I experienced this when working at a giant company where all the teams were required to report their "code coverage" metrics to middle management.
We had the flaky test problem too, but I think another angle of is being shackled to test tech-debt. The "coverage goals" in practice encouraged writing a lot of low quality tests with questionable and complex fixtures (using regular expressions to yoink C++ functions/variables out of their modules and place them into test fixtures).
Fiddling with tests slowed down a lot of things, but there was a general agreement that the whole projected needed to be re-architected (it was split up over a zillion different little "libraries" that pretended to be independent, but were actually highly interdependent) and while I was there I always felt like we needed to cut the Gordian knot and accept that it might decrease the sacred code coverage.
Not sure if I was right or what ever happened with that project but it sure was a learning experience.
> This is less historical record than medieval propaganda piece
I think you could make a good case that the title is a little sensationalistic, but you could pick at US civics class in exactly the same way (and not just in recent history). The branches of government we learn about fail to include (or at least emphasize) the fundamental role of regulatory capture, lobbyists, and opaque/undemocratic three-letter agencies in real-world governance. Not to mention the fact that even the founding of the country was based on high ideals that were highly caveat-ed ("all men are created equal" unless those men are property).
Regardless of the extent to which ideals are lived out in practice, to many people it's notable that those ideals are there at all. In my experience as a US citizens, most people educated here seem shocked to learn that there can be any ideals behind monarchy besides divine right of kings/"I am the state" [1].
> The funny part about the young author example, how older authors are not exciting to discover? Yeah the richest and most successful author of all time was discovered when she was 32. J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit at age 45. Little House on the Prairie? Published when Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65.
Agreed. I felt like this article was grasping for something good, but remark that "45-year-olds aren’t discovered, they’re uncovered, like toxic waste, or a political scandal" is ass-backwards.
Tolkien and Wilder and both great examples of writers who produced landmark works basically as a byproduct of leading full and interesting lives -- not by orbiting the publishing world and champing at the bit to churn out some flashy yet forgettable novel at a record young age. When this happens, the only embarrassment is for the establishment "publishing world" which pretends to represent "literary greatness," not for the author who is "uncovered." Personally, I suspect that "uncovered" authors will endure at a higher rate than the "discovered" ones.
Also I have to add that I rolled my eyes at the "evidence" of Emily Dickenson killed herself. So did Hemmingway, who was first published at 26. What's your point?
Despite all this, the core insight that "suddenly you’re old, and find yourself in a permanent state of imperfection, which you must reckon with" I believe is very true. Even those who succeed in one area of life (being published) have to grapple with it. What options did they leave on the table in order to have that success? What options have been lost due to fame and success (only a fool would believe there are none)?
Becoming a particular (and necessarily, imperfect) person instead of a potential person is a kind of horrifying first taste of death. I think that the healthy way to deal with it is to make peace with the fact that our ability to change ourselves is limited and our ability to change the past is even less. The serenity prayer and AA-adjacent ideas do this.
As a last note, I thought the movie "The Weatherman" did a really good job exploring this.
Good review: I hadn't heard the Christian Science take on The Secret Garden before and am surprised the wikipedia article doesn't mention it, but it's pretty obvious now. The title imagery really makes me think of:
I think this is actually hitting much closer to the intention of Levitical law than people realize. Data and debt are very strongly connected, and I think probably always have been.
> Compared to resistive heat, sure, but a heat pump powered by fossil fuels isn't much better than a gas furnace. My point is that we need to stop burning fossil fuels for electricity so that heat pumps make sense.
Technically, heat pumps can absolutely achieve greater than 100% efficiency (considering their input electricity as a starting point).
It's also true though that there are also lot of caveats about their effectiveness based on temperature differential, maximum output compared to a furnace, efficiency with which the upstream electricity is generated, etc.
The insult-people-for-being-car-skeptics trope is starting to show its age [1].
It's true that old fogey skeptics who have vested interest in the old ways are disposed towards motivated reasoning, but they're also the ones most able call out the motivated reasoning by the few who make disproportionate profit most from pushing new technologies.
> Does every stable relationship involve sexual aspects?
