The law wasn’t designed with this use case in mind. It’s likely you and everyone you know break minor laws daily just by going about your day. The end result of this is wider application of flawed human judgement in enforcing laws that could be used to punish anyone at any time.

Does that sound like a good idea to you?

My success as an architect or senior dev or supervising senior dev or practice lead (all hats I've worn just like the knit beanie I wear every day) all depend on a senior management team above me that remains relaxed, open to new ideas, and collaborative. I need them to view me as a flexible resource that works just as hard to understand their needs and concerns as I do to understand those of the engineers at the firm.

That's why I wear jeans and a tshirt when I'm meeting with internal teams and I put on a suit and tie (or at least a cashmere sweater and slacks) when I meet with clients or mostly senior management teams.

I need openness and collaboration between peers who frequently and stubbornly misunderstand each other and by signaling that I'm not explicitly playing for either team I foster that openness and collaboration.

Often managers smirk or chuckle at my casual attire and engineers are wary and look askance at my Tie Bar wool ties and designer shoes when I am attending a workshop.

I dress for the audience, not for me. Stubbornly adhering to any other standard is dumb.

Look I appreciate the sentiment but I'm calling bullshit

You're putting way too much effort into choosing a look whereas in a real professional world everyone would choose to exnovate at one kind of outfit and move on to more important matters

But I do agree there are moments when you dress for yourself and moments when you dress for others

During work it's 100% dress for the team and client

As a senior software developer start-up founder and process consultant I'm telling you dress is an important semaphore that most people fumble badly and it only serves to amplify the control dramas and false corporate power dynamics

Your beanie is not only a beanie it's a badge of entitlement

What toxic pit do you work in where junior programmers are ARGUING with senior architects and the senior devs aren’t mentoring, reviewing and empowered to make key decisions in another room before junior developers ever see a spec? And how do I avoid working there?

A1) Your typical mega corp that is too big to be one thing and filled with geniuses around every corner. So some parts are a pit and some parts aren't. It depends.

A2)Probably don't have to worry about it.

A 20 year old "startup"/feature factory where all the original talent left years ago and everyone in an IT management position has been with the company less than 6 years. The majority of developers(200+) here are hired fresh out of school, or only had 1 previous employer. Now the CEO spends all day courting the "institutional investors" so he can secure his retirement.

I've seen this in a couple of places. Junior dev assigned to design new system. Senior dev assigned to mentor junior dev. Senior dev encourages junior dev based on experience. Junior dev ignores everything senior dev says. Manager listens to whatever junior dev says and sidelines senior dev. Senior dev goes on vacation. System explodes.

At my company management often gives new stuff to interns while senior people are stuck with maintenance work. It’s really weird.

I've been at a mega-corp that let newly hired developers to build new stuff while senior devs are busy putting out customer fires that in many cases, were caused by those junior devs in the first place. "We want to make sure the junior devs have interesting things to work on so they stick around."

Not really. A new system means it is not in production yet, so if something goes wrong there is little impact. Breaking the working system doing maintenance can cause lots of problems, so it is seniors who are tasked with changing it.

Your manager should be called a practice lead and they should have recently been a senior dev. They should have been picked by other senior devs as the obvious choice since he’s the guy who spends more time on lunch and learns than writing code.

A company that cannot come up with a better more interesting process isn’t somewhere I want to work.

How about making the questions broad enough for every candidate to have some input and evaluate them on what they choose to focus on? Something like, “How would you design an ATM?”

There should never be a right answer to an interview question, just a candidate that solves problems in a way that fills a gap in your company.

I worked with Michael Slaby in 2008 and 2012. He's an incredible technology manager. He's great at punching up and fighting for his engineer's perspectives and helping upper management understand limitations and then getting out of the way.

Since that time he's probably had his own epiphanies from working in industry but one of mine was that we did shockingly little QA and everything was built as fast as humanly possible. Everything was building the airplane in the air and it was largely due to constraints of the political or legal kind. Timeline management and allocating resources to testing was always an afterthought.

Testing usually comes from a feedback loop of launching broken features, incident response, manager gets in hot water, engineer gets in hot water, engineer proposes testing plan, manager uses incident as primary source reference to secure additional budget, testing implemented.

In politics no service, company, initiative, or team lasts long enough to complete the cycle.

"In politics no service, company, initiative, or team lasts long enough to complete the cycle."

This is systemic corruption. A billionaire can dump as much money into a for-profit company to build a platform for a specific campaign and then when the campaign is over then can claim that there isn't enough business to keep the platform solvent for the next 2 to 4 years and do it all again with the benefit of the previous code base. It's better than a Super PAC because the for-profit company can work directly with the campaign and no one will bat an eye. The company can even have foreign financing. All the while, their losses amount to a huge tax write-off and the public pays the bill.

