How are people monetizing Chrome extensions? I was under the impression you couldn’t do subscriptions anymore (without bringing in a third party) but you could still charge a one-time purchase fee from the Chrome App Store, is that not the case?
Agreed. I think pairing basically amplifies the team chemistry, for better or worse. If you have down-to-earth developers who like to learn and teach and generally get along, pairing will be amazing, but if you have know-it-all devs desperate to be right and show how smart they are, it’s a disaster. I paired for a year in the latter environment and it was miserable.
I think your line "It’s also more fun" sums it up. Social media is about dopamine. As for the art of persuasion, while it might be marginalized in the current online environment, I'm encouraged when I hear people acknowledge that rational arguments have never been the best tool for changing people's minds, especially not in the short run. I think more often they come in handy after the fact, to rationalize people's feelings and memberships. But that's not to say we should throw up our hands and give up on reaching people. There's the alternative of delaying rational debate until a foundation of decency and emotional goodwill has been established--again, pretty tough to do online. There was an episode of Yascha Mounk's podcast from 9/4/20 where these two approaches are discussed. Elizabeth Anderson offers this critique to Mounk's project (called, oddly enough, "Persuasion"): "This is why I think I have some slight reservation against your Persuasion project, because it's all about argument. I don't think Americans in general are ready for argument, what we have to have is testimony. That's where people just sit down and talk about their lives, and open up in ways that other people can actually listen, and hear what the experience of others is like. Where people are speaking from the heart, about their experience. It's not about larger scale, policy arguments about principles; it's just about experience."
Recently read "Metazoa" by Peter Godfrey-Smith, a really entertaining, first-principles-style explanation/theory of how biological systems lead to consciousness. Highly recommend it. I also enjoyed "Range" by David Epstein, although I admit part of that is because it was telling me something I wanted to hear .
I've found that SDE day jobs can be not so great, but it's actually BECAUSE there's not as much coding as I'd like. I think I'll be content if I can find a job where 70% of the time is spent writing logic and testing it. But my experience so far, while limited (about 3 - 4 years), has been that your time is taken up by meetings, research, tech debt hell, etc. So you might not be missing much, some developers actually do most of their coding in their own time just like you!
I'd agree these are all valid, and not mutually exclusive. ie, as a junior dev use some discretion based on what type of issue you're facing, as a manager set the tone and if needed give the offer some guidance on when to struggle for a bit, when to ask, and when to take a break (still such an underrated strategy!). This is one of those problems that only gets solved when both parties understand the solution though. In other words a developer can have a good grasp of how question-asking should work, but despite a lot of lip service, this manager or the next might not get it. And vice versa managers/devs.
Interesting. Yeah it seems like this is the story with a lot of SDE roles. Funny you mention agency work because I've been considering trying that route. Maybe startups offer more pure coding too? But then of course that comes with tradeoffs as well, stress, wearing more hats, less financial stability, etc.