Agreed, this was delightful to read! I really appreciated how the author was open about naivety and blind spots. It made the contrast more apparent when they learned things. I'd love to read more by this person.
_why's book is what got me into programming. I still love Ruby, even though I've only had single digit months where I was able to program professionally in it
Because HR in general has worse employees than other disciplines?
Seriously, in my 20+ year career, I've run across very few legitimately talented people in HR. The department seems to attract the kind of people who have little to offer intrinsically; who happen to be willing to facilitate the necessary protocols, as minimally effective as possible, while claiming "people skills" that end up being little more than office politics.
It’s true in my experience. HR IT, IAM, etc. are dominated by fakes and low skilled workers. Corporate IT is often the same but for some reason HR IT is distilled mediocrity. Definitely some exceptions and exceptional people but they are used and abused by the frauds and leaned heavily on by the unskilled.
I’ve had the joy of being in meetings with folks from every discipline that don’t know their field but HR IT takes the cake. Somehow they find a way to absolve themselves of responsibility by leaning on more technical teams while simultaneously touting their unique technical expertise and importance they use as a club to ignore those very same teams.
Having known a couple of founders who built their companies to a greater than 5000 person company, this is actively done. Founders need control over who they employ, promote, fire, etc. While it doesn't matter much at the entry level stage, as you move up the seniority chain, there is a lot more politics. HRs major purpose is to make sure that things that are done to employees are done in a legally justifiable way. If management wants to see someone gone, they make sure there is a paper trail. If someone needs to be moved up faster, they facilitate that. Essentially, they are there to do upper management's bidding, not to employ their own thoughts. Headstrong people don't survive there.
In my experience HR isn't filled with "bad" employees per say, it's filled just with bureaucrats. They care more about following policy to the letter just to do it rather than actually thoughtfully applying policy which generally involves following the spirit of the law by bending rules rather than the letter of the law.
Two reasons really. HR is not a profit center, and no one who picks the software will actually have to use it. Zed Shaw takes this up to 11 in a presentation he did in Montreal https://vimeo.com/2723800
This could be my inner grumpy old man speaking, but as a general rule of thumb, I look very poorly on editorializing in code comments. Originally because I didn't want my junior devs embarrassing the company when our clients received control of the code we wrote, but that also transferred into my perception of open source.
That comment should not have survived 4 years. Again, inner grumpy old man showing through.
Edit: to be clear, such comments are treated as reflective of the people and organization behind them.
I can see your point (particularly with regard to deliverables), but I suspect the practice is quite widespread - comments often end up being used as a sort of brain dump.
That's a fair enough point, especially when directly employed working on closed source / proprietary code. You're essentially stuck in an echo chamber, and professional standards are more difficult to maintain when you don't have the whole of the world looking on.
I also imagine that the mental strain of figuring out edge cases and poor documentation in a system as complex as a windows OS would be enough to make anyone at least a little salty.
However widespread it may be, that does not me that I have to like it :D
I think there should definitely be limits to this—some brevity/levity can be positive—so I would always try to err on the side of acceptance, but in general I agree. In this particular case at least, this comment seems to betray some hint of an anti-user sentiment.
An appropriate limit is, as I mentioned, editorializing. To be precise, your clients, peers and users should not the the target of your feelings expressed in comments.
An additional litmus should be professional discipline: express dissatisfaction with a todo (ideally referencing a bug or discussion issue source URL or identifier). Without that reference, it acknowledges an issue without indicating any motivation to solve or re-mediate the original cause, which is (IMHO) indicative of a careless and lazy attitude.
I think it's even more harmful: "there's the comment that code does X, so the code does X" (or in this case, an implicit hint that the code fixes non-X) - in other words, wishful thinking.
Yours.co | Lead Software Developer | ONSITE Utah http://yours.co
Yours.co is looking for a software developer to build and lead a small team of two or three other developers in building their platform for offline backup of cloud storage.
You will be the head of software development at Yours.co and one of the first full-time software hires. You’ll have the opportunity to build a team, establish a process, pick a tech stack, and help settle the age old question of whether to use tabs, spaces, or extra semi colons to indent lines. This is a chance to create the culture you want and grow as a developer and person.
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What makes Elm + Phoenix so good together? I use Elm professionally and love it, but a back end is a back end. Is the love just "I really like Phoenix?" The way people talk about it makes it sound like it is uniquely suited to Elm, which I don't understand.
Shortcut builds project management tools for modern software teams.
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Bonus points if you have used Jira before and are excited at the prospect of taking some of their market share!
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