I'm a pretty useless developer who does about the same amount of real work as you per week. I also often don't understand the technical details other developers discuss in meetings.
I am generally quite open about my lack of aptitude, as I result I've never really been promoted, I've just bounced around between different junior roles. It always seems obvious that I'm the most junior member of any team I'm on, but I'm starting to wonder if that's all in my head.
Your post kinda makes me wish I'd tried a bit harder at bullshitting. Maybe I could've at least made a bit more money.
> I also often don't understand the technical details other developers discuss in meetings.
I often worry about this, but unless you're at the Staff+ level, I think the chances of you knowing the intricate details of ~other~ peoples' work is low. And that's probably not a problem.
> makes me wish I'd tried a bit harder at bullshitting.
Honestly, I'd highly encourage it (a little). Being able to market yourself and your skills is very valuable.
> Expecting simple and final answers to questions depending on a myriad of factors (some unknown or even unknowable!) is stupid.
I don't think "covid sceptics" are the only ones guilty of this. Far from it in fact.
Vocal believers in "covid orthodoxy" (can't think of a better descriptor right now) seem much worse at acting as if simple and final answers exist for everything.
Annoyingly necessary disclaimer: I am not a "covid sceptic" by any stretch, I am fully vaccinated and believe that many precautions are warranted. But I am sick of being told what to do based on uncertain emerging science.
Case in point: vaccine passports seem to be an example where the policy was concocted based on assumptions about the science which turned out to be untrue (the assumption being that vaccinated people wouldn't carry or transmit Covid.) I believe that most governments are only keeping them in place in order to inconvenience people into getting vaccinated. This is exactly the sort of thing that fosters more scepticism, even if a lot of it is misguided.
I don't understand how you could read the parent comment and decide that it's "blaming" teen girls, unless you are deliberately arguing in bad faith.
Teenage girls are predisposed to behave in the way described, and Facebook/Instagram is profiting by exploiting that. Nothing about the explanation above is blaming them. If anything the comment makes a stronger case for Facebook's actions being immoral.
> Why are young girls so awful to each other? I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that is has to do with "hormones," new emotions, and new social awareness, etc. But, it's also the case that from a strictly evolutionary perspective, young girls are are the most fertile and therefore the most desirable.
How could the words "I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect..." not be considered blaming them? There is definitely some nuance here (I don't think the parent comment is hard-lining to say that the victims here are 100% to blame), but they are most certainly associating some level of blame to teens and their inherent "predisposed" behavior as you say.
It’s kind of amazing to me that an observation that anyone could make based on their experience as a human living on planet earth gets discounted because there isn’t some peer reviewed study from Harvard or whatever that confirms the observation. Young girls are mean to each other, that’s a fact. We don’t need an army of data scientists to “look into it”.
It’s helpful because it’s pointing out how absurd it is to constantly demand “data” to verify rudimentary observations of human nature. For whatever reason, and maybe it’s because of tech being so data obsessed, you can make a claim on this website as benign as “look both ways before crossing the street” and inevitably someone will want to see a “peer reviewed” study that says looking both ways before crossing the street “affects the outcome variable” of not getting hit by a car.
> If you don’t think universities are the right people to help with this question, who would you recommend to answer it?
Your mother, or your sister if you have one.
>How do you know this fact?
My name is remarkEon and I went to middle and high school in the United States on a planet I call Earth.
Is your claim that only in the United States is it that girls are mean to each other when they are in primary and secondary school? This seems like a much more extreme claim than mine. You have to argue that there’s something unique about the not_the_United_States schools such that there’s something nullifying intrafemale competition.
It’s a claim so extreme that … I’d like to see some data to back it up.
> You have to argue that there’s something unique about the not_the_United_States schools such that there’s something nullifying intrafemale competition.
Why do you think this? You only have your school experience to go on. You have nothing to base this claim on.
I think it’s entirely possible that the conditions of school create much of the competition you are observing, and that US schools are more extreme than others.
School intentionally creates behaviors. There is no reason not to believe that it has side effects.
And yes, to get any insight into which of is right, we’d need someone to have studied it.
I honestly think you must be trolling at this point. You’re taking this pedantic, academic view about the behavior of children and taking it to such an extreme (US school structure and its problems explain all malevolent minor female behavior) that I can’t believe you’re arguing in good faith.
