Nobody I know likes these goofy software shifters. It's a feature that's confusing and that nobody asked for. The PRNDL was fine. Just give me a lever. Please.
Extra: so, so much sentiment around economic effects in this article. I don't mean to downplay them at all, but this article misses something very central that I've heard from people who have become 'fed up' with the democratic party over time is -- in summary -- that they don't want to be talked down to. It has become a habit of the left to paint a portrait of people who oppose their viewpoints as dumb, uneducated, etc., and then being shocked when they don't get votes.
The article brushes against this for a twinkling moment in its 'dignity of work' segment, but I don't see a portion where it addresses this directly. This is a huge deal. You cannot insult people and expect them to vote for you. It's like going to a bar to try and find a date with your only strategy being negging[0]. When it's part of your messaging that the opposition is opposing you simply because it's dumb, it also plants an inherent superiority complex in your supporters, which only serves to exacerbate the problem.
Again -- the economic points are important here, too. I am not downplaying them at all. This is just something that a ton of articles and sources about this problem in particular seem to miss.
I keep hearing about this, too. It's not one or two people, it's very, very many who I've seen and heard expressing this over time. It's not a problem that is getting any better -- in fact, it would appear to be getting worse.
You cannot insult people and expect them to vote for you.
I wholeheartedly agree with most of what you have written - however this part is suss because the opponent of the democratic party does this same thing and during the campaign often to their face ("I would not even be here if I didn't need your votes" kind of things...). dem party has a lot of issues to work through but "the other side" is just better at politics. if a party that could not give two shits about "working class" is getting working class votes you know there is magic happening politically...
> I wholeheartedly agree with most of what you have written - however this part is suss because the opponent of the democratic party does this same thing and during the campaign often to their face ("I would not even be here if I didn't need your votes" kind of things...).
Yes! I agree. It's a problem. This is the ticket --
> "the other side" is just better at politics
combined with
> that could not give two shits about "working class
It is radically un-hard at this point. People _still_ quote 'deplorables'[0] to me, after nearly ten years. Combine that kind of attitude from the left with right-wing's ability to use rhetoric to make folks feel as though they're welcomed by the republican party in spite of democratic messaging, and you've got your magic. The left is doing half of the work for them, ironically.
We've got a penchant in the states for viewing the whole of the 'working class' as these 'right-wing, nutcase deplorables'. A gang of under- or un-educated people just waiting to be radicalized. We look down on these people and disregard their concerns ( see the article's dignity of work re: removing jobs vs creating lower prices ). When you do that, you alienate people. When the other party has a knack for alienating people, all you need to do is open the net.
I have some opinions, here, based on the people I've met and worked with over time. All with a grain of salt, of course, because I'm just one guy with one career, and of course my views don't represent a vast and diverse industry :)
It sounds like you need a couple of people, because you have a couple of problems. The programmer who
1. Understands machine learning and data science, and can action-ably put code in place that utilizes all of the data you're collecting
2. Understands the value of testing and will fix broken windows as he goes ( your "things break constantly" problem )
3. Can write high-quality code
4. Can move at startup speed while doing all of the above
5. Can spin up at your workplace in time to make an impact around your nearest deadlines of... two or three months from now
surely exists!
But they sound very expensive.
Why:
In my experience, data scientists and machine learning folk are very scientist. Especially at the master+ level, they can make a huge impact on their area of expertise for sure! The drawback -- _usually_, and I will say I'm painting broad strokes here based on a lot of the people I've met and worked with -- is that they're not used to building production software and keeping up with demands of testing and high code quality.
On the other hand, enterprise developers are very good at the high code quality and testing part, but generally don't have the scientific depth to jump in on machine learning / data science projects. Again, broad strokes.
If you want someone who can do both, they usually have a _ton_ of years of experience, because! It takes a ton of years to learn how to do these things well.
So that person probably exists, they're probably quite expensive, though.
If you do wind up with more than one person and you cannot hire them at the same time, you will sacrifice in one aspect for gain in the other. If you hire one person, you run the risk of dragging them through the dirt, because you're going to be stretching their talent thin. I've noticed that the type of person with the level of experience to do the jobs you want don't like to move fast and run themselves ragged.
Well yes ok sure. But I was considering using Greptile, and looked up the quote, and now it's very clear i won't invest time or money in something non-sustainable...
That would be considered illegal here, is it legal where Greptile is based or are they breaking laws? I'm not saying this makes the practice any better, but I want to know if this actually puts them at risk of punishment.
I think it’s certain hourly-wage jobs that have can hour limits. (ie. physically demanding jobs in hot weather conditions require periodic water breaks, in addition to hour limits)
In other hourly-wage jobs, you can still work over 40 hours but the worker is entitled to over-time pay. My mom worked at the US Post Office and during the holiday seasons she would sometimes work 12 hours a days, but all hours above 8 were paid at twice the hourly rate. Also, note that signing up for overtime was voluntary.
Software engineers, on the other hand, are salaried. Similar to lawyers, they sometimes have grueling hours (ie sleep in the office) but it’s not illegal, afaik.
Even worse -- giving a thorough estimate, having the other party decline and reply with a different, significantly shorter estimate, and then turning their new estimate into your new deadline. Woof!
