say that by the time the deal rolled around the catastrophe had already played itself out at Nokia. It's sad what happened to Nokia, but the acquisition is the least of it.

Call me names all day, I would never get on a flight with that airline. They should really just pack it in at this point.

"These events are still rare." OK, but if there's a turd in a bowl of 10,000 Skittles, I'm not eating any of them.

Instead of being a programmer auditioning to sling code, he was already “part of the club” (management) and just engaging in a two-way discussion, as equals, on whether he was going to join that particular section of the club.

Hmm! The latter is typically how I approach interviews (I'm a developer). I feel that if that's not the case then why am I here? Sometimes you get people that are smart in a dumb way, like the last interview in the story here. Just looking to be intellectually dominant, the "winner". But you just have to recognize those situations for what they are and not get discouraged. Developers are in demand, we get to act like it. And sometimes people get treated like shit because they allow it to happen.

I find this suspicion suspicious. I know that some people are melodramatic about it, but why can't people just have their food without gluten if they don't want it? Nobody ever backlashed against the anti-MSG thing, and that was arguably way dumber.

On the other hand, I have heard that this has resulted in lowering of standards for handling gluten, and people who are severely allergic are being exposed to small amounts, while people without celiac don't notice those small amounts. So, that's bad.

This is what mealy-mouthed "best tool for the job" rhetoric misses. Different platforms have different communities with different people in them, who place emphasis on different aspects of development.

My personal hunch is that the things that get in your way as a developer on Windows add up and become very frustrating. So, good devs either get tired of this or don't want to deal with it in the first place. The rest of them wait for an open-source solution, rewrite it in C#, and prepend the name with an "N".

Pre-legalization: "Crime will go up." Post-legalization: "Crime went down, but not because of the weed thing."

Well, okay then.

"Functional programming is the mustachioed hipster of programming paradigms."

Well, that's not helping. But I agree that devs should learn FP, and I now write in a much more functional style than I used to. I resisted for a long time, and that was a mistake.

Getting the first and last line of a file with unpacking is pretty slick. Respect.

I remember idle moments during soccer games I played as a kid. I would sometimes think to myself "OK, we're up 1-0. If the rest of the game goes at this rate, we will definitely win." The problem with that reasoning is the word "if".

It's the blog post I was born to read. Thank you for writing this.

The amount of stupid tedious pain you're supposed to go through with vi in order just to get a basic working editor is ridiculous. Like some kind of nerdy rite of passage. No thanks.

A more humorous look here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZr7ADxLff8#t=0m38s

Well, in my opinion it's not just the cold, the summers are hot and gross too. Not much "open-window weather", as my mom says. But then, if pollen is a consideration that would make sense for you. I live in the Pacific NW now, which is much milder year-round.

That has been my way of thinking too. Another consideration is student loans - if you pay $500 a month in loans, that will be a smaller portion of an NYC salary. Same for any purchase or bill which is unrelated to cost of living.

I left Pittsburgh, like all my friends except for one. It's been discussed as an up-and-coming city for years now, but I'm still not sure it's somewhere I would want to live. I remember when people pointed to the Google office that was built there, as an indicator that things were changing. At the time, that office had 25 employees, not sure about now. I guess I'm saying that I'm not sure how much of that narrative is actually happening for people in Pittsburgh.

As far as raising kids, I could definitely see that. Your real-estate dollar goes pretty far. The weather sucks ass, though -- even Paul Graham says so! I really wouldn't want to have to deal with that again.

(Also, the bit about "why should I pay a bunch in rent to live near some nice parks" is such a dumb way of thinking about NYC. But if you really do think that way you definitely should not go to New York.)