In the case of The Groundwork, it likely cost upwards of $10 million for the people, building lease, AWS costs, etc. But where did all of the money come from? Certainly Hillary didn't pay for this. I'd love to see Eric Schmidt's 2016 Tax Returns.

There really is no call for this sort of vitriol, especially when it isn't really paired with any information that we might learn from what you said. If you gave some actually tangible examples, perhaps this anger could at least be intellectually interesting.

I'm not angry. As they say in America, "I have no dog in this fight."

It does not bother me in any way that the government in China gets to decide whether and where people can travel or work or live.

I'm glad they don't do it where I live, but I am sure the average Chinese citizen is glad they don't have to suffer many indignities and strange quirks of western life.

I cannot, for instance, let my child play with a water gun at the public park for fear he will be shot and killed by a police officer. I do not need to pretend that's unquestionably good. It is certainly not the way I would prefer to live. It is just a fact of life.

I hope by the length of my next sentence I'll be worthy of some small part of the praise you're giving the Seattle Times here :-)

It seems to me that the only difference between an exit poll and a voluntary disclosure checkbox which, if utilized by a statistically significant portion of the electorate, could be leveraged by official government commissions to audit election results where online voting is offered is that one these options is in the price range of the national parties and not publicly disclosed and the other strikes fear into the heart of everyone I've spoken to involved in election process.

Voluntary disclosure doesn't have to be a slippery slope and I firmly believe can and will lead to more fair and equitable access to the voting process and greater participation if it enabled online voting to be audited.

No one believes that large numbers of people will be blackmailed into disclosing their vote and if this or discrimination happens at scale then make it explicitly illegal. For those who aren't subject to these factors and are willing to participate in a census it would completely change how elections are run for the better.

Voluntary disclosure sounds as if it undoes the secret ballot.

Just a reminder: the secret ballot is secret to protect those, whose genuine vote would otherwise be manipulated (/forced/extorted/...)

Not every individual voter might need that level of protection for themselves.

But every individual voter requires this level of protection for the whole process.

Phrased differently: for some, anonymity in voting is nice. For others, it is necessary to get their genuine vote. For democracy to function, we need everyone's genuine vote.

Thus: we need voter anonimity that cannot be rescinded by the voter - nor by anyone else.

>Just a reminder: the secret ballot is secret to protect those, whose genuine vote would otherwise be manipulated (/forced/extorted/...)

For mail-in voting (which is how the majority of people in King County vote), what makes the ballot secret? Can someone be forced or extorted to fill in the ballot in front of their persecutor?

>For democracy to function, we need everyone's genuine vote.

I'd honestly like to see anonymous voting in the house and Senate. This would vastly reduce the influence of political parties. Yes, it means that it's harder for constituents to track what their representative actually does, but the way modern politics works, "what their representative actually does" is essentially vote the party line on almost every vote.

Source: I vote in King County (of which Seattle is a member city and probably uses the same process given the same elections office).

The Mail In Ballot procedure here uses a double-envelope system.

The inner envelope has the vote (with a matching identifier tab pulled off). It is supposed to contain only the vote.

The other envelope contains the inner envelope and this envelope is marked with the address of the voter, and a legally binding contract (signed by the voter and/or representative witnesses if they are unable).

My belief is that the validation process for these ballots includes multiple stages and probably blinding, wherein, the outer envelope is authenticated as a registered voter and that it contains something likely to be a vote (there's a small viewing circle). This would then be stripped and the trusted inner envelope, still sealed, added to a tabulation bin. Said tabulation bin would then be counter later in an anonomized manor.

Again, this assumes a slippery slope. Organ donors abound. Should we be allowed to redact it on our driver's licenses for fear that we might be judged by our bosses and neighbors or compelled to donate or that it reveals our religious beliefs?

When someone says, "America isn't ready for online voting." I hear, "The interests who already buy and aggregate enough information to have the results ahead of time want to stay 1 step ahead of regulators."

No one is going to pay you to tick the organ donor box, or threaten you or your family if you don't.

Both of those things have happened with voting in the past, which is why ballots are secret.

>No one is going to pay you to tick the organ donor box, or threaten you or your family if you don't. Both of those things have happened with voting in the past, which is why ballots are secret.

It's perfectly legal to take a selfie at the ballot box showing that you voted a particular way. It's feasible that some party could anonymously pay, say, $20 for every selfie they are sent with the way of voting that they ask for. Sure, it's illegal but so would be doing the same thing if the ballot wasn't secret.

You can take the selfie and then void your ballot. Person who paid you won't know.

If you tick a disclosure box and void your ballot, then that can be tracked.

World governments and wealthy private interests are right now paying huge sums of money to interfere with election results.

That's happening right now. Not in the past. That's why we need enough people who aren't in danger to volunteer their data.