No - I’m arguing that culture and social structures influence behavior, and that you can’t generalize from what you have observed at school to other cultures and times.
There is nothing pedantic or academic or anything I have said.
> US school structure and its problems explain all malevolent minor female behavior
This is simply a lie. I never said anything that implies this extreme view.
You are arguing that malevolent minor female behavior is universal and doesn’t need to be studied.
You might turn out to be right about the former, but without studying it, it’s just your baseless prejudice.
Experience and observation are a great place to begin an investigation. Of course if you're not careful, they can incorrectly color your results. As you say, anecdotal beliefs are not necessarily facts.
That said, the error I see more commonly is that the observation is perfectly valid, (or at least roughly valid) but the explanation is poor. People believe in the explanation because they feel so strongly about the observation. This is a fallacy I see over and over again. (and is often something I've seen leveraged in scams: "You've all experienced X. Here are some emotional stories about X. Now let me tell you how I have all the answers to X.")
I've tried to make it clear that my idea is not proven, but is something that I think is reasonable, and will hopefully lead to an interesting discussion. I'm definitely not suggesting that I have access to the truth, or that my idea is fact simply because I've explained something using scientific terms.
It's a weird phenomenon that's unique to HN. I understand that the idea is to elevate online discussion here, but many do it to such an absurd degree that anything anyone says always has someone asking for a source.
I sometimes wonder how these people would have survived at parties or social gatherings before the Internet when you couldn't just whip out your phone, spend 2 minutes not talking to anyone, click on the first Google search result, and then proclaiming "um acksually..."
Agreed. SOME may behave this way, but without more info who are we to say that they "are predisposed" in general. Teenage years are very hard for tons of reasons mentioned above and the way people handle those stresses comes down to tons of factors, support systems, upbringing, context, culture, etc.
No need to apologize, precision is important. Perhaps my point blurred two different things.
Point number 1 (directly referencing your question):
No, I did mean it's easier to heat than to cool. Basically every mechanism release heat, including heat pumps. Ultimately, to get a person to a comfortable temperature, all that is needed is to wrap them up in insulation until their body heat matches the heat loss for the required Delta(T).
Cooling is another thing altogether. There is no cooling mechanism, all we can do is:
Your body can do 1. but only if the humidity is low enough, but it can't do 2. My conclusion here is to illustrate that your body can largely take care of itself when it comes to warming itself up, but it's (comparatively) very bad at cooling itself.
Point number 2:
While heating is very easy, it's also very energetically wasteful for two reasons:
1. The Delta(T) you have to fight against is larger, often double so the losses are larger (Delta(T) sets the heat loss of your home)
2. Most heating isn't done with heat pumps which are very efficient, whereas all cooling is pretty much only done with heat pumps [1].
3. You can use heat that the AC moved around. Today you can hook up your AC to your boiler so the heat you moved out of your home is dumped into your boiler. As long as you use enough hot water, the more you run your AC the lower your carbon emissions will be since the water boiler runs off gas (I'm not advocating for using more hot water, btw)
So, while using your AC is not good for the climate, it is not the easiest optimization to do first.
[1] Swamp coolers are weird: you live in an arid enough place that evaporating water cools you down... so you waste that precious water when you could just run an AC???
It is in fact thermodynamically and metabolically far easier to heat than to cool.
We're warm-blooded creatures, so if we want to be warmer we can just jump around, or put on insulation. To cool, we have to sweat, and if the sweat can't evaporate much because of high humidity, we have to do a lot of it.
Similarly, if we want to heat a space, we can just burn something. Cooling requires active transport, whether finessed by something like a windcatcher or attic fan, or through an air conditioner.
Heat pumps are more efficient, but more complex, than furnaces, and can be run in reverse to provide air conditioning.
People really don't appreciate how brutal humidity is on our bodies' ability to cool down.
I run my AC more to dehumidify than to cool. I hate setting my AC below 78, that's freezing, but I have to because of improperly sized AC units, poor HVAC installation, etc.
My thermostat is located in a cooler part of my house compared to my bedroom -> my thermostat has to be set to 73 to cool my bedroom to a nice T.
