I agree with you! It's a shock to the system for a lot of folks to have their code base used that way. FOSS is often a labor of love by very smart folks. If it's legal (and the license allows for it), then it's fair game and hard/impossible to stop.
This site is for the lolz and obviously following the style set by the previous mf websites. I find it cathartic to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation we are in, but also genuinely engage with the neck breaking pace of change we are all having to adjust to.
People complain about all things all the time (rightfully) but I'm not gonna complain about your complaints now, I will only add that I sometimes enjoy humor full of "shock" and profanity. Still! , After decades of professionals and non-professionals diluting it. This site was funny. Ymmv
It is as "cathartic" as dropping n words everywhere. N this and that, that n president!
Author has incestual relationship in their family. At least in my country that is highly offensive. For the sake of their possible children / siblinks, I hope they use protection!
I'm fairly certain most cultures have common use of incestual insults.
The english "mother fucker" is born of the original taboo of fucking one's mother. The act is seen as bad, so we use the phrase referencing the act as a label for all sorts of bad things. Like, you dropped a book on your foot, and that's as bad as someone who sleeps with their mum, so you say "mother fucker".
Spanish has tu chinga tu madre or just chinga tu madre.
Not sure off the top of my head, but I know there's lots of other cultures that use the same taboo in the same kind of substitional way.
It’s so strange that the Claude-ness leaks out even when it’s prompted to use this tone. The underlying flavour shines through clearly. I’m sure you could get it to shake it with enough prompting
It sounds nice in theory, and maybe you could make it work. But in reality, distracting a developer from whatever they were doing has a cost. Add up ten 1 minute fixes and your whole day goes by.
From the customer's perspective though having a fix out in a couple of minutes is the golden standard. I guess that's were team organization and planning comes into play. Having a couple of dedicated resources to address these ad hoc issues, without distracting the people working on larger projects.
I think the dichotomy you introduce here is false. My experience with continuous deployment is that the faster you can ship, the smaller projects get.
Instead of bundling a lot of hypotheses about possibly-valuable changes up into a big release, you focus more on the next step in the direction you're going. You release those steps one by one. (User-visibility of larger features is controlled by feature flags, but you ship and user-test in small slices.)
In that context, the whole notion of distraction is different. You have to hold a lot less state in your head. Instead that state lives in your unit tests, your acceptance tests, your backlog, and the world at large. If a given developer is releasing a couple of times a day, it's just not a big deal to find a natural stopping point, release something small, and then pick up the next slice of some longer-term effort.
I know the feeling -- "I have to finish this <big feature we're trying to release> but all these pesky customers keep getting in the way."
Your customers should be the highest priority, all the time. If they hit a bug that prevents them from accomplishing a task in your software, that matters 1000x more than the feature they don't even care about/use/want yet. Some big project the customer doesn't know about isn't why your customer is your customer.
Obviously trivial stuff (i.e. a misspelled word or an out-of-alignment UI element) ought not require an engineer to drop everything. But "I can't edit my document" or "I can't sign up because I have a weird email" or "I can't save or send this invoice" -- all of that SHOULD require an engineer to drop everything to fix it -- right that minute. Your customers are paying you money. If there's a fly in their soup, you ought not be saying, "If you order soup tomorrow, we'll make sure there's no fly in it. In the meantime, fuck you, I have to prepare next week's menu."
My point -- if there's a bug that's blocking a customer from doing what they're paying you to enable them to do, then that's all that matters at that moment, anything less and you're either understaffed, or your priorities are all wrong. Worry about today's customers today, worry about tomorrow's customers later.
I guess some companies have the luxury of prioritizing their roadmap over the needs of the people that actually are paying your company money -- but mine sure doesn't. We treat every customer's problem as the most important thing, because it is -- they're the ones that give us money. It would be like a restaurant ignoring a customer's request for a refill of water because they're busy planning next week's menu. You do that enough times and there'll be no need for next week's menu.
The customer isn't always right, but they should always come first.
> Having a couple of dedicated resources to address these ad hoc issues, without distracting the people working on larger projects.
Can't people take turns being oncall? It's disruptive to one's life to not be able to be away from a computer for more than N minutes, so only having to do this for limited periods is important.
And while people are not oncall they can work on development and finishing fixing any problems they discovered while oncall.
I'm confused about this article. On the one side I agree with his point on constant and timely feedback. On the other side I disagree with his dismissal of yearly reviews and weekly meetings.
You need these more formal environments to quantify the performance over a longer period of time. In doing so you can correct for biases, and get feedback not just from the manager but from everyone you work with. Additionally you can aggregate the data company wide to see patterns and hopefully try something new. I'm sure plenty of people do it wrong and that might be a different conversation.
Maybe what the performance improvement was missing was a human touch. Giving feedback without caring for the person can feel cold and calculating.
It's also not clear to me how pay-for-performance and promote-for-performance is supposed to work without some kind of systematized performance review system. And I will say that, at least in my personal experience, pay-and-promote-for-performance is hugely important in getting the most out of your software engineers.
Why do you say that? And what exactly do you mean by "pay quanta"? Rewarding and incentivizing high performance seems to obviously be in the business's best interest, so why do you say they don't focus on it, even for the companies that do it explicitly for that reason? Are you claiming they're lying as to their motivations?
Why would they make less money by moving to a streaming model? I would imagine more people would go and buy just that instead of getting a cable package. They can also start charging a reasonable amount based on what it costs to produce the content.
If right now they rely on people paying for the channel but not watching it. Wouldn't switching to a streaming model mean that advertisers would be more interested because more people were actually watching the channel and saw ads?
ESPN's contracts forbid it to sell to anyone other than a Cable system. Otherwise it would be selling direct like Netflix. This is the terrible deal that major sports networks forced on it (and it took on anyway). Some day all that massive money will vanish and sports leagues will be gasping for income.
> I would imagine more people would go and buy just that instead of getting a cable package. They can also start charging a reasonable amount based on what it costs to produce the content.
ESPN probably expected that as well. In the US, you would expect almost any sports channel to have enough fans to make a profit. If people are going to drop channels they don't want, you would expect sports channels to be immune.
Apparently it hasn't turned out that way.
I can say that the last three times I went shopping for cable TV, the sports bundle was extra. Personally, I like hockey, but not much else. I would be happy to pay $7 a month for hockey games, but I wasn't given that option. I needed to pay much more, for a much larger bundle, and I chose to live without it.
It's that way in Australia - and worse. You've got our pay TV provider doing silly things like [1] and something strange with the broadcast rights meaning I can't really stream all the games until 2020.
Cable/satellite isn't really as big in Australia as it is in the States and Canada, but the last time I looked it was still $30+ a month if you wanted sport in HD (you know, so you can actually see where the ball is)
AFL streaming right now is broken due to the rights deal. Telstra paid such a small amount compared to 7 and Foxtel for the online rights that they had to accept a lot of restrictions, such as only steaming on mobile devices and no tablet full screen.
I suspect Foxtel will be in a similar position to ESPN come the next rights deal, where they can't afford to pay as highly due to people cancelling cable. Hopefully though that just results in a better streaming deal.