Not generally. But creating a child necessarily involves creating a stable biological relationship primarily with two other people.
Most people across history think the biological circumstances that bring us into the world are spiritually important and making the triangle between mother-father-child healthy is good for children.
For better or worse, people care their genetic material. We can either choose to create a society that makes the best of this, or we can try to suppress it and convince people that it doesn't matter.
And yes I know that surrogacy exists. But that's a side argument that opens up a lot more questions and I don't think it really changes the fundamentals.
This is called out as concretely happening in the "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth" documentary.
> Welfare policies made things worse by denying benefits to families with adult males in residence. Fathers and husbands had to leave — or hide in the closet when social workers came to check. (quoted from a review [1])
> technical leadership is hired by managers who's background is in the unrelated field of automobiles.
... On top of that, I think there is a bit of a generational gap between firmware engineers. I have worked with several firmware engineers who were artists at optimizing single threaded superloops and miracle workers at squeezing in yet another feature and become tech leads, only to find they have an infinite blank canvas. Some don't actually have the wisdom to not use the new freedom to paint themselves into a corner. A lot of the old projects are trivial now, but dealing with bureaucratic application-level protocols in firmware without getting requires a set of skills and tricks that don't often translate well from what Cloud/App developers are doing.
In the video of the incident linked elsewhere there is a caption that basically says that an automated system is what notified the controller there was an issue and probably why she was able to correct it at the last second.
> What's going on in control towers that's causing this? Did hiring standards for ATCs drop all of a sudden, or something like that?
There was a fairly major change recently [1]. Before 2014, the FAA used to be biased towards recruits that had been already trained in a program on someone else's dime (military or university). Perhaps their on-the-job training isn't quite good enough to compensate for that change yet.
> ... These are all ways to avoid bullshitting - but unfortunately there’s one simple way to avoid bullshit - by being critical. It’s far easier to retreat to the critical, negative position and say why things won’t or can’t work. Except… this is a mistake.
I think this article does an admirable job contexualizing itself in the very real world of "bullshit" work performance, but simultaneous not being satisfied with giving into cynicism.
The bullshit jobs critique is very good and probably does seep into material talked about here, but on an individual level it's a beautiful and worthwhile activity to unravel the parts of the "bullshit" that are actually meaningful. Signaling and performance might be hyperreal and pornographied in the current world, but they still have a valid and healthy version worth considering. The idea that "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely Players" is a beautiful part of the human condition that long predates modern capitalism.
It's refreshing to read something that acknowledges the need to "meet people where they are" in terms of how you interact, but doesn't give into the narrative that this means you're condemned to a life of bullshit. It's good to have a larger understanding of the world's ills too, but I think people who spend their whole work day just thinking about how their jobs are irredeemable bullshit are fools.
I work more in the firmware space, so my experience with feature toggles is always with half-baked tooling and limited ability to change deployed products. We do use continuous development within the organization, so there is still a lot of applicability, but it's always interesting to see the way similar problems get addressed in a higher-level and more online environment.
That said, I'm surprised this article doesn't mention the two words that always come to my mind when I see toggles: combinatorial explosion. Several times I've worked on projects that went way too toggle-happy and decided that new functionality should be split into indefinite life "features". Just in case the company someday wants to sell a model without that feature. Of course, when an old toggle finally gets turned off a year later, you realize that it crashes the system because several other features kind of half depend on them.
> was ever a thing. i still don't.
I experienced this when working at a giant company where all the teams were required to report their "code coverage" metrics to middle management.
We had the flaky test problem too, but I think another angle of is being shackled to test tech-debt. The "coverage goals" in practice encouraged writing a lot of low quality tests with questionable and complex fixtures (using regular expressions to yoink C++ functions/variables out of their modules and place them into test fixtures).
Fiddling with tests slowed down a lot of things, but there was a general agreement that the whole projected needed to be re-architected (it was split up over a zillion different little "libraries" that pretended to be independent, but were actually highly interdependent) and while I was there I always felt like we needed to cut the Gordian knot and accept that it might decrease the sacred code coverage.
Not sure if I was right or what ever happened with that project but it sure was a learning experience.