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SanderNL commented on I Made an Extended Version of Vimtutor – Introducing Vimtutor Sequel   github.com/micahkepe/vimt... · Posted by u/micahkepe
globular-toast · 2 years ago
> Vim or emacs come into play at layer 245 in the system and their impact on the final business reality is approximately 0,003%.

Who cares? One fire or war and a carpenter's work all comes crumbling down. Should he then not care about his work or his tools or materials and nail any old shit together? Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

SanderNL · 2 years ago
Who cares? Those who measure actual impact instead of showing off.

Focus on what matters is my only advice. Hint: it’s not your editor.

SanderNL commented on I Made an Extended Version of Vimtutor – Introducing Vimtutor Sequel   github.com/micahkepe/vimt... · Posted by u/micahkepe
imiric · 2 years ago
For me it's not so much about the process of learning itself. To be honest, I'd rather avoid having to learn how a tool works to use it. Software that prioritizes ease of use and friendliness has a much broader appeal—and, consequently, user base—than those that don't. There's value in that.

I chose to learn Vim, Emacs and other tools with a steep learning curve primarily because of their return on investment. They have great extensibility, so I can customize them exactly to my liking. I know that they won't radically change, or worse, disappear in a few years, as a lot of software does. So taking the time to learn how to use them is purely a selfish endeavor. I even put up with their quirks and shortcomings because of this, even though there might be alternatives that do feature X better, are faster, etc. Using these tools simply minimizes the chances I'll have to re-learn something else every few years. I'd rather avoid that.

SanderNL · 2 years ago
Developer productivity is not and never was bottlenecked by their tools.

One snap of the fingers in one of the many layers above us and million dollar projects succeed or fail. We are always a fancy dinner or business relation gone sour away from success or failure.

Vim or emacs come into play at layer 245 in the system and their impact on the final business reality is approximately 0,003%.

SanderNL commented on New study simulates gravitational waves from failing warp drive   aei.mpg.de/1171367/what-n... · Posted by u/nabla9
Loughla · 2 years ago
It is unsettling though. Because it places a limit on what has so far been essentially limitless success as a species.

Without travel beyond our solar system, we won't last forever.

And that's kind of sad for me.

SanderNL · 2 years ago
It’s sad to not last forever? That’s an interesting thought. I understand, don’t get me wrong, but it’s completely unnatural in so many ways.
SanderNL commented on SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos   github.com/facebookresear... · Posted by u/xenova
sashank_1509 · 2 years ago
Are there people who don’t accept cookies?

Don’t most websites require you to accept cookies?

SanderNL · 2 years ago
Always refuse them, close to zero problems.

I can’t think of a technical reason a website without auth needs cookies to function.

SanderNL commented on An experiment in UI density created with Svelte   cybernetic.dev/grid... · Posted by u/11001100
jorvi · 2 years ago
I have had the (dis)pleasure of watching my 60yr old mother having to re-learn the entire administrative part of her healthcare job three times over and deeply struggle because the insurance suits decided a new software package was needed.

Nothing humbles you more as a dev than seeing a layman struggle through an interface, getting increasingly frustrated and desperate because she can’t find the button she needs due to complexity and sensory overload due to a million tabs, buttons and text fields.

The worst of it is, you can see that she knows what she wants to do, but can’t translate that into the steps needed to get the computer to “understand” that, effectively making it feel as if it is trying to sabotage her. Something that would have taken 20 minutes with pen & paper suddenly takes 40 minutes digitally. Weren’t computers supposed to make us more efficient?

Considerately, screw your attitude. Eat some humble pie.

SanderNL · 2 years ago
This anti-learning attitude is common, but I don’t find it admirable.

To me this is like a dev saying “screw Git, I just want to do console.log(). All this complexity is sabotaging my productivity.”

Modern jobs, even health care, require learning about and managing complexity. It’s not just “taking care of people”. Throwing your hands up and saying “I’m old”, which is a lousy excuse because I know plenty able old people and completely digitally illiterate young people, is not a viable solution.

Now, whether we want that as a society is another topic. But for the foreseeable future adapting to complexity and actually taking the time to sit down and learn this shit is IMO the only way forwards.

SanderNL commented on Every company should be owned by its employees   elysian.press/p/employee-... · Posted by u/ellegriffin
SanderNL · 2 years ago
Businesses are some kind of feudal leftovers that refuse to die. The serfs not only accept it, they actively defend it. Meanwhile the billionaires lean back and smile.

I don’t see why nation states should be democracies, but “businesses” should be private dictatorships. It’s a waste of shared resources. Your personal army of value generating serfs is taking away from our collective capacity to do useful communal work.

