AggressivelyPassive

  • 11 Posts
  • 374 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • The Founders were among history’s monsters and you need to stop trying to protect their legacy by painting us with their brush. Chattel slavery was a uniquely horrible institution and its end mattered.

    Dude, I’m German. I know a thing or two about facing the past. So don’t act like I’m defending anyone.

    I didn’t choose to enslave anyone and I have no power to free them.

    As far as I know, only about a third of people in the US back then ever owned slaves. The other two thirds didn’t choose that either. Yet most of them got complacent for a pretty long time.

    Also, you do have a choice. You can buy clothes that are maybe not morally pure, but at least better. You could buy a Fairphone. You could become politically active or at least vote for the better candidates/parties. Sure, that won’t turn the world into utopia over night, but at least you can make it a bit better.

    We all have to face the fact that our actions and inactions cause suffering, and some of that is indeed not in our power to change. But your stance of essentially giving up and pointing at the other crime as ever worse is hypocritical.

    As Adorno said: there’s no right living in the wrong. And we are so wrong currently the slave population in this world is higher than ever in the US: https://www.un.org/en/delegate/50-million-people-modern-slavery-un-report





  • You’re conflating things.

    Urgency is not a factor, but brevity and mental load. Writing mails takes time and forces you to jump between issues/contexts. Even if you answer all mails in one go, you still need to switch contexts again and again. Add to that the inevitable misunderstanding in written communication and you end up with hours of work for simple questions.

    Of course there are issues that can be resolved via mail/tickets just fine, but many can’t. Forcing employees to choose a certain channel is not a good idea.

    Also, you can send an email to schedule a call.

    Why are companies going async? To go global. Now find a slot that works for Central/Western Europe and California. Good luck.






  • They re-invent everything for no reason. Every mundane device has been “re-invented” using big data, blockchain, VR, now AI and in a few years probably quantum-something.

    The entire tech world fundamentally ran out of ideas. The usual pipeline is basic research > applied research > products, but since money only gets thrown at products, there’s nothing left to do research. So the tech bros have to re-iterate on the same concepts again and again.



  • None of the things you mentioned were in my description. You made that up completely. I talked about meetings, no scheduling information.

    She’s not entitled to asking multiple times day if you’re done yet.

    Did I even imply that? No. You made that up.

    I work above senior, have done management and tech lead.

    Hearing only what you want, not what the other person said makes you almost perfect management material.

    Seriously, look at my comments and your replies. You answered to a completely different reality.


  • Nah, I think you’re mixing things up here.

    “Toxic” is just a label you’re putting on everything you don’t like and you’re also putting a ton of implications behind it.

    If Stacy wants a feature, and she’s the official representative, I need to clarify what that feature means. A manager can’t shield me from having to research the technical implications, that’s my job.

    Also, you can ignore calls all you want, if there is a genuine need to communicate, you need to have that call at some point. That’s actually your first point in the list above.

    I think you never worked in a role above code grunt. As a senior developer, my job is to do all what I described above. I need to do all the technical legwork a manager can’t. I need to write everything down. I need to get feedback from stakeholders. That’s nothing a manager can do and that’s nothing a junior can do.

    I code something like half an hour a day.



  • I feel like these memes of hating everything other than lone coding is because you keep working for toxic companies.

    No, it’s because we are working with humans and their deeply flawed organizations. As much as people hate corporations and love startups, both are always a mess. Every organization I’ve seen from the inside is barely functioning. Cruft, interpersonal conflicts, incompetence, or simply very bad market situations.

    Software engineering kind of has to get involved with almost all of that. If you need to get approval from department A and Stacy just keeps changing what she wants, you’ll have to carry that chaos into the development and it will usually percolate through half the engineering department, because hardly any interface is actually a stable attack surface. That means meetings, calls, meetings, reviews, meetings, and fucking Stephen again wants to pitch this weird framework he’s so in love with, meetings, budget calls, because there’s no way, simply changing the field length can take that much work, meetings, …