It's even worse. The educated tech industry workers don't actually make any banter, so any time their prejudices slip through, it's just their actual opinions instead of banter. It's a very bizarre opposite to the supposedly 'uneducated' blue collar way of doing things, which brings levity as a first-class citizen, and communicates boundaries well.
You don't even need to be inappropriate to have workplace banter. Nobody ever said that a light environment has to be built on jokes that bust chops. In fact, busting chops kind of blows. There's plenty of room for clowning around outside of that, and plenty of ways to build camaraderie, too. You don't have to bring racism or sexism to the table to have a good time, and you don't have to have a good time at someone else's expense.
Man, I'm really sick of the robotic culture of tech. It's such a stuffy bummer. We should be making more skeleton jokes and showing each other macaroni art pictures.
In the UK government, before programming was considered a high-value skill, the vast majority of programmers were women. So much so that programming was measured in girl hours (which were paid less than man hours).
When it became clear that programming was going to be a big deal, women were systematically excluded, flipping the gender balance (although they had trouble hiring initially because men saw it as lesser work).
It flipped because the roles programmer (largely women) and analyst (mostly men) became programmer-analyst. The role women were dominating was collapsed into the one men already dominated.
At the exact same time (at least in the US), which was the 1980s, law and medicine (as in doctors, not nurses) rapidly shot toward near-parity of participation by men and women, while both being high-pay and much higher-prestige than anything to do with computers—now, still, but especially then. That the profession becoming higher-paying and a “big deal” was the cause of this shift doesn’t make much sense, given what else was going on at the same time.
[edit] to be clear, I’m not denying the existence of a gap, or making claims about whether it should be addressed—in fact, I think understanding the cause is vital if we do want to address it.
This is the same in blue collar environments. They have more of the levity that I'm seeking regardless.
> And let's face it the kind of people who want to dedicate their life to staring at a screen make for a strange crowd.
Maybe this is it? I'm not fully convinced. I have worked with tech dorks that had a sense of humor, and that didn't bring contentious things to the working environment. Is it a lack of wit? I don't know. The more I think about it, the more confused I get, honestly.
This is an interesting question, so here's a bit of speculation.
Banter is a matter of wit. You could call it an intellectual pursuit.
Blue collar jobs are primarily not intellectual pursuits. They need their own kind of smarts, but these smarts are relatively orthogonal to the kind of linguistic smarts used in banter, and most importantly the work output itself is not intellectual. There's little chance of the banter directly getting into the work output, and so there's little direct motivation for bosses to police it.
Software development is basically entirely an intellectual pursuit that very much overlaps the wit of banter, and banter is likely to leak into the work output. Hence easter eggs are a thing. So, bosses are more likely to want to police banter-adjacent activities, which has a likely chilling effect on banter itself.
Another, more recent, factor is that more software development activity is online/remote and therefore lower bandwidth. The subtleties of banter don't convey as well as they would in-person.
>Man, I'm really sick of the robotic culture of tech. It's such a stuffy bummer.
HN is like this too unfortunately. Anything slightly out of the high brow sanitized tech groupthink gets downvoted or flagged even if it doesn't break the rules.
It's mostly people who think the world must be a certain sanitized way and if you tell them the reality is otherwise they must suppress you to preserve their world view which they see as being the ritcheous one.
People are too sensitive and act on their feelings and emotions instead of logic and critical thinking. Which is ironic considering how such people pretend to be liberal, educated and all about free speech and freedom of opinion but only as long as your opinion matches theirs.
> It's mostly people who think the world must be a certain sanitized way and if you tell them the reality is otherwise they must suppress you to preserve their world view which they see as being the ritcheous one.
With regards to camaraderie and banter, I don't even want to talk about world views. I genuinely don't think they matter too much in that context. Really what I'm sick of is just a lack of any attempt to make a connection whatsoever. I don't need to align with a person politically or socially to build a connection and have good workplace banter. There's just such a fundamental unwillingness to do so, in my experience. That's what bugs me.
And I know the difference. I've been in both blue collar and white collar environments. Blue collar people look to build the connection and bond together almost immediately, just about every time. There's a period of 'feeling each other out' when you start on a new job or with a new coworker so that they can suss out _how to connect with you_. That's right: it's such a first-class citizen to their working relationships that there's an entire art form to initiating it.
Contrasting with the white collar environment... it's almost non-existent, unless you work with people who, ironically, come from blue collar environments. I think it's really sad, and I think we could benefit from being a little looser. I don't think that means we need to drag any contentious topics in, nor do I think it means that we need to drag ourselves into un-professionalism. There's just something to be said for being able to be goofy and chat with coworkers that seems to be lost on the white collar environment.
Harmony is the strength and support of all institutions. Banter and camaraderie build that harmony.
I don't know what this phenomenon is by which humans take personal experiences and attempt to extrapolate broad, sweeping generalizations and/or present anecdotal data as objective fact, but it's far too prevalent for my liking.
I'm sorry that your experiences differed from mine, but some of my best friends are connections that I organically grew in ostensibly white-collar jobs (in the education and tech sectors).
Many of the engineers I know are some of the most eclectic goofballs you'll ever meet.
I've worked a fair bit in both environments. Maybe I've somehow missed out on 'the mean', but that's my experience. I've met the eclectic goofballs in tech too, but they're far from the norm.
