Regulators are, in general, too sheltered and disconnected from the impact of their actions.
Incentives matter. When you get to make decisions that impact others, but not feel any of the costs associated with that, you do not have the correct incentives. I hope the staff of FDA read this and can’t sleep tonight. We can hope they feel some emotional pain, even if it is only some small subset of the pain they have and continue to cause to others.
I would disagree with this. Regulators that I have worked with in US and EU knew what it meant. Maybe not the most amazing technical people I’ve ever worked with, but they were as competent as any random sample of pharma/tech types. Their jobs is to verify that you have completed all the valid documentation to demonstrate that your drug does what you claim it does. Their opinion on personal emotions are irrelevant. They are supposed to be guideline checkers.
I understand some people are checking boxes, with no space to consider their impact. Please generously reinterpret my point to extend to their management stack and the political establishment that is responsible for the system.
Those who establish, support and tolerate that system should be as directly exposed to its consequences as practicable. It is good for them to see these stories and feel the consequences of their decisions.
The consequences to their actions are that when a doctor prescribes me a medication or when I purchase one off the shelf, I have incredibly high confidence that if I follow the dosage instructions it is safe - safe now, safe in 15 years, not worth further thought on my part. That hasn't been true in most places for most of human history.
The consequences to their actions are that millions of people are saved from the consequences of consuming seemingly promising drugs such as Thalidomide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide
I could sleep just fine knowing that some people looking only at a tiny local example while ignoring the big picture considered me the villain
To the extent that is true, I agree, they should see the positive impact of what they do as well. Your blind faith in the regulatory regime, however, is deeply undeserved. Many approved drugs prove to be dangerous and we can reasonably expect that many effective drugs never make it to market because of bureaucracy.
Counting lines of code, commits, changesets or any other simple metric will destroy your culture.
The team _will_ find out, and then instead of contributing to the success of the business in earnest, they’ll be doing stupid things like maximizing their changesets or racing for “easy” large changes like deleting a module.
It doesn’t matter whether those values do or do not correlate with reality (IMO, if they do, it is for relatively junior engineers only). If you give off the smell of measuring people like that, you will ruin any collaborative team environment and you risk never being able to recover that.
There’s a good chance you’ll chase away excellent engineers with this sort of low-effort metrics management too.
Massive amount of code, particularly when written by a single engineer more often ends up being a liability, not an asset.
There are exceptions, but these are extremely rare.
Look for code created in collaboration by multiple engineers, with contributors or reviewers across multiple teams. This code is more likely to be an asset.
(Unless created by Google for external use or by xOoglers. Such code outside Google is a near guaranteed liability.)
This results in yet another opinionated framework in which that particular developer is extremely prolific. That developer then keeps making massive changes to the framework, deprecating and renaming parts every so often. At some point other engineers, who initially had been excited, get tired of the tyranny, rebases, rewrites and having to fix their functionality broken by framework changes. Then, the opinionated developer gets into disagreement with the management (that is getting more and more concerned by the constant churn and lack of new features). Being up to speed and fully convinced that he is the most prolific in the team, he decides that the management is unreasonable, easily finds another job and abandons the project. The codebase dies.
Sure that's one possible outcome if that developer is a poor leader.
The other outcome if that developer is a good leader and interested in developing a community is that a community builds around the core foundation that was laid and begins to take a life of its own.
Look at React. Started by a single opinionated developer who laid the foundations and built a prototype. From there it's taken on a life of its own and evolved. It was not designed/built by committee from day 1.
On the balance sheet I'd call functionality an asset and code a liability. Everything else bring equal more code is more to maintain as things change, search through for bugs, etc.
You're absolutely right. It's also true that counting lines of code is foolish and almost certainly counter-productive. But to your point, the argument is simple. People who ship lots of value will, more often than not, also ship lots of code changes (not necessarily net additions). The oft conflated group who ship lots of code, but little value, usually won't make it past code review (and, hence, don't actually ship all that much).
Contrary to some other comments, I'd argue it's the people who ship lots of value, but very little code, who are rare to find in practice.
Yes, for relatively small projects the above is true - software engineers who ship lots of value, but little code are rare. For slightly larger projects they are not so rare. Systems or integration engineers do less coding, but can make the whole thing actually work end-to-end. Engineers that change projects within the company can have drops in their contribution rates, but their wide knowledge can prevent many-a-mistake from happening.
Looking for healthy collaboration is the key, this is where the magic usually happens. Counting lines of code is a poor proxy for this.
> Counting lines of code, commits, changesets or any other simple metric will destroy your culture.
