smurph

I agree that male friendship has suffered a lot over the past few decades, and the decline of overtly exclusively male organisations for adults probably has something to do with that. The only real exceptions I can think of are athletic leagues and religious activities. Basically you can play in a men's soccer league or go to a men's bible study and nobody will think it's odd or sinister, but joining an overtly male only social club will probably be viewed differently. I wonder if the guys in this article would have just joined a local lodge of some kind 50 years ago and been happy with that.

The Detroit that existed for most of the 20th Century likely can't exist again in the US unless the whole nation's economy changes. You'll never have a large population of low (formal) skilled workers making good money because their experience and a general shortage of reliable labor. The corporation has figured out for the most part how to move the know-how from the worker's brain to a corporate training manual, and unskilled labor is no longer scarce anywhere for long since relocation is a lot easier than it was 50 years ago. If Detroit is going to turn around, it is going to look like most of the other American cities. Lots of young creatives move in, followed by trendy bars & restaurants, followed by young white collar workers who want to live in the new trendy area. The white collar workers price everyone else out, and the process starts again in a new neighborhood. The white collar workers could come from startups, but the area already has plenty of them working for established businesses like the auto companies. Downtown Detroit at that point would just be a bigger Royal Oak or Ferndale with some high rises and old money sprinkled in.

His direct boss probably has little or no say in how much he gets paid, and the person who does influence that has probably never met him or even heard of him. Welcome to corporate America for the working class.

I've noticed the same thing. Management tends to be older white men with MBAs and there's a big culture divide between them and the developers who control their destiny. So what do they do? They go hire a guy about their age with a CS degree and an MBA to be the trusted representative and they pay him more than any developer. It doesn't just happen in software either, I've seen the same thing with biologists at bio tech companies. Some brand new white baby boomer ends up in charge of the biology team that's been there for years all because the white baby boomer boss doesn't want to handle the mostly female and non-white employees.

That sounds like a regular lead developer, but I agree a good lead dev is worth more than any software architect.

They don't say anything is illegal, they say it is 'prohibited'. They don't say who it is prohibited by, and since it's clearly not the federal government you have to assume it's just prohibited by the NFL itself. Of course nobody has to listen to a goddamn thing the NFL says, so why include the message? It's likely a CYA thing on their part, since it gives them the power to essentially disown any event or analysis that is related to their broadcast. Also worth noting is how the NFL is obsessed with law enforcement culture. Lots of the league employees are former police and FBI, so there is a good chance they actually think they have some kind of authority over what a person does or says in relation to the NFL.

Am I the only one who thinks it's insane that someone can go from an undergrad CS degree to a failed startup and then directly into (presumably well paid) consulting gigs? I'd be pretty wary of a consultant who's only work experience was starting their own company and failing.

Merge commits from pulls really bothered me at first, but as I've used git more I've realized that the hoops you jump through to always rebase and avoid them aren't always worth it. A merge commit might clutter up your git log, but it does more accurately describe what happened.

Big defense contractors have a yearly VRIF (Voluntary Reduction In Force), which is when they offer slightly better than average retirement packages to expendable older employees. Young people would never get the offer (because they couldn't retire) and important older engineers would also never get the offer, even though many of them wanted it. This is a big improvement over that since it can be used by younger employees and the employee decides unilaterally if they want the package.

A lot of kids are attending college because it's a status symbol for their parents, and I think it's been that way since the 90s. I remember being in high school and hearing about my friends getting in big fights with their parents because they did not want to go to college, which of course was unacceptable in white upper middle class suburbia.

I actually really like the Zune music player that you could (still can?) download from Microsoft. I never even owned a Zune, but the player software is a lightweight WMP with better design. Sure the Zune Marketplace/pass links were all there, but they are easy enough to ignore.

I've had federal employees tell me with a straight face that waterfall development is the only model that works, and that is why 'all of the tech companies use it'. These people have often gone and gotten certifications for stuff like six sigma and CMMI. They will never change their tune. You basically have to wait for all of them to retire. The average government tech worker is so different from the commercial tech worker that they may as well be a different industry all together.

The bevel is pointless. You won't be able to notice it in on smaller versions of the logo, which it most of them.

In my last job I had to lead a team of people and I had one developer in his 50s and one in his early 60s. They were fine, I loved working with them. The guy in his 50s was just a awesome engineer who could code circles around me and everyone else on the team and was still getting better every year. The guys in his 60s wasn't as good, but he was on his second career after going back to school for CS. So his technical knowledge level was about the same as a 26 year old.

Now I work with an engineer in his 50s who did not know what a VM was before working with me and still writes everything in procedural C. Our product still has a serial port on it because of this guy. So it goes both ways.

