Hacker News: gfs78

New comment by gfs78 in "Why are we so bad at software engineering?"

gfs78 — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 19:12:11 +0000

Why are we so bad at software engineering? Because most software comes without any liability.

New comment by gfs78 in "Ask HN: How does your company keep track of lessons learned?"

gfs78 — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 14:24:46 +0000

Professional services companies business is about selling/billing hours. Those involved in the sales are seen as an asset, those involved in providing the service are seen as a cost. They don´t care about the latter.

DXC, Accenture, Capgemini, Indra, etc...they are all the same.

New comment by gfs78 in "What does happiness at work mean?"

gfs78 — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 15:35:19 +0000

I feel your pain, but beware, university degrees are not the solution to life problems. I´ve got one, supposedly a hot one, in C.S. and my life has been stuck in absurdity forever and I´ve been stuck in insanely shitty jobs (programming-related ones) for the last 7 years. The situations that lined up one after another to fk my life were extremely improbable but happened. Sometimes life sucks. But don´t give up, try to find solace in your fighting.

New comment by gfs78 in "What's SAP?"

gfs78 — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 16:05:31 +0000

Agree.

It´s buying what doesn´t add much value/differentiation to focus on the things that are important to the company.

New comment by gfs78 in "Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums"

gfs78 — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 15:30:47 +0000

but they still need to get his job done

New comment by gfs78 in "Design systems, agile, and industrialization"

gfs78 — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 19:28:12 +0000

Enterprise web development (or any enterprise development) has always been dehumanizing. It´s the vertical organizational model applied to software development. The enterprise implementation of Agile is just the vertical model in new clothes (status meetings disguised as daily meetings, story points used for stack-ranking, etc). When you enter the enterprise you trade leverage for job stability and 9-to-5 working hours.

Startups and mid or small sized niche companies are a little more human. But here you tend to get long working hours and more stress, plus sometimes they are also "vertical".

New comment by gfs78 in "Why Continuous Integration and Delivery Is Important"

gfs78 — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 15:27:44 +0000

On continuous delivery: "Given that all of the changes deployed are individual commits, the deployments are low risk and cause less bugs".

I would like to know the source of this claim. I guess someone did an study on this...

New comment by gfs78 in "Ask HN: What change in your programming technique has been most transformative?"

gfs78 — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 15:15:54 +0000

KISS + YAGNI + constant refactor. Code is a means to an end and I suck at futurology.

New comment by gfs78 in "Procrastination is about managing emotions, not time"

gfs78 — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 15:22:32 +0000

Procrastination is more about dreams, opportunities and possible outcomes than time management and emotions.

If you have the chance to win it big doing something you love you will find the time. If you have less of a chance or you don´t like it that much you won´t be able to find that much time. If what you have to do is something out of obligation or you don´t care at all you will procrastinate.

And it´s fine. It´s your inner compass trying to tell you that maybe this is not for you/wasted effort.

In the short term the best strategy for procrastination is to put your pants on and do it. In the long term is making sense about why you are doing what you do and evaluating if it brings value to your life or not.

New comment by gfs78 in "Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students"

gfs78 — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 14:43:07 +0000

Agree. But in the past it was also taught in no so serious places. Today it does not.

New comment by gfs78 in "Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students"

gfs78 — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 14:07:04 +0000

The move from Pascal to Java made a transition from learning how to program a computer to learning how to build apps using java-like OOP and libraries. Most places where Java is taught don´t teach about computer registers, stack frames, pointers, memory management, etc, and how they work together. Or if they do it they do it superficially.

New comment by gfs78 in "Where do individual contributors go once they peak?"

gfs78 — Fri, 27 Dec 2019 20:54:25 +0000

I find the wording of your last paragraph a little insulting.

Please answer: do you think aerospace, embedded and relational DB engines is dated work that has not evolved?

New comment by gfs78 in "Where do individual contributors go once they peak?"

gfs78 — Fri, 27 Dec 2019 19:21:04 +0000

Not an easy problem to solve. And this is why, given the odds, a career in tech is probably a bad decision.

To avoid ageism while being an IC you need to find a job in a niche where the domain is CS and/or ENG based (as in embedded, aerospace, or even relational database engines) and these jobs are far and in between.

Beware: jobs like Facebook seem to be CS based but they aren´t (that´s why their programmer average age is 27). The CS problems they have are due to arbitrary complexity and they are short term. Companies like these are media companies.

New comment by gfs78 in "Where do individual contributors go once they peak?"

gfs78 — Fri, 27 Dec 2019 19:03:17 +0000

Where do they go?

A-Management.

B-Consulting.

C-Stagnation.

D-Endure a string of jobs where they are mobbed because they are seen as a threat until they retire from the industry.

New comment by gfs78 in "Where do individual contributors go once they peak?"

gfs78 — Fri, 27 Dec 2019 18:59:37 +0000

But in most cases they don´t care, hide, or are in a position to understand.

New comment by gfs78 in "Depression and suicide linked to air pollution in new global study"

gfs78 — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 17:19:27 +0000

So, living conditions in your typical high polluted city have nothing to do with being depressed or suicidal?

New comment by gfs78 in "Show HN: I built a website for sharing salary info"

gfs78 — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 12:47:39 +0000

If you plan to go global don´t repeat glassdoor mistake (or is it on purpose?). In countries where inflation rate is big (like 30-50% a year) salary info that is not tied to the date the worker was perceiving it, its mostly useless. Same happens with average salary reports, etc.

New comment by gfs78 in "The top bug predictor is not technical, it's organizational complexity"

gfs78 — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 19:03:52 +0000

Lots of freeloaders and incompetent power trippers in the middle layers and above. Small orgs. and startups cannot afford this kind of workers.

In my current project (big co.) we have a technical PM, a non-technical PM, a non programmer dev lead, an scrum master and a lead business analyst, all involved in managing the work of a team of 2 and a half (a sr ba/qa guy, a part-time ssr dev and me). Waste work is probably in the 90%.

New comment by gfs78 in "Google Culture War Escalates as Era of Transparency Wanes"

gfs78 — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 20:19:34 +0000

If they want to rock the boat who I am to tell them no to.

In these Google cases the problem seems to came from the position they are trying to rock the boat. More as a child rebelling against a parent than as a worker against corporate policies. Problem is they are not as important to Google as a child to its parent, and it´s showing.

New comment by gfs78 in "Google Culture War Escalates as Era of Transparency Wanes"

gfs78 — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 18:56:02 +0000

Probably the result of years of social engineering played upon the protesters. They fail to see Google is not their friend. But also fail to see that the part they play as Google employees is not that important either.