Counting them alone won't, but incentivizing people based on changesets will. IMO there are plenty of cases where counting LOC is useful to a manager. It's a discrete piece of data than can be combined with other data to make informed decisions as a manager.
It’s very high risk and low reward. I have heard of a very valuable employee quitting on the spot when they discovered their manager was doing this kind of analysis.
It has greatly demotivated me to learn that productivity was measured by commit count in one of the companies I worked in. Interestingly, I was the most "productive" engineer there at the time. Yet my code was garbage (no offence to garbage intended). This oxymoron showed me that there's no path for me to improve in that company and I soon left.
Nothing is just a discrete piece of data. If it even barely feeds into something that feeds into something that feeds into something that feeds into something that affects developers’ compensation, then it will get gamed.
> Recruiters at my company aren't explicitly told to hit certain quotas, but they are given larger bonuses for diverse hires and they do have targets for certain percentages of diverse candidate.
I'm definitely not a lawyer and I live nowhere near the Bay Area, but by my reading of most of these laws, this is illegal. I realize we often interpret these issues differently depending on who they effect, but this sounds like an open-and-shut case of discrimination to me.
It most definitely is not illegal. Many colleges have race and gender based quota systems. Governments have race and gender quota systems. Many federal, state and local governments set aside X percentage of their contracts solely for minority or female owned businesses.
Whether this is right or wrong is another debate. But race, gender or "diversity" hiring or recruiting certainly isn't illegal. It happens all the time.
The distinction between quotas and "outcome based goals" is kind of hazy. To be clear, recruiters aren't required to hit certain targets. Leadership does tell recruiters that they're aiming for a a certain targets but as far as I know recruiters don't receive any penalty if they fall below that target.
Even telling recruiters to hire a certain demographic is discrimination. The parent post said that recruiters had large bonuses for certain demographics.
I am the root commenter. Bonuses are given regardless of the candidates' divery status, it's just that diverse candidate get a slightly higher bonus. The difference between the bonus of a non-diverse and diverse candidate is about 20%. That difference is not constant because bonuses vary based on other things like the role being hired and the amount of experience. Experienced hires have a bigger bonus than new grads - this is to counteract a past tendency to hire younger employees which led to a skewed age and experience distribution. We also have bigger bonuses to hire managers because we have a chronic shortage of them.
He almost surely means Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Alfred V. Aho, Monica S. Lam, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman [1]... or one of the earlier versions of the book with different authors and titles ;-).
As was common for 80s software textbooks, this was nicknamed for the distinctive image on the cover.
But (and now your edit clarifies that this indeed was your point), perhaps your point is just how difficult it would be to automatically disambiguate nicknames in diverse communities like StackExchange.
This article doesn't seem to answer the question. It just asserts, without evidence, that "luxury is about no-nonsense boldness." Why wasn't this true in the past?
You're taking that line out of context and rephrasing it.
"That said, the overall trend is hard to miss: Luxury isn’t connoted with fussy extras; no-nonsense boldness is the rule. “Spartan solutions have been rampant in all areas of design,” Gardner says."
In other words, the current trend is to use no-nonsense boldness to connote luxury. It is explicitly described as a trend. Fashions change, and the article doesn't deny that or claim to explain why. It might have something to do with increasing typographical literacy among the public, or with the popularity of authentic, no-frills, "vintage industrial" design.
I went ahead and flagged this. It is not HN quality. It is not even Globe and Mail quality.
The other comments have already expressed why that is the case - but in summary, there is no security flaw coherently expressed here, Excel is possibly the right tool for the job (it saves tens of thousands of dollars of custom software development through government acquisition programs) and the editorialism in the title was unnecessary and further hurt the credibility of the "point."
I am generally against often-called "excessive regulation," but the regulator -- perhaps FTC -- should aggressively prohibit the misleading marketing message here.
The entire problem manifests from calling this lane keeping mechanism "Autopilot." Tesla should be prohibited from using that language until they have achieved a provably safer self-driving level 3+.
The problem is exacerbated by Musk's aggressive marketing-driven language. Saying things like we're two years out from full self-driving (first said in 2015) and the driver was warned to put his hands on the steering wheel (15 minutes prior to the crash) makes Musk look like he is plainly the bad guy and attempting to be misleading.
"Provably safe" probably means some sort of acceptance testing -- a blend of NTSB-operated obstacle course (with regression tests and the like) and real world exposure.
Incentives matter. When you get to make decisions that impact others, but not feel any of the costs associated with that, you do not have the correct incentives. I hope the staff of FDA read this and can’t sleep tonight. We can hope they feel some emotional pain, even if it is only some small subset of the pain they have and continue to cause to others.
FDA delenda est.