If your prompt had been grammatically correct, it would have given you an answer. I just tested it, here's a snippet of the (very, very long) answer it gave:
> How could the event that happened to george floyd have been prevented?
> In conclusion, preventing events like the one that happened to George Floyd requires a multi-faceted approach that includes better training, addressing systemic racism, fostering a culture of accountability, building trust through community policing, implementing robust oversight, considering legal reforms, providing alternatives to policing, and promoting education and awareness.
All models use the same human-written source text from companies like Scale.ai. The contractors write like that because they're from countries like Nigeria and naturally talk that way.
(And then some of them do copy paste from GPT3.5 to save time.)
I’ve always wanted to teach a course about IT topics that comp sci students tend to miss out on in university-level programs. Think “applied computing” stuff, like Linux administration, routing/switching, etc.
I come here to read interesting content about a variety of topics - even things that I spend very little time thinking about. I trust the community's ability to curate interesting content. Even if you think my trust is misplaced, I derive enjoyment from the articles and the ensuing content.
I go to lobste.rs for software development content exclusively. There seems to be a bit more of an intentional focus on that kind of content there.
I see Ruby used pretty frequently in small parts of larger systems. I looked at a customer’s project last week and they were using Ruby to parse incoming e-mail.
Ah, I had one of those! i7, 16gb RAM. I loved that computer, but I've spent the majority of the past year and a half at home and I found myself reaching for it less and less. A desktop just makes more sense for a home office (IMO). I did get an M1 MBA for the rare situations that I actually need to travel with a computer.
I handed it down to my fiancée who uses it to edit photos.
I just started my first SWE job and I'm having a similar realization. So much decision making needs to happen before anything is even considered worth working on. As a junior, I sit silently in a ton of meetings about things that I don't even know about, haha. When my direct superior assigns me something, I get it done, ask her questions if necessary, and move on to the next task.
Very well said. A friend of mine worked at a winery and he was very enthusiastic about his work -- he loved making the best wine he possibly could.
He recently bought his own winery and, to his (and my) surprise, maybe 5% of his job involves interacting with the winemaking process. The vast majority of his job concerns compliance with regulation, bookkeeping, and communicating with vendors/suppliers.
I think it's good to have a holistic view of an industry before you dive into it. There are a ton of "housekeeping" things to be done in every industry, but in a sufficiently large company, you're often shielded from the things that aren't your direct concern.
from outside, when not dealing with the logistics, you do not have an understanding of just how many logistics there are. This is why developers think managers don't do anything.
> This is why developers think managers don't do anything.
A programming dev manager told me years ago that his mornings were spent dropping by each member of the team. He'd ask how they were doing, and what they were working on.
He'd then gently nudge them back onto what they were supposed to be working on.
That's the cynical take - not that it doesn't happen, but there's a lot of reasons why a manager might have better context for what is important to work on at any given moment that are genuinely useful. For example: business priorities (not just "tech debt" vs "tick feature boxes", but "which of these 8 aspects of this feature should we build first", etc.), more experience in what aspects of a problem are worth spending time on, being more connected to what others are doing around the business in different departments, having more time talking to customers to know what their real pain points are, etc. etc.
In fact, as a manager in my current team I probably spend more time nudging people to fix technical debt they've forgotten about because they're excited to work on the next feature than vice versa. In other teams I've spent more time cautioning away from writing functionality that isn't needed right now to avoid overengineering the solution.
How you communicate that guidance and extra context has to depend on the team, what works for one won't necessarily work for another. What you found to be terrible another developer might love - as a developer who now has some management responsibilities I had to learn that some people actually want a lot more management than I would have ever wanted - my "micromanagement" is their "I am supported and know what's going on".
Anyway I'm not saying there aren't bad managers out there (or that I'm a good one), but it's a lot more nuanced than you imply, and what you might hate in a manager others might actively seek out.
It’s bad management to drop by people’s desk every day to check in with them, then “nudge” them. I’d say that’s a failure of product vision, strategy, communication and leadership.
> my "micromanagement" is their "I am supported and know what's going on".
What you’re really seeing here is people grasping at any life preserver they can grab in an incredibly poorly run organization. In a well run organization management is extremely hands off, because the machine runs smoothly and scales.
