Good post, thanks for sharing it and the author for writing it!
I liked very much the observations in the first half of the post, however I don't agree with the conclusions. For me the reason for the state of software engineering (and well, many other industries really) is the problem with leadership. We as society often choose wrong leaders[1] and these leaders have very detrimental effects on processes and quality. However, it doesn't mean that what we do in software engineering is intrinsically meaningless, it's just very inefficient. The majority of web and mobile applications do solve a problem people have, because people do need to eat, shop, dress, play, organise their documentation, learn, do sports, connect to other people, share things with each other, etc. More often than not these applications are developed not because of great leadership but despite of terrible one, because the people who write code still manage to do their job despite of it. And the same thing happens in hospitals, you don't think that hospitals' management is much better, do you?
So, basically, the problem with the first approach (Gratitude) is that it ignores the problem. Often ignoring the problem is contributing to it. And the problem with the second approach (Cynicism) is that it exacerbates it, because it essentially promotes the lack of integrity and the same problematic egocentric attitude that's responsible for this problem in the first place.
Being angry is a very natural reaction to this problem, and I do agree it's necessary to a degree. However I don't think it's the solution. I guess the solution is to accept the current situation for what it is, and do your part to change it. You don't need to be angry to do that, but you do need to ditch the wrong expectations about our society and how it works.
Wow, great piece, thanks for sharing it!
While reading it I was absolutely sure I've already heard it. For the first part I thought it's the transcript of the text they read in Vipassana retreat, and for the second I thought it must be from Alan Watts. But from the rest of the blog and from the comments here I understand that it's neither, and that it's just your thoughts. It reads really nicely, like a river.
I also noticed that your previous blog's name (stormrider) is somehow similar to mine (cyclinginthewind) haha.
Thank you very much for writing this! It's very well formulated and expressed. I especially liked
> Unfortunately, it's very difficult to convince suffering patients that they have some control over their situation without also implying personal blame for their problems
I also see it as a big part of the problem, that it's difficult to convince people that they do have control over their lives. In many psychotherapy books, when therapists describe various cases, this is a corner stone of a therapy success: a patient understanding that they do have control over their situation. That it's not the outer world that is so demanding that it leaves them no choice, but them choosing to cope in a particular way, and that there are other ways to react and cope.
A star like Sun is in a state of an equilibrium between gravitational forces that want to collapse the star and the fusion energy. Gravitational pressure helps atoms to collide and fusion takes place. But it doesn't sound right to say that the heat is from the pressure.
Once the fusion energy isn't enough to counteract the gravity, the star collapses into a white dwarf (or a super-nova later).
Hey, great answer, totally on the same page with you. But at times the boredom voice is just so loud, that even understanding that this voice is also just a part of grand happening does not help.
Although I do agree that the percentage of people on the spectrum is higher in tech industry than in other industries, I think it's not higher than some 5-15%. When you ascribe to every introverted person being on the spectrum, you neglect the significance of it in people who really have it. It's like you're saying "yeah, we're all like this, so don't pretend you can't do this or that".
On one hand it's true and people will apply their preconceived interpretations, on the other hand if nobody talks about it these interpretations and biases will never change. People have these biases because they don't know anybody with autism/schizophrenia/depression personally, but once they know and realize that it's a human just like them, they could understand it better.
I think it's hard to explain why the things it does are cool, because it's related to the aesthetic sense of beauty and it's very difficult to explain that one. It's like you take a person who is doing number theory, and you ask them to explain why they are so fascinated that you can approximate prime numbers distribution with a particular function.
I think it's related to aesthetics of seeing how things are connected into a "bigger picture". It gives you an immense sense of beauty, once you are able to see that things, that you thought are not related, are connected into a bigger picture, and are actually very much related.
In Haskell a lot of things are about this "bigger picture", while in many popular languages the things are just a bunch of practical tools, that have nothing to do with each other.
