Everything affects the environment. And saying "all prices are large" isn't helpful.
I think the Starship failure was a comical own-goal. But, in the end, we have to figure out what the cost of externalities like this actually are instead of hand-wringing.
I sometimes wonder if truly my friends have started posting less on Facebook or is it their algorithm messing up again?
I see almost no original content posted by friends and only posts from pages with comments by my friends on them ("X and Y commented on Z page's photo")
My employer monitors tap in, tap out and break times too. It started with a "good intention" from the HR and middle management started exploiting it in no time.
Background:
There was a lot of new about a year or two ago how the Japanese government was starting to take initiatives to reduce the overtime culture here in Japan. We always had to tap in our security cards to enter the building and perhaps the timings were always recorded for security concerns. But, the HR announced that in an effort to reduce overtime culture, these times will be automatically entered in the attendance system and your boss would be notified if you worked for 8 hours or more. "Ideally" the boss should then reprimand you and overtime, we would become overtime-free culture to work in.
What really happened:
While there were emails being sent for every employee working more than 8 hours, the manager would just approve it. There was no practical use of the new system and nothing improved. Rather, my managers started getting access to all this data they never had direct access to before. Colleagues were being sent emails if their break times exceeded 5 minutes more than the stipulated 1 hour. Same for coming in at 9:04 instead of 9:00.
When a colleague back lashed, upper management threatened him by telling him they could also dig up his PC on/off/sleeptimes etc to give him significant paycuts.
I cannot help but get irked at the pity-projections that the western media has on Japan.
The structure of the article itself is made to sound how the war has damaged the social aspects of Japan - and how the numbers prove so. It starts with the story of a person using these services, till a point you realize the satire. Then the downfalls of such services while gracefully pushing in some irrelevant history.
In reality, showing this article to any average Japanese person in Japan, they would feel this is absurd. No such industry exists, there are a couple of weird companies popping up everywhere across the globe. Heard about the fake social media pictures company in the USA?
These articles need to stop! Every publication is increasingly posting these uncanny ideas about how strange this country is, too much western obsession.
My manager at work especially has the reverse attitude where the person who broke it is more significant than what broke/how we fixed it/ how to avoid it in the future. I have seen people get taunted for a bug they caused two years ago, a bug which didn't affect any revenue or was pretty easy to fix. And of course it still gets pointed out during appraisals.
Its a nightmare, because there's no room for experiment left anymore. Everyone just sticks to the template, afraid to do more than required, never deleting unused code etc. An attitude like this never ever helps!
Are you my coworker? Because you sound like him /s
No really I appreciate risk management but when it cripples your ability to make decisions, innovate or otherwise ACT on information that could help you be a more efficient team and the develoment team becomes a room full of people doing nothing but maintenance for years on end people leave and companies fail.
I just watched that very thing happen this year to my company for exactly that reason. Someone with the word "senior" in their job title was so risk averse that the market caught up, passed us and started eating our lunch.
God help them because I can't do it anymore, and writing on the wall says they'll be closing up shop this fall. I'm out the door for good at the end of the week.
(Second thought - did they patent it? "A system and method for reallocating blame and responsibility for business related negative outcomes. The negative outcomes include a plurality of career limiting moves and hastily made decisions." ... )
So much so that I don't think "refactoring" should even be a concept - that's what coding is. Every feature, bug fix or change should take into account the new relationships and structure of the model. Leaving refactoring for later is ignoring the fundamental required task of coding.
When it is all said and done, if you fucked up, you should get some shit for it. However this should be good natured, YOU should be laughing at it and everyone else laughing WITH you.
No one has right to demand what I laugh about or not. There is enough shit I have to take regularly to have zero desire to have to pretend laugh to it.
The discussions about everybody mistakes should be open, with emphasis on everybody, but leave mockery out of it. Inform everyone when they make mistakes without mocking them or attacking their egos and keep it factual. Don't assume everyone is friend with everybody nor that everybody is happy, it is not true. The line between laughing at it and with me is thin and oftentimes muddled.
Relaxed laughing at mistakes is result of good teamwork, but you don't get to good work by demanding that people accept being laughed at or mocked.
Publicly i.e. I front of the team? No. It serves no purpose than to stroke some egos and reduce the "Overton window" of development discussion and experimentation.
To me the one2one situation would feel like I’m surreptitiously getting bollocked for making the mistake, under the guise of humor. In public, on the other hand, I don’t care if someone takes the piss out of my code - I’ll laugh right along with them as long as it’s not overly malicious. IMO it sets a good example not to be precious about your code.
The importance of this person is the part where i agree.
But defining this person important is independent from the action of loading this person with guilt and financial, career relevant or social sanctions . That makes access to the important knowledge actually difficult, because no one will want to admit errors and share how they happened and what could have been done to prevent them...
Its very disheartening that Silicon Valley would promote such lifestyles. As a tech worker outside the US, US has always seemed more promising than the rest of the world when it comes to innovations and myriad number of opportunities to realize dreams.
So far I had been whining about how we have really bad inherent work cultures here in Japan. Its a norm for everyone to work overtime : 9am to 10pm is extremely normal. "Hardworking" guys send emails at 2 am and next day when I check my inbox, I'm somewhere burdened if my boss would expect the same of me. Clearly no one here understands that longer hours != more productivity.
If the pioneer locations in the industry were to promote such culture, I wonder if countries like Japan would ever grow out of its current mindset validating their methods even more so.
When I started living alone the first time, I realised I miss someone to talk to, a friend or family. But I was into reading. So I started reading aloud to myself
1. I stopped skimming, actually started reading
2. I got tired faster and didn't feel alone anymore
3. Learnt more pronunciation and spellings correctly