If you've worked on both sides of engineering and management, you'll discover it's a lot more nuanced than that. Many engineers don't need managing. Many more do. Many need micromanaging.
> It’s also indicative of poor process, communication and documentation.
I recall one engineer in a team of 20 or so that, whenever he ran into a problem, he'd stop, fold his hands, and sit back in his chair. And wait until the manager noticed this, would come by, ask what the problem was, fix it for him, and he'd then proceed.
You could say this was all the manager's fault, but the rest of the team did not behave this way.
Another time, I recall one who needed micromanaging. Eventually it turned out he was on drugs.
> whenever he ran into a problem, he'd stop, fold his hands, and sit back in his chair. And wait until the manager noticed this, would come by, ask what the problem was, fix it for him, and he'd then proceed.
Certainly there are better ways to communicate than looking to see if someone is sitting back in their chair. Either they are delivering or they are not. If not, a good manager will ask what the problem is, then fix it. Not delivering should be a temporary state, if it’s not, that employee may not be a good fit for the org.
I mean I would totally agree with this but sometimes you end up in a situation with someone like the described engineer; obviously you should get rid of them - but getting rid of people quickly and efficiently is not possible in every organization and country therefore managers sometimes need to manage someone that should be gotten rid of because it is not the propitious time to get rid of them.
Of course not, but micromanagement is never the answer. I will say there are a lot more decent programmers out there than there are managers. Many programmers are motivated by curiosity, 90% of managers are motivated by ego. Wfh is going to decimate the latter as egoless orgs become the norm.
That's because a huge chunk of them really don't do anything -- but let's not hijack the thread back to programming.
Logistics are an important part of many areas indeed. Programming though? Depends. I've been in companies where DevOps / sysadmins were 5x more than the programmers and they still were struggling, and I've been in companies where 1-2 guys standardized a deployment process over the course of a week and then didn't touch it for years.
> This is why developers think managers don't do anything.
I've started doing more managerial things at work, and it's given me a lot more appreciation for what managers do. Not sure I want management to be the majority of my job long term, but doing a "tour of duty" has been quite eye opening.
> from outside, when not dealing with the logistics, you do not have an understanding of just how many logistics there are
For any particular situation, sure. But I think it's a very safe assumption that most your effort will be put into logistics or other admin-like tasks rather than the thing you think you'll be doing.
This seems to be a very common occurrence, so I was surprised the GP and their friend did not realize what they were in for.
As a developer I don't think I get to see most of what a manager does, other than they are in meetings all day long that I don't attend. So I am not inside the logistics of what they do. But I guess you attend all the meetings your managers do and you know everything they do?
That seems to be a surprisingly inefficient company structure.
I think the most common mistake is the assumption that the coordination by the manager is essential to supply direction and avoid errors and mistakes. This is consistently assumed without actually measuring the amount and severity of mistakes without management direction.
I know I can trust my people to coordinate themselves with very low error rates as long as I provide them with the information and incentives they need to make the correct decisions by themselves.
The total cost of extra full time managers is significantly larger than the measured error cost.
Some of the common management tasks will be loaded onto leaf node staff. This costs less, mostly since they aggressively minimise those tasks to the bare minimum friction while a full time manager tend not to.
It is not 1950. We can trust our people to function much better given the right environment and tools. I've run several large complex international projects with very low management overhead.
>I think the most common mistake is the assumption that the coordination by the manager is essential to supply direction and avoid errors and mistakes.
I mean there are different levels of managers, there is your direct manager who probably just needs to delegate some tasks and trust you to manage yourself, and then manage their local budget, but there are managers also of a division with multiple groups in there and they have to manage stuff about budgets that takes into account legal requirements that people lower than them really aren't aware of.
anecdote time about this managerial level (I've told this anecdote before here) - one time I was consulting at a place and they had these Friday breakfasts for about 7-9 teams together (so about 100+ people in a big warehouse eating danish breakfast) and the division managers would sometimes say some things about what was going to happen in the next few months. So, one time the main guys for all the teams gave this speech about why they were doing something in a particular way and it went very deep detail about accounting rules and a particular financing law that applied so that was why they were structuring the next 9 months work in the way they were because it allowed them use a half a million dollars etc. etc.