> No one is going to pay you to tick the organ donor box

> World governments and wealthy private interests are right now paying huge sums of money

You are describing a different problem than the one the parent comment is describing. The latter is lobbying, which can be prevented through legal restrictions and auditing to make sure those restrictions are being adhered to.

The former is outright vote-buying. People who are looking for money can, and will sell their votes for money, goods, or jobs. This happens in less rigorous democracies like India today. This happened in the US as well with the old-time patronage machines in big cities. Even if you don't necessarily need to sell your vote to get any job, you might lose a job offer to someone else who was willing to demonstrate that they voted "correctly".

The existence of one problem does not minimize the other, and we should seek to strike as many impurities from the process as possible, rather than trading one devil for another.

I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, only the cost and timeline for a grassroots effort to prevent disaster. If we leave this up to local parties to solve our great grandchildren will be having the same argument

Keep in mind, democracy functioned in America for about a century without secret ballots.

Forgive me, I don't know what you're advocating for here. I greatly appreciate that you're chewing on the policy, problem, tech.

For the USA, I no longer think polls are useful predictors, nor are exit polls useful audits or verification. For polling to work (be useful), like is done in Germany, requires the whole system to be designed as such.

Our gold standard is the Australian Ballot. Private voting, public counting. We weaken this system to extend the franchise, eg absentee ballots.

But the real kicker is our FPTP (winner takes all) election system. It's so brittle. The inevitable error rate intrinsic in any form of voting (casting ballots) coupled with durvergers law virtually ensures drama.

Said another way, my militant defense of the Australian Ballot, this recurring national spaz attack, would be mooted by switching to a more robust form of elections. Ranked choice and proportional representation have the most interest and support, though I prefer Approval Voting for a better balance of fairness and simplicity.

Back to your point about disclosure, if I follow you: I very much would like to see tech, POCs, research into time boxed privacy. Like maybe all election materials, including ballots, are released when an election is certified. Versus hidden and then destroyed a few weeks later. My motivation is to find other balances, equilibria, between people's privacy (and protection) against society's need for confidence in the results.

I agree with proportional representation applied within a bounding area of authority and letting representation by __area__ and/or __area of interest__ be by decided by the vote rather than distracting (which is subject to jerry mandering).

I prefer the "Path Voting" method (which I have to google for with wikipedia path voting every time, since I can't remember how to spell the inventor's name). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method

"The Schulze method (/ˈʃʊltsə/) is an electoral system developed in 1997 by Markus Schulze that selects a single winner using votes that express preferences. The method can also be used to create a sorted list of winners. The Schulze method is also known as Schwartz Sequential dropping (SSD), cloneproof Schwartz sequential dropping (CSSD), the beatpath method, beatpath winner, path voting, and path winner."

Well then.

I am explicitly not shutting you down. I shared my views and why. I encouraged you to do the same.

For instance, one cheap and obvious way to improve uitilityof exit polling would be to implement compulsory voting.

Also, please work on a campaign. To the best of my knowledge, modern campaigns don't rely much on polling. Most effort is put into GOTV (voter identification and balloting chasing).

Edit: Oops. I'm not familiar with Republican campaigns. In my area, their GOTV is less potent and they rely far more on advertising. So they might still be more reliant on polling. It's a good question for me to follow up.

Opinion polls are still useful in other ways. Depending on who's paying. Sanity checks. Push polling. Message crafting. Talking points, a la Voted San Fran's Favorite Pho Restaurant. Feeding corporate media's horserace narrative. Policy groups trying to gather intel on both opponents and allies. Consultants fleecing noob candidates. Arm waving because old school operators expect it.

YMMV.

KOBE! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcMe2H3mIKk

At the danger of DOX'ing myself I'll just say I was a hair's breadth from closing the loop on full online voter registration in 2008 but apparently local offices are not REQUIRED to accept faxed registrations and might FORGET to change the toner or turn them on.

This is not my first brush with radical voting ideas and I'm not afraid to put them into practice when legal signs off :-p

These days I settle for election judging. Isn't that a scary thought?

You should google project Houdini, narwhal, and orca

Pointing out a contradiction of policy and interest between civilian and military who each have independent concerns and capability doesn't necessary imply sarcasm. I took nimbius to mean that it will be interesting (as in get your popcorn) to see who's influence in the halls of power win out when such a contradiction exists.

I see little conflict, there is little reason the military would observe restrictions in the battlefield. now they could limits its use only while deployed or simply run it under an exception only policy, as in you get to use it for this period of time and not otherwise.

there has always been separate rules applied to the people and government, the issue comes down to the simple matter elected officials should always be considered public while in office.

The pull quote at the end of the article is heart breaking. Internal employee email saying if they have to cover up one more deficiency they know they're going to hell.

Just want to say Google: Can we please get the option to disable left turns onto major roadways from a side street with no stop sign for the major roadway?

I frequently have to reroute myself due to these “shortcuts”