If my AC is very large it wont run very long between cycles. When it does it will wring every bit of moisture out of that relatively small amount of air.
If the AC were smaller, the AC would run just about all day long, more of the air would then go get its moisture removed.
In other words:
1 unit of 4C air mixed with 9 units of 30C air -> 10 units 27.4C. Assuming I've removed all the water in the one unit of 4C air the water content has only gone down 10%
5 units of 24.8 C air mixed with 5 units of 30 C air -> 10 units of 27.4C. If I can get just 50% of the air out chilled 5 units of air, I've removed 25% of the water in the air.
These numbers are just thrown at you, so take them with a BIG grain of salt. You'd have to look at the water saturation tables to really do the math.
I didn't really mean training as in pre-planned courses. More sitting down with someone more experienced and being coached through a feature or a programming concept. I guess I was wrong to expect more of this.
Not guiding new people on critical aspects of existing systems or codebases is an indication of weak management. I think it is fair to assume that a developer knows the basic concepts pertinent to a given role, however the behavior of working systems is usually determined by a suite of proprietary configuration that is going to be confusing for anyone new. Unfortunately the people most familiar with that will have the hardest time communicating it to someone that is new.
How do you think the college more experienced than you has learned all he knows? Could be through another experienced college, yes, but chances are he learned by himself. We, IT people, are somehow elitist when it comes to knowledge: we think meritocracy is the way. I don’t like it but that’s how it is.
Does anyone else have a slight suspicion that this kind of stuff is promoted by authorities as a sort of "nudge"?
The goal, I think, is to emphasise the really wacky stuff so that anyone who might have more nuanced concerns about a vaccine (or anything else that differs from the "correct" narrative) gets lumped in with the crazies, and therefore shamed into keeping quiet.
The UK government, for example, has openly used psyops tactics on its own population for the duration of the pandemic, so I don't think it's too much of a reach to say that this could be another example of it.
> The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.
From the minutes of SPI-B, the UK government's pandemic psyops group
Compulsory disclaimer that I'm not an anti-vaxxer, I will almost certainly take the vaccine as soon as it's offered to me. I'm just someone who thinks that a government using these fear based tactics on its own people is utterly shameful.
This is amazing, I'm noting this down for future use.
As someone said elsewhere in this thread, it makes you wonder what's really going on while we are distracted by this stuff.
What I find interesting is that there (probably? maybe?) isn't a shadowy CIA-like organisation promoting this stuff, this "tactic" is a naturally emergent property of the woke belief system.
I think I find this more frightening than if there actually were a shadowy organisation pulling the strings: here we have a philosophy, which many well-intended people subscribe to, that causes them to behave like a sophisticated intelligence agency deliberately trying to disrupt a foreign power.
In fact, a lot of that woke stuff actually comes from the CIA.
It's a tactic they first used in the 70s in Europe, when "real" left parties (i.e. the old-school socialist/communist parties, affiliated with the soviet union) started gaining ground.
All of a sudden they started funding a lot of stuff like that, because it weakened/marginalized those parties. Why fight for workers rights when you can fight for LGBT, immigrant, women rights, etc. I.e. the right of fifteen distinct groups that have no power.
Much more recently that tactic was used to destroy the Occupy Wall Street movement.
I admire your drive very much. I too started programming in my 30s, but have always struggled with it and now wish I had pursued something else.
I cannot imagine having the mental energy or the enthusiasm to spend most of my evenings doing side projects and reading CS books. I'm happy for you, but is that what it takes to do ok in this career? Hours and hours of unpaid work, even after you've got a job?
It just makes me wish I had focussed on being a product manager or something. I'm pretty sure most of them aren't spending all their evenings reading management books.
Another one here who is really not that great at it. I also find my interest in getting better at it waning by the day, because I know I'll still be mediocre no matter how hard I try.
But right now it's a choice between software or an unskilled low paid job, as I have no other skills.
I am generally quite open about my lack of aptitude, as I result I've never really been promoted, I've just bounced around between different junior roles. It always seems obvious that I'm the most junior member of any team I'm on, but I'm starting to wonder if that's all in my head.
Your post kinda makes me wish I'd tried a bit harder at bullshitting. Maybe I could've at least made a bit more money.