I totally agree here, that 'culture fit' in team work is a real thing. Usually a thing that you discover some month later, after the person feels they can be "themselves" and don't need to pretend being nice. If the whole team finds a person toxic, this is very real case of 'culture unfit' and it should be dealt with.
However, I also once faced with a case, when manager didn't want to hire an engineer, because she thought he wasn't 'culture fit', although he was a great engineer. Technical members of hiring committee managed to convince her otherwise and then this person became in a sense the heart of the team, everybody liking him more than anybody else.
So, in my opinion 'culture fit' should always come from within the team a person works in and it should be a collective opinion, not an opinion of a single manager.
> When I interview candidates I attempt to engage them in technical argument where I purposely make some questionable statements. How do they attempt to correct you? Do they leave the door open for their opinion to be incorrect. You can learn a lot about what someone will be like to work with just using this simple technique.
I like programming languages much more than natural ones, therefore what usually makes me happy, is to see a language-for-humans to resemble a programming language, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban.
But thank you so much for the links! I learned quite a lot from them and now I at least know that the reason I feel German is more similar to Russian, than English, is the thing called "analytic vs. inflected" languages.
This is an absolutely amazing course! It's also about how Buddhism actually guessed so many things correctly about how our brains work. The author explains about Buddhist ideas and almost for every of them, there is a scientific experiment, that indicates it could be true.
It seems that you don't actually want to become enlightened as much as you just simply want to be helpful to other people and teach them a valuable skill.
I personally think that enlightenment and teaching others about it are quite different things that maybe don't have in common as much as one thinks they have.
As I see it, you might reach a state of mind you are very content with, and it makes you see the world "as it is" and because of it, you don't need to teach anybody anything, since it's already "as it is" and "as it should be". So, maybe it's just enough to be aware of it.
That's a very stupid decision to make from her side. She had small children, so every additional year she lives is immensely important for her children. To die in the next year is just 0.05% probability, to die now - 5%. Even if she dies in 10 years, these 10 years of her life would have been an unmeasurable gift to her children comparing it with her dying on the operating table.
The surgeon had to do the math with her, instead of wondering, whether she understood the risks or not.
Unfortunately, many people are illiterate with numbers, so you cannot assume that in that person's head numbers like 5% and 0.05% do not both translate to "negligibly small".
> When I behaved this way in the past, a strong mentor or manager would have helped me immensely. Instead I had managers who were scared of me because I was more talented than they were and just wanted me to go away.
I think this is the cornerstone of the problem, that there rarely are more than one strong personalities in a team, because each strong personality is like a positively charged nucleus that attracts electrons but repels other strong personalities.
I liked very much the observations in the first half of the post, however I don't agree with the conclusions. For me the reason for the state of software engineering (and well, many other industries really) is the problem with leadership. We as society often choose wrong leaders[1] and these leaders have very detrimental effects on processes and quality. However, it doesn't mean that what we do in software engineering is intrinsically meaningless, it's just very inefficient. The majority of web and mobile applications do solve a problem people have, because people do need to eat, shop, dress, play, organise their documentation, learn, do sports, connect to other people, share things with each other, etc. More often than not these applications are developed not because of great leadership but despite of terrible one, because the people who write code still manage to do their job despite of it. And the same thing happens in hospitals, you don't think that hospitals' management is much better, do you?
So, basically, the problem with the first approach (Gratitude) is that it ignores the problem. Often ignoring the problem is contributing to it. And the problem with the second approach (Cynicism) is that it exacerbates it, because it essentially promotes the lack of integrity and the same problematic egocentric attitude that's responsible for this problem in the first place.
Being angry is a very natural reaction to this problem, and I do agree it's necessary to a degree. However I don't think it's the solution. I guess the solution is to accept the current situation for what it is, and do your part to change it. You don't need to be angry to do that, but you do need to ditch the wrong expectations about our society and how it works.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_Oab42VZRE