BlargMcLarg (u/BlargMcLarg)

BlargMcLarg commented on Good times create weak men (2019) tonsky.me/blog/good-times... · Posted by u/InsiderTesla

jon blow is a great example to bring up. he's extremely talented and focused on his craft, and has been churning for decades, unburdened by family, to produce his work, with very talented engineers contributing (including muratori). in the last twenty years, they have shipped two puzzle games.

i don't say that to suggest it's unimpressive, but rather to point out that adopting his methodology of avoiding anything resembling modern languages and tooling comes at a cost. the cost includes a huge hit to productivity. if everyone built games the way these two suggest, there would be orders of magnitude fewer of games available. if everyone built software the way these two suggest, there would be orders of magnitude less software available. i'm sure they would be fine with that outcome. the rest of the world probably would not.

BlargMcLarg · 2 years ago

Eh, Rare was putting out multiple games in a short timespan of larger size in programming teams fairly small in the 90s. The tools themselves don't seem specific to inducing incredibly large development times when the game developers before Blow managed to do it faster and better.

Your point still stands (there's research floating around proving it) but Blow isn't the best example.

BlargMcLarg commented on "No, it's less effort than that" smartguess.is/blog/your-e... · Posted by u/replyifuagree

IanCal · 2 years ago

I mean it is literally the issue that planning poker addresses - identify differing expectations without influencing the initial estimate. People can then totally ignore that, and ignoring something makes it pointless, but that's true of literally anything.

It identifies a lack of a shared understanding of the task. Or framed differently, it identifies when you probably all have the same expectation and you can move on.

BlargMcLarg · 2 years ago

That still doesn't solve the prerequisites being exceedingly rare in most teams. A system solving an issue under rare circumstances is barely worth considering, doubly so if it doesn't solve the issue in your specific circumstance. That's, again, disregarding that the modus operandi of most management teams directly interferes with planning poker itself (high turnover, high focus on increasing scope and scope per person).

Or we can dive into technicalities where it technically does solve the issue but does it poorly, and just happens to be better than any other system we know (also questionable).

BlargMcLarg commented on We have used too many levels of abstractions unixsheikh.com/articles/w... · Posted by u/riidom

jl6 · 2 years ago

One little-appreciated fact is that many of the most accomplished and knowledgable engineers were tinkerers from an early age. If you start your computing journey at the age of 18 with a compsci degree, you might already be a decade behind some of your peers.

It’s not too different from pro tennis players, who typically start playing before the age of 8.

For those at the top of the game, computing is a calling as much as a job. They will do substantial learning on their own initiative.

BlargMcLarg · 2 years ago

You might be a decade behind, but there's still diminishing returns kicking in hard even just a few years in. That's disregarding inefficient learning and what else which may close the gap further.

Your latter point is far more important to the matter. Those who treat it as a passion more so than a job, are more likely to be the trendsetters. Growing up and being free from responsibilities makes it easier for that thing to become your passion.

And let's also not forget, a few decades ago, computers weren't exactly a cheap thing for parents with little understanding to let their kids tinker with at will. Being born in a family with enough wealth to get a computer, enough wealth / understanding to let a kid tinker with it, was an immense boon. A long with anything that type of family tends to have going for it alongside wealth. It's not that far-fetched an idea that it's the other things, rather than the early age interest of the kid itself, that got them into such a position later in life.

BlargMcLarg commented on "No, it's less effort than that" smartguess.is/blog/your-e... · Posted by u/replyifuagree

IanCal · 2 years ago

A valuable discussion to have is about how to change the scope so that the cost/return tradeoff is right for your stakeholders.

I've definitely seen devs assume too much needs to be done, just like I've seen non-devs ignore key parts of the problem that push up the time. Sometimes it's trying to make a general solution when actually what's needed is someone to sit down with a spreadsheet for a day.

> There is back-and-forth as the estimates are questioned for being too high, almost never for being too low.

I'm sure people will have flashbacks when I say this so sorry to those, but this is the issue addressed with planning poker. The idea being that you all say how hard the task is, without being affected by each other, and discuss when expectations aren't aligned. Someone is probably missing something.

I might think something is simple because I've not realised a complex part of the problem, or because I can see a nicer neater solution.

BlargMcLarg · 2 years ago

>but this is the issue addressed with planning poker.

It isn't. Having a team which is both intimately familiar enough with the set of features as a whole, and understands how to use the system to get around the inevitable 'A does it in X while B does it in X*3', are both prerequisites. Suffice to say, with the amount of discussion based around Scrum being done wrong alone, neither of those are even remotely a given. This also doesn't take into account turnover and new features being able to remove a team from meeting those prerequisites at any point.