I would say hiring a bad older engineer is actually more harmful than hiring a bad younger engineer because your team might subconsciously give the older person more benefit of doubt, and go along with more of their bad decisions. The solution is to not hire bad engineers or to fire them quickly.

Joel said it best: Smart and gets things done. That's really all you need. They don't need to be rock stars or 10xers or top 1%. You just need to be able to give them something to do and have confidence that it will get done in a timely manner and the code won't end up on Daily WTF. They need to have enough passion to bring some new knowledge to the table once in a while without you explicitly telling them to go learn about X. They need to get along with their teams. I think if you just push hard for those simple things, you will end up with some top tier developers anyway.

I worked with a guy like this who didn't realize he was doing nothing useful. He thought that printing updated spreadsheets and reading random documentation was worth his likely 6 figure salary. It was no secret though, all of the younger employees knew about him. I think the managers avoided dealing with him because they were afraid that he would wind up assigned to their team and bringing their productivity down. He would get really upset whenever we got an email about a new VP or Director being promoted, because he though he was in line for that sort of thing. Eventually he convinced his manager, a remote guy who didn't really know who he was, to promote him to a senior engineering position. I left soon after that.

The city government is still corrupt and incompetent, and the remaining population is largely unemployable. Yes it's a good thing that the city is going from broke to just poor, but I don't know if it will every truly recover.

This model assumes everyone in your organisation is Clueless and the author correctly points out that it falls on its face when you try to apply it to a group with a few Losers in the mix. Also, someone is always writing the checks and handing out the raises, so there will always be a leader somewhere in the group.

In my experience, this is how the big defense contractors approach software. They will gravitate towards the most expensive proprietary tools in hopes that their engineers will pigeon hole themselves into that environment. I honestly had people tell me that I wasn't allowed to use anything open source (even through the military uses open source all the time) and that ClearCase is the most dominant version control system in the software industry.

"Get your rat out"? Seriously? That's got to be one of the most foul things I've ever heard. Real life is so much more disgusting than fiction.

In my experience, there is no shortage of older people who hold the title of Software Engineer, usually with a high number following it or an impressive word proceeding it. However a lot of these people have moved into 'big picture' roles and rarely touch code anymore, or they are really acting as managers. The few that do still write code full time are extremely valuable and tend to have really deep knowledge of the technologies they work with and the domains they operate in.

I would also be interested in the average retirement age for Software Engineers, meaning people still doing the job when they retire. I'm betting very few of them actually wait until their 60s.

I'm a young programmer and this is a goal of mine. It doesn't mean I will stop building things, but it would be nice if I didn't have to do it for other people and didn't have to do it for at least 40 hours a week if I didn't want to. With the salaries we get, this is very possible if we can avoid lifestyle bloat.

I'm not saying that trying to innovate on a successful product team is bad. I am saying that when someone's motivation for innovating is to further their own career and not to solve the customer's problems, then their ideas are going to be bad most of the time. That's when they're an architecture astronaut. They care more about getting their ideas implemented so that they can so "look at that smart thing I did". Meanwhile other engineers are doing things like fixing bugs and implementing features that actual users have asked for.

Many of the attempts that had been made, especially at Microsoft, were also just new versions of existing apps with some kind of syncing built in and a higher price. Office Groove is an example. Office doesn't need to have a DropBox built into it, it just needs to be Office. But if you've got an architecture astronaut in charge of the project, then they are going to want to use the position to build a reputation for being an innovator rather than just getting things done.

So I got [number], but I don't really know if it's good or bad. There is a percentile but no scale of where the psychopaths begin and end. Pretty pointless.

Right now I would say it is a commodity. I think the majority of people getting into bitcoin right now are doing it either for emotional reasons or because they have enough disposable income to play with it. I don't think I could convince my mom or dad to start using bitcoin, or even just a stranger on the street. It's still just a novelty for nerds.

So why would a reasonable actor choose to store money in this currency when there are easier to get, easier to use, demurrage free currencies available? I get the economic idea (I think) but it seems like something that would need a near monopoly to succeed. Otherwise it will just be a money pit for idealistic enthusiasts.

Seriously. I think reading HN or at least some quality development blogs is probably a better indicator of competency than any of these certs. Just don't tell the incompetent people.

I tend to write object.parse(byte[] buffer) methods a lot, especially when the object type itself is being defined in another team's code.

So her response to the criticism regarding missing out on good people because they did not have degrees from top universities is to say "Why can't we just be good at hiring"? Seriously? Your employees are trying to tell you how to improve your decisions and be more flexible, and your response is to tell them "No, actually you just need to do as I say, but do a better job at it."

Did Mayer spend 25 years as a military officer? That seems to be her management style.