HN user

hotdox

30 karma
Posts0
Comments56
View on HN
No posts found.

One study found that being laid off ranked seventh among the most stressful life experiences — above divorce, a sudden and serious impairment of hearing or vision, or the death of a close friend. Experts advise that it takes, on average, two years to recover from the psychological trauma of losing a job.

For healthy employees without pre-existing health conditions, the odds of developing a new health condition rise by 83% in the first 15 to 18 months after a layoff, with the most common conditions being stress-related illnesses, including hypertension, heart disease, and arthritis. The psychological and financial pressure of being laid off can increase the risk of suicide by 1.3 to 3 times. Displaced workers have twice the risk of developing depression, four times the risk of substance abuse, and six times the risk of committing violent acts including partner and child abuse. The stress induced by a layoff can even impair fetal development.

I use next script. It creates temporarily dir for firefox, uses it as a profile dir and remove after firefox closed.

   #!/bin/sh -e
   DIR="${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache}"
   mkdir -p -- "$DIR"
   TEMP="$(mktemp -d -- "$DIR/firefox-XXXXXX")"
   trap "rm -rf -- '$TEMP'" INT TERM EXIT
   wget 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pyllyukko/user.js/master/user.js' -O "$TEMP/user.js"
   firefox -profile "$TEMP" -no-remote "$@"
It also uses very hardened options from https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js

It is not my invention, but I lost a link to blog post

In technology, it is common for technical resources to not be on the same level of communication as the business.

Please stop call us resources, after that we can have an effective communication

I respect Joel and his experience. I just don't see connection between first part of article (unable to start) and second one (fire and motion). Can you make it more clear for me?

I think you underestimate quality of outsource workers around a world. I am not talking specifically about India. For 10k/month you get a very good developer for a short(1 month) gig in Europe. For long-term(3-6 month) gig price is even lower.

From your side as a person who understands project you can propose technical leading for a project, e.g. 1 day/week for 1 month. But you need to decide how to handle conflicts. Outsourcers has no initiatives to follow your recommendations.

It likely exists because other candidates have got through the process but were not effective.

No, just someday someone decided to add this to interview process.

It is not a bad trait in itself. Badness is applyig this trait to every small event of your life. You need to differentiate between important and unimportant events. Before starting running scenarios in your head assign cost to a case. Tune your cost-setting according outcomes.

As a guy who was working a lot on improving Android OS privacy. I see several problems here:

- First and the main. How persuade user to buy your solution. Buy is not about money. Buy is to replace existent free solutions. Solid should have substantial user base. Only in this case big players will take Solid into account. E.g. there are a lot of private Android forks and stores. They have no traction. Privacy is a feature. This feature is not very important for current customers.

- Second, it is hard to manage permissions for data access by hands. User should judge is access reasonable for this application. It is complex even in Android case, where every user works with hundred of applications. In web case it is more complex. You will contact hundred of services during visit of single page (CDN, javascript hosting, video hosting, ads serving etc). User will just push "Allow" button on every access request.

- Third, every current technology was created for sharing (or surveillance, if you prefer). Data is leaking through provied permissions. E.g.you give application access to photos, it has access to location. Location is stored in photo's EXIF header.

- It is hard to persuade user to buy something. Here buy is about money. 3d party developers prefer to give free applications. They monetize showing ads

Usually it is good to have second side of story. We can not, so, let me be the devil's advocate.

There have been numerous technical arguments where it is all of the other engineers against the lead, which go nowhere.

If you can not convince lead, may be it is not her fault?

The code the lead has written is also atrocious

It is hard to agree on quality of code between several programmers. It is easy to agree on quality of OTHER guy's code.

Two biases in-place here:

- You work only on problem code, not well-functioning one

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

, and if I didn't know better I would say it is actively malicious (in terms of nobody else is able to maintain it).

Skill you lack - handling problem code

However, the non-technical side of the company is very frustrated with how often everything breaks

This is a real problem, here I can not indulge her

I am trying to fix things but the codebase is not in a great condition and the lead has no interest in making it better.

No interest or no resources?

Non-technical folks have talked to me about just doing a rewrite, since there really isn't much code, but the lead will not even consider the idea.

Joel calls it "single worst strategic mistake" in https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Code amount is not a good characteristic of system complexity. May be buisness people underestimate amout of effort required.

(Edit):Fixed EOLs