Too often it just devolves into people raising eyebrows at one another and either it becomes 'X will do it, so X's estimate becomes the value' (why even bother doing poker then) or 'take the average or minimum' which screws over anyone who estimated higher.

BlargMcLarg commented on Leaked Microsoft pay guidelines – salary, hiring bonus, stock awards by level businessinsider.com/micro... · Posted by u/thunderbong

lotsofpulp · 2 years ago

> I've seen several examples over my career where the technically "more experienced" individual is not truly the better suited for the job. You won't know that until you hire them and, in my opinion, is a good reason for why you should pay someone based on the job (so long as they qualify for it).

We go through life making a lot of guesses and utilizing a lot of prior probabilities. Work history is, in my experience, one of the stronger signals available to us.

If an employer initially pays an employee less due to less track record, then finds out the employee is as good as other employees, and does not adjust the pay, then that employer is stupid and will eventually lose the good employees to places with better management. Assuming employees have access to sufficient labor pricing data and can see they can earn more elsewhere.

> But that shouldn't be a >5% difference.

What is the basis for this cutoff?

> Are you going to tell me that despite performing the exact same job and actually performing it objectively "better" that I should have made less money?

You should have made whatever the maximum you could negotiate. If this employer did not want to pay you more, you should switch employers. A good employer would have paid you much more than the others.

>This is the kind of stuff that routinely happens to women.

No, your example is bad management incentivizing bad employees and turning away good employees.

Women being paid less due to being women is illegal discrimination.

BlargMcLarg · 2 years ago

>We go through life making a lot of guesses and utilizing a lot of prior probabilities. Work history is, in my experience, one of the stronger signals available to us.

Research continues to fail to support this. At what point is your experience a self-fulfilling prophecy?

BlargMcLarg commented on Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster brettscott.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/Gigamouse

thsksbd · 2 years ago

A guy getting playing video games or getting high off his mom's pension all day is not a valiant outlier asserting his independence.

He's a mooch, parasitical to his parents and contributing nothing to the human experience.

He's also a victim because, partially, he's fallen into this state of despair because society's attitude towards checking out has become too lenient and soft to keep most these boys (and it is mostly boys) in line.

In fact, he's not even courageously stepping out of the head. No one judges him, no one really cares what he does.

A beatnik in the fifties might haves been an interesting person to talk to. Today, he's just a bum.

BlargMcLarg · 2 years ago

>(and it is mostly boys)

I'd really like to see on what basis you're writing this when many other things point to either the opposite or the numbers being equal.

>because society's attitude towards checking out has become too lenient and soft to keep most these boys

Society has been actively shaming and demonizing men for decades now, trying to get them to accept working through what feels like an untraversable valley. A valley which was in many ways easier to traverse before. Society took away the incentives, and now tries to replace it with punishments. What do you propose that won't cause severe animosity in a group historically known to destroy societies when pushed to the edge?

The extremes aside, this is the reality behind most 'boys' checking out. Men are biologically wired to try and excel if they see opportunities. They aren't seeing them anymore.

BlargMcLarg commented on How to Do a Full Rewrite badsoftwareadvice.substac... · Posted by u/tate

mekoka · 2 years ago

Obviously satire, but in real life, there are reasons why a full rewrite becomes appealing. Perhaps the solution even.

One is overwhelming technical debt. Code where the project manager didn't believe in encapsulation, or refactoring, or none of that "architectural nonsense", and was only fired 5 years too late. Code that is difficult to understand, maintain, test, debug, change. Code that follows you home after-hours and on the week-ends. Code that nurses you to bed at night, shows up in your dreams, and wakes you up in the morning. Code that has made many a colleague look for employment elsewhere and new hires give up and quit in their first week.

Every time I see someone profess with assurance that you don't rewrite, I just know that that person has never really experienced the hell I've described above.

BlargMcLarg · 2 years ago

> Code where the project manager didn't believe in encapsulation, or refactoring, or none of that "architectural nonsense"

If anything I find the largest proponents to have drunk too deep from that well and cause the rewrites to never be considered, as the time required to do it becomes far too long to be worth the pay-out.

This excludes the worst kind: the overarchitectured old mess in need of a rewrite as it was based on the wrong assumptions and is now boggled down by 10 layers of abstractions and indirection which don't do anything.

