badman_ting · HackerTrans

badman_ting

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12 tahun yang laludiscuss

> If your arm gets broken, you don't "suck it up" and say "that's life", you go to a doctor and get treated. It's no different when your brain gets broken.

People say this sort of thing a lot, but it strikes me as unhelpful. The stigma against seeking help for mental health exists and is real, whether you think it's absurd or not. And that stigma often exists in the very people who need help, so just saying "oh you're being silly" is super not empathetic. It's actually not that different from the founder you mention.

Furthermore, 5 separate doctors will all concur that my arm is broken. But they will not concur that I have schizophrenia, or borderline personality disorder, or whatever. There are a number of reasons why that is, but my point is that none of this is as cut-and-dried as a fracture -- not the diagnosis, not the treatment, not the patient's acceptance that something is wrong.

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

I'm not a founder, just a techie with mild depressive tendencies. I think the advice to talk to someone when you feel it coming on is the best - if you talk to someone about the specific things bothering you, it can help avoid the scenario where the things loom so large in your mind that you can't get past them. Talking about problems somehow brings them back down to human scale and can help you realize how much you've built them up in your head. It's remarkable the number of times in my life that I have dreaded something that ended up being totally not that big a deal.

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

There was nothing named "Bolt" before Mr. Benton's product came around? Really?

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

The first time I went to Mexico, I was excited to get a fresh coconut, a hole cut in the top with a machete and a straw inserted. It was much less refreshing than I expected, so I don't understand this trend.

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

Probably correct. But, it doesn't feel that way.

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

Right, this strikes me as a situation with real potential for "the cure is worse than the disease".

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

Right. The point here is actually reducing the pool of candidates to those enthusiastic enough, and with enough time, to do projects in a way that fits the template this interviewer is looking for. I don't doubt they had success hiring people this way, rather the problem is in the false negatives as you point out.

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

I worked at a place that had people whose responsibility was the workflow, precisely so that developers could focus more on writing code. Then people started doing their own projects (good) so they wouldn't have to use .NET anymore (good) but they never took the time to get the workflow right (bad) and each new project worked slightly differently or was built on a completely new and different platform (bad) so now everyone has a more complicated workflow than they used to, and they're all different.

No automated testing, no CI, no reasonable way of deploying code and certainly no rollback, who has time for such frippery? I left.

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

Anecdotally it seems like a lot of the people let go were in SDET roles.

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

I hope this person is OK but that strikes me as unrealistic. Ageism is a real problem for software developers, but also that 15 years at MS could just as easily be viewed as a negative than a positive.

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

It's really not bullshit, I think. The stuff about fear rings totally true to me, it aligns perfectly with my experiences. But, I know that being on the other side of it, it can sound like a bunch of hokum. (That's part of the reason why people keep living that way - the logic is pretty watertight.)

I've read books about it too, and not been helped that much beyond perhaps gaining some insight, or setting expectations of what happiness is like. But that doesn't invalidate the information in the books, it tells you that merely reading about happiness does not make it so. You can read all the books about how to be a great basketball player, but you won't improve until you actually get on a court and shoot some shots.

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

Yup, it's about labor costs.

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

It's not like I disagree but discussing this aspect of every new thing that comes along is rather tiresome.

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

Wow, gotta disagree there. I found that having projects on Github was impressive to potential employers 100% of the time I brought it up. Before I had them on there (in particular, two small personal side projects) it was much more difficult to prove that I know stuff because I commit to private repos.

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

Oh, brother.

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

This is very thorough, and I'm sure it's helpful to a lot of folks. So thank you to the author. For me, it's probably a syntactical issue, but I find things such as the below too hard to comprehend.

What did we get just by doing this? Let's see:

    λ> :type EitherIO
    EitherIO :: IO (Either e a) -> EitherIO e a

    λ> :type runEitherIO
    runEitherIO :: EitherIO e a -> IO (Either e a)

So already we have a way to go between our own type and the combination we used previously! That's gotta be useful somehow.

OK, looks like a pair of parentheses moved. I have seriously no idea why that is interesting or useful. Conceptually what's going on is probably not complicated, but that syntax makes it inscrutable to me. (I could be wrong and the problem could be at a deeper level of understanding.)

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

Very strange comment, I'm sure execs expected all of this when the deal was done. Their expected outcome probably does not look "catastrophic" to them.

Actually, I would say that by the time the deal rolled around the catastrophe had already played itself out at Nokia. It's sad what happened to Nokia, but the acquisition is the least of it.

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

Call me names all day, I would never get on a flight with that airline. They should really just pack it in at this point.

"These events are still rare." OK, but if there's a turd in a bowl of 10,000 Skittles, I'm not eating any of them.

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

> Instead of being a programmer auditioning to sling code, he was already “part of the club” (management) and just engaging in a two-way discussion, as equals, on whether he was going to join that particular section of the club.

Hmm! The latter is typically how I approach interviews (I'm a developer). I feel that if that's not the case then why am I here? Sometimes you get people that are smart in a dumb way, like the last interview in the story here. Just looking to be intellectually dominant, the "winner". But you just have to recognize those situations for what they are and not get discouraged. Developers are in demand, we get to act like it. And sometimes people get treated like shit because they allow it to happen.

12 tahun yang laludiscuss

I find this suspicion suspicious. I know that some people are melodramatic about it, but why can't people just have their food without gluten if they don't want it? Nobody ever backlashed against the anti-MSG thing, and that was arguably way dumber.

On the other hand, I have heard that this has resulted in lowering of standards for handling gluten, and people who are severely allergic are being exposed to small amounts, while people without celiac don't notice those small amounts. So, that's bad.