freshflowers

I have never seen any evidence that the WMF has been following standard software engineering principles that were well-known when Mythical Man-Month was was first published in 1975. If they had, we would be seeing things like requirements documents and schedules with measurable milestones.

This person appears to be completely ignorant of the changes in software engineering since, let's say, the mid 90s. (Which kind of discredits everything else he writes.)

However, he's introduced as "He runs a consulting business, rescuing engineering projects that have gone seriously wrong."

So basically this is just a consultant's sales pitch.

All that matters is having a good conversation and not appearing completely incompetent.

After an enjoyable conversation, the hiring person will rationalize wanting you all by themselves, even if they have to make up / project qualities you've never demonstrated.

95% of the time, there's nothing rational about hiring.

Gee, and there was me thinking that the rise of Trump had put an end to the argument that these types of unethical behaviour are not symptoms of the same problem.

Defending a lack of ethics with ideology is a nothing more than a cheap trick. And I'm not falling for it anymore.

now that the tables have turned, women might need to make a compromise

Most of us here on HN work in the tech industry, with its notorious sexism and underrepresentation problems. So let's get real here.

To claim that the tables have turned reeks of the same claim to victimhood that the straight white christian men that voted for Trump use to justify their crap.

You claim you don't want to right the "whole mensright bandwagon", but you're already on it.

The tables aren't even close to having been turned, the disappearance of many jobs that men continued to claim for themselves until they stopped existing is just a coincidence.

Suggestion to stop using the same fucking stock images with the same fucking benches everybody else is using to symbolize "cool company".

Whatever sincere doubts and supposed nuances may have lead YC to continue to tolerate Thiel's presence before Trump took power, there can be no more doubts today.

An organization that associates itself with both the ACLU and a fascist regime lacks any kind of credibility. This reeks of PR driven opportunism.

The latter has to do with the fact that those cups have a very different purpose, which is why the solo cups are marketed as "American party cups". The "American" refers to the format of the party as much as the cups.

At normal parties in the Netherlands we just drink beer from bottles because we have an entirely different beer and alcohol culture, without the whole age limit BS (despite recent legal changes raising the purchase age to 18).

With the exception of the transparant hard plastic cups used is stadiums and at festivals, we tend to not drink our alcohol from plastic cups.

Politics isn't some isolated thing. Politics is about everything we do and say. A techie elite deciding what they do isn't political, or worse, beyond politics, is part of what got us to this point in the first place.

HN is a garden, politics is war by other means

Denial, denial, denial. This is like the arms dealers selling to both sides in third world conflict and claiming they are ethically above the killing.

You claim intellectual curiosity, but you peddle intellectual dishonesty.

Thank you, btw. I left HN months ago, and today come back to see exactly the pathetic hypocrisy that turned me off in the first place. Shit like this makes me be ashamed to be part of the tech community.

Sure, let's hide from the real world and pretend it isn't happening.

Any management advice that consists of a one-size-fits-all approach is by definition bad advice.

Every member of my team is an individual, and they all deserve an individual approach. Also, I find this particular approach rather condescending, and assuming the employee in question needs handholding and psychotherapy.

In Western Europe, you'll especially get the latter. And be glad it doesn't result in an HR complaint. Or at least a permanent distrust of that creepy invasive manager.

But the worse would be a truthful answer. As a manager, I know some of my people well enough to know what kind of painful shit that would dredge up. It's impossible, and even downright undesirable to have a relationship with all your team members in which it is okay to discuss such things.

Hang out more on subreddits you don't agree with.

Hanging out with people you don't agree with is one thing. Hanging out with people that want you to stop existing is an entirely different matter.

If people are willing to (vote to) cross that line, time for talk and bridging divides is not just over, it's suicidally naive to think otherwise.

I could go Godwin here, but you get the point.

And somehow I have little sympathy for people who want to leave the US for political reasons but have a problem with countries where wealth is distributed more evenly.

Which by far doesn't solve all problems, and subsequently creates a ton of new problems.

How about just an appropriate workplace for the job, like 99% of all other jobs, even some of the lowest paid ones?

Have a bit of self respect and respect for your craft.

The lazy part here is your writing and argumentation, not the fucking swearing.

I agree with the "know the audience" part.

As in: much of your audience here isn't American, and you obviously are.

No natural light is pretty much illegal in most civilized countries.

This is why office buildings in most of Western Europe aren't as massive and square as in countries like the US.

No bullshit. I was taught this. It's standard practice. You may have just had a shitty instructor.

Same experience, over the course of over decade. iBook, Powerbook, Macbook, whatever, all frayed power cords or other defects at the laptop connector end.

I'm an Apple fanboy most of the time, but damn is this getting old.

Sugru works wonders though, if you catch it early enough.

As a European who regularly hires people from outside the EU (including Americans), it always seemed to me that the American H1B Visas were deliberately designed to suppress wages.

Any other skilled migrant visa system I know of has a very explicit and fairly high wage minimum to prevent such abuse.

As a result, the stereotypical underpaid Indian engineer is a rarity in Europe. Indian engineers that do end up here are usually amongst the higher skilled and better paid workers.