BlargMcLarg commented on YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform nytimes.com/2023/09/19/ar... · Posted by u/mhb

pixl97 · 2 years ago

Suddenly this is the thread that has snapped for you and said this is wrong? For most of modern history an accusation was all that was needed to have you removed from your job. The cops showing up at your office and just 'questioning' your behavior around minors without even making accusations is generally enough to ensure you don't come back the next day. It's one of the reasons I don't post as little information about myself online as I can. Doxxing can have terrible outcomes.

BlargMcLarg · 2 years ago

>Suddenly this is the thread that has snapped for you and said this is wrong?

How about we take our own advice, stop making assumptions and "be nice" as you put it, hm?

>The cops showing up at your office and just 'questioning' your behavior around minors without even making accusations is generally enough to ensure you don't come back the next day.

I'd like you to honestly think deeply about this a few times. Has this really been the same as it was a few decades ago? Why do some countries or areas feel far more comfortable with leaving children around with men, while it seems the US in particular has trouble even imagining a dad wants to spend time with his kids? And why is it primarily the men, when it's become more and more obvious women are just a much perpetrators?

Yes, false accusations and ruining people's lives over them has been a thing since we exist. You ever wonder why so many people freak out the moment they are accused, despite being innocent? But as a society, we can fight and be critical about this. Just like we got rid of witch hunts, so too can we think twice about companies facing next to zero repercussions by hiding in the crowd despite their disproportional power.

All I'm saying is, if you're the coward throwing others under the bus over your own gain, don't be surprised if a rebel fed up with your cowardice decides to do the same. Turnabout's fair play, after all.

And for real: it's just an apology. I'm not telling these companies to pay damages or get dragged to court. It's just a 5 minute effort to say "Oh we were too quick in our judgment, sorry about that". It isn't enough, but it's the bare minimum they can do without having to drag them to court to force it or threatening to take away their position of power. The fact they can't even do that speaks volumes.

BlargMcLarg commented on YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform nytimes.com/2023/09/19/ar... · Posted by u/mhb

Barrin92 · 2 years ago

>is the beginning of another level of dystopia none of us wants

This 'dystopia' is called freedom of association and I can confidentially tell you that I personally support the rights of any business to choose who they enter contracts with and not to do business with a likely sex offender, so I think you ought to speak for yourself.

There is no basis on which to compel a private business to host everyone's content and I would in fact consider that to be quite dystopian.

BlargMcLarg · 2 years ago

>not to do business with a likely sex offender

And if you are wrong, are you also willing to apologize for hasty decision making? Or will you hide behind the crowd and say 'well everyone else said X!'

Because that's what is happening right now. People's lives are ruined on the assumption of someone being the big bad. Then when it turns out the situation is far more nuanced and delicate, the social damage is already done. Not just the big guys like Brand, who got enough millions to throw lawyer after lawyer at the case should he be innocent, but also the small guys who have a far weaker position socially and financially.

BlargMcLarg commented on Microsoft Nintendo acquisition hopes revealed by leaked Xbox exec email rockpapershotgun.com/micr... · Posted by u/politelemon

FirmwareBurner · 2 years ago

Because Microsoft is smart thinking long term and doesn't care about an outdated model of selling consoles anymore, as it sees the future revenues comes from owning valuable IP and monetizing that instead on all the gaming platforms, regardless on which hardware you use to paly it: Xbox, PS5, Switch, Steam, iOS, Android, Linux, MacOS, tablets, smart-TVs, etc., they don't care, they'll gladly take your money regardless if you have an Xbox or not.

They're slowly dethatching themselves from the console HW and moving to selling services the same way the detached from Windows and Office as the core products and made more money selling O365 and Azure subscriptions including their arch nemesis Linux.

That's why they keep selling CoD to the competitor's Sony PlayStation instead of making it an Xbox excusive like Sony and fans feared they would. People, and Sony, still don't get it, that Microsft's new business model is monetizing IPs and services, not selling more console HW thanks to exclusives like the old days. They'll probably make more money form Candy Crush than Sony makes from Last of us on PlayStation.

Holding on to the "console war" ("muh console sold more than your console!") is just silly and outdated. The big money is now gonna be in IP and services, not selling console HW, and Apple also knows this which is why it focuses more on new services for existing customers (ApleTV, credit cards, SOS satelite, etc) and less on selling more iPhones to new customers as the hardware market is already saturated.

Nintendo will outlast the Xbox, but Microsoft will outlast Nintendo.

BlargMcLarg · 2 years ago

Consoles aren't going to be obsolete anytime soon while the alternatives, PCs and laptops, are more expensive, worse at the same price range, and provide worse handheld experience. Less of a market share maybe, but still a viable niche.