A surprising number of inexperienced developers do the following: "once I get any working solution I should immediately open a PR" and let the senior engineers tell them what's wrong with it.

When the big money leaves this field I hope there will be more pressure for people to adopt good engineering practices. I love to work with folks who put good effort into trying to make high quality changes. Personal initiative and ethics are how high quality software gets written.

That being said, the philosophy has many practical lessons to teach. Meditation and philosophy helped me personally through a long illness.

Real shame there's nothing to replace it, there's huge arbitrage in the market of good people who don't know people. If I were starting out now I don't know what I would do, how do you even meet people.

Any action will affect other people in some way. What matters is how you choose to utilize that capability.

In general, people are cautious when giving criticism because it carries implications.

Say a manager gives negative feedback to a subordinate. The subordinate now believes the manager doesn't like them. The subordinate follows the standard advice: start looking for another job. Manager now has the larger problem of hiring a replacement.

It's best to reinforce positive behavior. Little trick I learned: compliment people. Find an reason to say "nice work" on every code review. DM people and say "nice presentation", "great design". It works.

Maybe decision fatigue is supposed to bias humans toward the optimal solution for the fiancee problem [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

No one's getting hurt by this system if it's randomized. It's a matter of graders giving out partial credit for wrong answers which is discretionary. Rarely students are granted a small mercy. Seems OK.

Ideally if your robots cost less than $20/hour you can buy enough of them to do one job each.

I've observed this kind of culture mostly at startups. Once places start to make a lot of money -- things become political.

So if you want to work at the highest paying jobs, you'll have to deal with politics. Because once they make enough money to afford you, the company also makes enough for savvy gatekeepers to entrench themselves in a core system and carve off a piece of that revenue for themselves.

And what is your solution to that?

Speak for yourself, but I live on the west coast and my Internet connection is great.

Edit: downvoters, what are the problems with U.S. internet?