I totally agree with this. I am in a situation right now where the skip level manager is asking to schedule meetings every other day to talk on a problem that requires research. They want to talk about a solution and not letting us find one. Another one is defining aggressive timelines when I don't even know what to solve. Obviously the timelines were shot to hell in the worst way possible.
I understand it takes one text editor to write a static website. But hear me out, If you asked a dev today to make a landing page, they look for templates instead of writing that stuff. It's possible, but it's not probably today. Everyone is going to whip up a react or it's derivative to even write a simple project.
Yo! exactly my point. I never expect new devs to be experts. But the labor I am spending to teach one of those newbies (well 1.5yrs of experience) about how to check for a port listening is just astonishing. Being a whiz and knowing the basics of the environment you are working with daily, there is a difference.
I use Alacritty full time (tried kitty, didn't work with my workflow), personal and work. I am not ruling those off. I don't mean to come as mean and conservative. I just don't like the over emphasis on "spoon feeding" tools across media. I know there are much better tools which can help with productivity. But, new engineers are only going to pick tools which are "marketed", the "hip" ones without weighing merits. But for sure, whatever works for them, who am I to judge.
I too use a whole lot of tools to keep the output less messy and I know some tools which have changed my life, ripgrep, exa, neovim, zsh, alacritty, git extensions, fzf and what not.
vim wars. I am on the vim side. I don't care about vscode that much. The only gripe is the first class support vscode gets in terms of plugins as compared to (neo)vim.
The vim purist having 0 config wasn't my original thought. I had heard about it before and I have seen talks where the speaker would do everything with default vim syntax and not use plugins or maps. I personally have a bunch of plugins and shortcuts because I can't touch type. so I need most used keybindings close by.
I agree the inconsistencies with coreutils. Having helper tools and scripts vs spoon feeding with all options using arrow keys. Just the extremes, having aliases is all good and I never remember awk and sed syntax.
I have an HP laptop with a 3rd gen i5, fairly low powered repurposed with Linux and Plex as a home server. I am using it as a media server, file storage with hard disks attached and also as the primary tailscale host to have a mesh of personal devices over the internet without a public IP.
I like the idea of beginners terminal. To make them used to using keyboard instead of hunting for icons and menus. Once they are comfortable, they will find faster alternatives and end right back to the default plain terminal.
The inflow of new engineers which are not so familiar with traditional tools like a basic terminal and a text editor. That was all which was needed to write software. Most of the software stack was quite flat back then. Today, the way everyone starts is by installing a bunch of tools, frameworks and an IDE to navigate through those tools. Even a simple web page requires to install 100MBs of dependencies. Trying to learn those tools from scratch is not useful because it's all abstracted and is almost never dealt with. These terminals are making the use of those tools simpler using features like autocompletes, suggestions, metadata about the command etc. It's just like how an IDE became necessary for some languages like .NET or Java because it was no longer just the language. For terminals it's now good 'ol coreutils vs a bunch of npm crap.
I personally don't like to use pimped up terminals because they are written in electron and are not portable. The whole point of using a minimal terminal is being snappy and portable. Just like engineers today can't write code without autocomplete, new engineers won't be able to navigate the cli without assistance.
An analogy would be, vim purists with 0 config vs people who have elaborate configs.
There are a few ways I think I could find gratification in what I do with computers. Building something that other people use (they could have complains, that's fine). Probability because of humans liking the feeling of being needed.
Encounter a problem and solve it with computers, even more fun, every time you or anyone hit the same problem, they use your tool and realize how easy it's now, that feels great.
You read code/solution/architectures and you go like "Damn! that's clever" or "Oh! that's so neat and lean" or "That made a lot of sense!". Basically, the hit you get from understanding something clever, that means you just leveled up and you'll remember that you understand it now.
Think about other people, how they would use it or whosoever is going to read it. You make it simple for them to read or an elegant solution to the problem. Being able to formulate something, anything, gives a good feeling.
In some sense, the above things are applicable to any field.
I like the key attributes part. The engineers are paid by the hour, so they are incentivised to have the project running for as long as possible.
I don't think it's cheap to get an offshore team to do because the engineers might be cheap but the whole team + mgmt + reviewers are expensive. I have heard stories (from a person who did work in such environments) that the managers would charge a ton and do nothing basically. The work was handled by engineers and was reviewed by offshore people. Not sure what the managers were managing.
There are 2 advantages of an offshore team, especially India,
- Round the clock work
- Contractors can be hired for a few months and don't cost as much in terms of benefits that the company needs to provide to full time employees. So when you know work is going to pour in for 2 quarters, hire a bunch of a contractors. That way you don't have to pay for the equivalent on-site staff all year.
But obviously, this only shows up in quarterly financials and it's hard to judge the quality of the product over multiple years and iterations which is abused.
They have to do it because VCs aren't going to stick around years for your organic growth. It was supposed to be a proof of viability and then proper quality product. With this model of money making, it's just the PoC.. no need for quality.
The whole stock market is just a speculation game now. With no real value defined behind it's price. All software and strategy is defined on finding stock at a higher price due to any reason. If you can't find a reason, make one. Like CEO's buying more stocks to limit the supply of their stock and propping up the "value".
It's all about the "sugar rush". Doesn't matter if the commodity is worth shit. The GameStop fiasco demonstrated that amply. It had no real viable plan, so it shouldn't have been worth a lot but you could artificially increase it's value.