SanderNL commented on Why didn't Rome have an industrial revolution?   maximum-progress.com/p/ro... · Posted by u/shaftoe444
fbdab103 · 2 years ago
Better than that, the printing press is a stupid simple idea that could have been invented basically as soon as you had writing. Wooden printing blocks were used for hundreds of years before the press. As soon as someone had the idea to use it for letters, you could have a functional (if crude) press after a few iterations. Bootstrapping widespread literacy with cheap reading materials.
SanderNL · 2 years ago
As always, tech people think tech is the important part of tech.
SanderNL commented on Panic at the Job Market   matt.sh/panic-at-the-job-... · Posted by u/speckx
fullstackchris · 2 years ago
same... also that saying "churning out 1k lines of code per day" is automatically good... sounds like churning out 1k points of complexity every day
SanderNL · 2 years ago
Yes and doing that requires a solid non-stop and consistent 3 working LoC per minute for six hours straight. I don’t think a human is capable of processing that kind of volume unless it is pure boilerplate.

I can see LLM’s playing a role here..

SanderNL commented on Panic at the Job Market   matt.sh/panic-at-the-job-... · Posted by u/speckx
cryptica · 2 years ago
I found a job as a developer after about 10 months of applying for 100 jobs per month. It was very weird this time round. Especially weird considering that my resume is exceptional (lots of experience; corporate, startup, back end, front end, full stack, distributed systems, open source). The list of technologies that I'm competent with is long and, for most of them, I've got open source projects to prove my claims. Air tight situation.

This time round, employers had all kinds of weird esoteric requirements which made no sense.

For example, I applied for a job where I matched every single technology in their stack (and it was a long list), I even had proven experience in 'Web Components' which was still niche in a professional setting (most jobs are still React, Vue, etc...) Anyway, they ended up rejecting me with the explanation "The head of engineering is very particular, even though this position is Node.js/JavaScript, he likes to hire candidates who have a background in C#." There was no mention of this on the job advert! Besides, I did use C# full time for 2 months during the summer break while at university which I mentioned after she seemingly invented this requirement but she responded 'He likes candidates who started with C#.'

There is no way they would find anyone who meets all of these requirements who also happen to know this completely unrelated technology.

Anyway, after 1 year, out of 1000+ applications I submitted, I got about 5 phone screens with recruiters and 2 interviews with actual company insiders.

The first company Founder I interviewed with seemed keen to hire me at first and kept leading me on; but they always waited for me to ask them about the next stage in the process before actually proceeding... They kept half-ass ghosting me until the last phase and then I was like "They can't be serious about hiring me" and I stopped asking about the next phase.

My sister works in HR and she told me that I only needed to match about 60% of tech requirements to get a job. It didn't correspond at all with my observations of reality...

Putting 2-and-2 together, it seems like they were giving all these high paying jobs to beginners and tossing experienced candidates' resumes in the trash... Probably the HR leads were not even seeing the resumes of experienced candidates coming in.

It all seems kind of conspiratorial if you ask me.

Another weird thing that happened (going 2 years back and which led me to being unemployed) is that the startup I was working for was getting very few job applications when I applied. They were super keen to hire me and I got a big salary, share package, everything... Then 6 months in, candidate applications started pouring in by the thousands... After sifting through thousands of applications, they managed to hire an absolute weapon; this guy was not only sharp, but he was churning out maybe 1K lines of code per day. Really impressive. I had not seen anyone code that fast before. He built features really quickly. I was doing peer reviews for the whole team, which was hard work and essential at the time, especially with code being churned out at that rate! Anyway I was laid off because the founders didn't see the value of my PR code reviews.

They didn't understand how important it was to have someone looking over this superhuman code churning to keep complexity under control. Multiple times, I saved the front end from memory leaks and rogue setInterval/setTimeout which were unnecessary or not cleaned up properly (among many other issues). Sigh. I feel like this situation would have been a startup founder's dream, surely combining the massive development speed with the safety/de-risking I was adding was worth the tiny sub-% equity I was set to receive 4 months later... Sigh.

SanderNL · 2 years ago
There is something off here.

- 1000+ applications, 2 interviews. Holy batman. That’s what, 4+ applications a (work)day for a year straight? How do you even find these positions.

- “Air tight”, god-tier CV.

- Only doing “PR”s.

- Handling “setInterval”s.

SanderNL commented on CISA broke into a US federal agency, and no one noticed for a full 5 months   theregister.com/2024/07/1... · Posted by u/rntn
ndriscoll · 2 years ago
My understanding is that regardless of funding, the US federal government has standardized pay scales that top out way below what private industry pays, so even well funded agencies can only possibly get junior developers/IT or people that are willing to take a significant (50-80%) pay reduction. The very most you can possibly make as a GS15 in 2024 is 191,900, and they have locality-adjusted pay with most localities being below that.

They might also generally still drug test? I don't even do drugs, but I'm not going to pee in a cup for someone to effectively do charity lol. Good luck recruiting a professional with decades of engineering experience when you treat them like they're a 16 year old working at Taco Bell. Even someone with 0 years doesn't have to deal with that kind of treatment in industry.

SanderNL · 2 years ago
Charity? I sympathize somewhat, but I’m also disgusted by the utter lack of respect for government and societal service in general. That shit means something.

I wish to believe there are still people that don’t care about making Yet Another few hundred thousand and just want to actually contribute to society instead of working on ad tech or whatever bullshit.

u/SanderNL

KarmaCake day1984August 4, 2020View Original