I fail to feel outraged by this process. Is "White Fragility" without criticism? Probably not, I think it is a fantastic book, but it scares the bejeebers out of some people and we get instagram drama and articles like this which I interpret as another attempt at purity (trying to outsmart "wokeness").

It is going to take a while for society* to come to grips with this new shift, because we're clearly not going back, but it definitely is rough around the edges, IMHO, because we haven't found the right vocabulary and framing. Unfortunately it is going to require people to sit with feeling uneasy, and that is something most people cannot tolerate.

There's a difference between a customer who plans on selling a billion units, and some company like this game controller design team that clearly making some crappy kids toys. I think the OP twitter person just learned a valuable lesson.

I have a happy little node server that's been running on an AWS micro instance since 2013 and I periodically stick a new SPA into the public area with auth through the express middleware. It might look a bit frankensteinish, but it works just ducky and costs like US$10/month with 20GB of SSD (most of that is the elastic IP + load balancer).

It just means you are slowed down by the need to look things up. Do you consider speed part of competency?

The ability to look everything up on the internet didn't appear until the late 90's. I finished my BSEE + MS CompSci degrees before 1994, effectively without the modern internet. We had manpages. And enormous books. All that's really changed is most pop languages don't have manpages, but at least we aren't killing forests for the X specification printouts!

https://www.watchtime.com/featured/watch-spotting-at-the-vie...

Did you read this?

https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler...

Because there is no more "sticking out". Everything has been commodified and accepted. There is no longer a way to differentiate yourself from the pack, because the pack is so diverse. I think that has really shaken things up: there's nothing to rebel against, and Gen-X cynicism/nihilism has left an identity crises for Mil/GenZ. Although it appears these groups are going back to tradition and don't give a f*k about nonconformity.

Steve Albini (legendary producer) wrote an essay in "Commodify Your Dissent" from the Baffler magazine around the time of the Dead Kennedys. He hits on the ability to buy anarchy patches in department stores as fashion items when in the past they were signs of a true counterculture. I highly recommend it, it captures what you are feeling up to a point, because it refers mostly to the 80's and 90's, and not the utter weirdness of today.

https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler...

30+ questions and everything was a composition of shift, rotate, and, or, nand, nor, xor.

If you're a programmer it's just a matter of figuring out what operations are used. If you're not a programmer, you probably have no language to describe the relationships, and therefore can't just zip along looking for common assembly-language instructions.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, I bet I could make an increasingly challenging logic puzzle generator just by increasing the number of composite operations and operands. I bet if I googled I could find a dozen such projects that already exist. My work here is done. :)

I'm suspicious of the MENSA selection criteria. You can even join without taking the test by having an SAT score above a certain value. Dubious.

But then, why would anyone join a High IQ society? I did because I needed proof I was smart, and wanted to be around other smarties (my social circle was nill), but the people were just kinda average and boring.

Plus there is also social pressure: while you're cavorting about as an individual contributor, many other peers will be crushed under management pressure, and will start to resent you, and demand to the VPs that you share the load.

That being said, Intel is really taking a hard turn back to engineering. I might even consider going back there, assuming Gelsinger doesn't go back to the old school ranking-and-ratings that forces you up or out, or the "you must give 120%" bullshit. Being forced to work in "dungeon mode" for months at a time is what drove me out. "Dungeon mode" is supposed to be a 1-2 week thing to fix a serious bug. (DM is spending 14 hours a day in a conference room 7 days a week.) YOu can only do that so many years in a row before saying enough. That's why Intel lost so many people to Apple a few years ago.

Does good programmer == very smart?

Does good mechanic == very smart?

Part of the echo chamber bias on HN is that programmers are an elite class of citizen that is head-and-shoulder's above the rest in terms of intellect. I whole-heartedly disagree with this proposition because I've met many, many programmers who were absolute ding-dongs.

If you stop deifying programmers (& engineers) it becomes easier to see they are just average tradespeople who trade happens to be in extremely high demand right now. And then other things fall into place, like how they can fall for their own bubbles.

Also, there is a long form of this called "Difficult Conversations", which is a really good book for handling all sorts of complicated issues, both at work and at home. Strongly recommended.