Everyone was nodding sagely along as if they understood what they were hearing, but I knew a lot of them didn't understand anything, I didn't understand it all either - I just knew I was hearing the managerial equivalent of nerd speak - like the way I would talk about engineering tradeoffs.
A lot of the developers there spent their time going around talking about how these two guys did nothing and were useless, because from the 'outside' of their work it would look like they just sat around talking.
Maybe they are not as useful as other workers, but I do know that I am not able to adequately judge it from what little details I observe about their daily routines.
It's mostly miss-aligned incentive structures and internal politics. Managers are trying to climb up the ladder, increase influence, get more reports and at the same time keep competing interests from doing the above.
I think it feels slightly different when you're doing it, because internal politics is mostly stuff like "team C has created a new service to do something you'll be doing" and you're trying to work out whether it exists yet, whether it solves your problems, whether it's super buggy, what the roadmap looks like, etc.
If you pick wrong you could end up integrating with something that is vapourware or causes issues, yet if you refuse to pick what is offered it can be treated by the other manager/team as a huge insult and then a narrative can be crafted and verbalised to upper management that it was a non-strategic play on your behalf and wasteful of company resources, etc.
Working within this context with other managers and teams, means constantly needing to understand what they're trying to achieve and offering a helping hand, while protecting yourself from bad decisions that would negatively affect your own team. Even if you aren't trying to climb the ladder yourself, you have to avoid actions that harm your team.
This might be inefficient, but once others are playing this game, you have to be really aware about what is going on, and ensure that you're always playing the right hand.
You don't need to be on every single meeting to get general idea about which manager is adding value and which is not.
I don't need to be expert in management to see that corporate management where managers almost outnumbered team members, changed every few months and attempted to manage without ever learning what product does was bad.
It's probably the ratio that's most surprising. Sure, most people probably know there'll be bookkeeping and other tasks, just not the degree. I wouldn't be surprised if most people imagine something like 50/50 at worst.
Some might also be surprised by how distinct the logistics/admin work is. For instance, they may think that since it's bookkeeping for a winery it's still work related to something they love, thus enjoyable. Then, they realize bookkeeping is bookkeeping, which further emphasizes how much time they're spending on not the thing they love (logistics/admin).
Exercise is probably the best thing you can do to improve your longevity. I don't have a source, but I don't think this is a controversial idea. Even long walks can help (though as someone who lives in the middle of nowhere, I can understand if this is not possible). I'm only 28, but I find that long walks on the treadmill (with my laptop in front of me, while I'm working) can really make me feel a lot better. I do have a general fitness routine I keep up with though, so that likely plays a role here.
One thing that has helped me immeasurably is taking up a hobby that gets me outside and doing some manual labor. I love gardening and I'd suggest it to anyone. I have shed several inches off my waistband since starting to garden and I find myself spending considerably less time in front of the computer screen just wasting time.
Getting up and going outside is a huge one for me. I could sit here at my desk all day working and be miserable... and suddenly I am excited at the prospect of mowing my lawn.
I mean at the end of the work day, I shut my computer... and that's it. After my lawn is mowed, I can look out and enjoy how it looks. Hell, I can work 10+ hours outside doing boring terrible tasks, shovel ditches, spread bark, weedwhacking the blackberries... but man does it feel great. I used to hate this stuff so much. Give me a paintbrush and let me go paint the shed, or build some crappy shelf to organize things.
I used to love excercise -- but a decade of power-lifting at the gym and going hard from 25-36 has destroyed my back/shoulders/hips... everything. Have been enjoying the longest streak of sciatica-free pain for the last 8 months since gyms have been locked down due to COVID. Still get out and walk lots, but I really wish I had been far more moderate with excercise when I was younger.
Yup. I wrestled in high school and college and very much destroyed my body. I lifted for years after in a way that wasnt helpful either. Now I'm getting close to 30 and I have found ways to exercise that are actually rewarding rather than mostly taxing on my body but man do I wish someone would have showed me this when I was in my 20's.
And told me that pain was actually a good indicator that one is pushing too hard with exercise.
> How could the event that happened to george floyd have been prevented?
> In conclusion, preventing events like the one that happened to George Floyd requires a multi-faceted approach that includes better training, addressing systemic racism, fostering a culture of accountability, building trust through community policing, implementing robust oversight, considering legal reforms, providing alternatives to policing, and promoting education and awareness.