Hell, it's even common for skilled migrants from outside the EU to get a higher starting salary than their local counterparts (especially those from poorer EU countries) just to meet the wage threshold.

it taught me everything is breached

More likely, sold. Every service that collects user data will get offers, and many can't resist the temptation.

Doesn't matter however, businesses that will sell you to the highest bidder (and in many cases, outside the US, illegally) can't be trusted to ever seriously invest in security. So if they aren't breached, they sooner or later will be.

Ironically, the same issue is exactly why I, as a citizen of the Netherlands, support leaving the EU.

Because even at this point, Net Neutrality is still less well protected by the EU than it was under our own national legislation.

I cannot in all good conscience support a union that has the power to undermine our civil rights. If Brits don't want those civil rights, that's their choice.

Brussels is not a force for good simply because in this case it would be an improvement for the Brits.

I buy from Bandcamp and voluntarily pay double just out of general principle. I listen most of music via Spotify out of convenience, but I'll gladly financially support any band that offers an honest product.

Ah, the fine art of rationalization...

I doubt a Dell XPS will last longer. The problem with non-Apple laptops, with few (and expensive) exceptions, is the build quality.

It's 2016, people treat laptops like any common electronic household item, and the majority of non-Apple laptops, especially Dells, start to look pretty ragged after less than 2 years.

That's why MacBooks tend to have a decent resell value, whereas you cannot even give other old laptops away.

Please make sure it's something your team can actually get behind, and be very careful about how you put it. Because for experienced developers, any sign of pivoting to consulting is a sign to run for the exit. That's explicitly not what they signed up for when they took a chance on a start-up. Many will rather help out by cleaning the toilets than to fundamentally change the nature of their work.

It's kinda shocking that PG omitted that part, because I've seen it happen several times.

(Read michealochurch's comment further down on this page, he pretty much nails it.)

There are many, many activities, paid and unpaid, in which people get confronted with entitled a-holes on a regular basis.

This is not unique to open source, or tech in general. This is a generic social issue.

Seriously, you claim it only cost the company a book and a week to get you up to speed in a new languages, but you can't be arsed to make that small investment in yourself before applying for a new job?

That inertia and lack of motivation is the reason I wouldn't hire you. Because besides languages, your job as an engineer entails constantly learning and trying new things in order to find the best solution for any given challenge. I need to trust you, the engineer to do that, because that is your job. The actual coding is just the formal expression of that job.

If you don't do that by your own volition, I might as well give the work to a much cheaper coder in an off shore sweatshop.

Try looking at it from an employer perspective. The fact that you have a CS degree tells me absolutely nothing about your engineering talent.

So hiring you on that basis alone would be gamble, and the odds for that gamble are hysterically bad. They have better odds taking a year's junior developer salary straight to the casino.

The number of people claiming to be able to do the job is a multitude of those actually able to do the job.

If you are actually "in a similar position", it should take you less than two months to get out of that position. Teach yourself a stack that is in demand, build a project and put it out there (Github, App store, whatever) and if you show any talent and skill the odds are you'll be hired within a month.

Just waving your CS degree around isn't going to make anything happen.

Fuck it, you've just graduated in November, you have no proven skills and you're already whining about not getting hired?

At one time, a college degree and a demonstrable grasp of computing technology was all one needed.

Yep, and that turned out to be a fucking disaster. So we learned how to filter for programming skills, and the results were utterly depressing. The vast majority of those "engineers who are unable to find work" couldn't code their way out of a paper bag.

That applies to the majority of applicants unless we start filtering for actual proven experience. Trying to find someone inexperienced who's worth investing in training is a truly depressing exercise most smaller companies really can't afford.

Is it really that much to ask that an unemployed engineer who wants a job coding in language X makes a bit of an effort to learn the language by themselves? Employers really don't expect 'paid' experience in something that's brand new, but what they do expect is self-motivation. If you're only willing to learn X when your boss tells you, you're either going to be a pain to work with or you're covering up for your lack of skill.

You only learn a language really well over years. That's your paid on-the-job-training. All most hiring managers look for is some sign of skill and motivation.

Not to mention the reality that the "cult of new", as we see it on HN and in the start-up scene really fucks over most non-startup employers. Most developers don't stick with any company for more than two or three years because they want green field projects in the latest sexy language and framework, not maintain "boring legacy code" (we're talking code no more than two years old...) in a stack that's just been declared harmful, crap or whatever by the HN hipster engineering in-crowd.

So you train someone, invest time in someone, allow them to learn from costly mistakes on real world projects, and just when they are at the peek of their knowledge and productivity, they fuck off again. Regardless of how well they get paid and treated.

We bitch a lot about employers not investing in training, but the flip side is that we have actively contributed to a culture of zero loyalty.

As far as I can tell, there is a real scarcity of actually talented engineers, but employees and employers are stuck in some destructive loop that just makes the problem a thousand times worse.

It's a software project management book disguised as a novel.

That sounds horribly Randian.

Something about the tone of absolute certainty and the cringe-worthy attempts at humor of Peopleware already rubbed me the wrong way, and I absolutely loathe novels that put convincing the reader of some greater thruth over literary quality (or just entertainment). I'm pretty sure I'm going to hate this novel, even if I probably agree with 90% of the underlying ideas.