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benchly commented on I'm a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do?   world.hey.com/joaoqalves/... · Posted by u/joaoqalves
socketcluster · 21 hours ago
I've been tech lead at different companies. Every time I switched companies, I started out as senior dev and got promoted into the team lead role again; each time with full support of my team.

I don't look or act like a leader and this has been a hurdle for me. But what typically happens anyway is; within a few months, my code ends up being a core part of the project; my modules become heavily depended upon and somehow I end up maintaining all the config files and guiding architecture decisions. One of my team members joked that I "conquered everyone's code." I probably write fewer lines of code than everyone else but somehow those lines end up heavily used. So then I basically just ask the big boss for a team lead position.

benchly · 20 hours ago
While I am not a software developer, it sounds like our career paths have had the same trajectory, and I'm wondering what the common factor is across industries.

I work in automation (mostly) as a lead tech and professional troubleshooter because I am familiar with a wide and varied amount of automation technologies. I've met plenty of people over the years who have much more advanced skills than myself, but never go beyond doing more than parts swapping on a workbench, which leaves me scratching my head.

Over the last few years, I have listened carefully to what people around me say about my work, and while it is good gas for the ego, I have notice that's not the likely reason I get promoted so quickly. While I can walk into a problem and know how to apply different processes to figure out what to do almost reflexively at this point, the real focus seems to be that I take ownership of the process.

Bit of a buzzphrase, "ownership of the process," but the short explanation is that a little planning, accountability, resourcefulness and communication seems to get you a lot further than just knowing what to do in any given situation. Employers like that because they now have department manager they can rely on, and team members like that because someone else is taking responsibility so they don't have to.

You're good at code, obviously, but if you zoom out on your work a bit, are you also bringing a bit of accountable authority to the table? That may be the real reason why you move up so quickly, or at least something that greases the gears so that can happen faster for you than, say, an equally skilled colleague.

benchly commented on JetBlue flight averts mid-air collision with US Air Force jet   reuters.com/world/america... · Posted by u/divbzero
cwillu · 21 hours ago
The current administration would _absolutely_ deny any such mistake.
benchly · 20 hours ago
As much as the current administration turns my stomach, previous ones are not absolved from weaseling their way out of catastrophic mistakes, either.

It's sort of funny that this thread turned into a USA vs Russia debate when they both play the same games. One of them is just slightly better at pretending like they're playing fair and friendly. My take-away from that is once an organized body, be it a country, corporation or religion, gets very large and holds a lot of power, they will inevitably start doing bad things.

benchly commented on Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment   bbc.com/news/articles/ckg... · Posted by u/1659447091
throwaw12 · a day ago
I have reported these ads to YouTube multiple times, because I tracked down their scam websites, but YouTube didn't delete them anyway.

Common pattern they had was:

- similar or same domains

- same messaging on their website

YouTube could have taken action, but it choose not to

benchly · a day ago
There's no incentive for them to comply with your request. Like Facebook, scam ads are a revenue stream for Google. The profitability usually offsets any negative PR or fallout that results from these platforms turning a blind eye to the point where their budget accounts for some percentage of scam income, leaving them to pick and choose when to take action while they actively make their platform increasingly hostile to users who want to protect themselves from said ads.
benchly commented on iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=hksVv... · Posted by u/walterbell
yonaguska · 6 days ago
Android got really annoying recently, I think in the past few months, almost 30 percent of the time some random menu will pop up. They added a new top layer menu and I keep fat fingering it.
benchly · 5 days ago
I have the same experience, and my hands are pretty small. Some paranoid bell rang in my head about it being an intentional annoyance to start getting us to use voice-to-text more,

Even switching to the Hacker's Keyboard and tweaking some settings still has me smacking the "tab" key or whatever when hitting space.

Just out of curiosity, who here is a one-handed texter, like me? I just assumed my constant need for error correction was because I only use one hand (and thus, one thumb) to type, but this thread has me wondering.

benchly commented on The closer we look at time, the stranger it gets   sciencefocus.com/science/... · Posted by u/philbo
My_Name · 8 days ago
They nearly have it in the article but don't take the next step, which is to realise that time is gravity. We are falling towards the future at the speed of causality. You can slow your experience of that by travelling really fast, or by being near something with a large gravity. Quantum particles can simply ignore gravity and time while we are forced to feel their effects due to our size, like a mote of dust can ignore gravity, but a brick can't.
benchly · 8 days ago
You might be interested in The Order of Time by Carlo Ravelli. Time and gravity are certainly linked, but from what I took away from the book (which is a lot to digest, even as non-mathy as it tries to be) is that Time is really heat. Heat moves only from hot to cold, dispersing in some entropic fashion as we move toward the final state of the universe, but in the meantime we can measure that time/heat "flows" at different rates, depending on how near or far you are from large bodies.

I likely need to reread it, though, as some of its ideas are a bit above my weight class when it comes to understanding physics. But, you may enjoy it!

benchly commented on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off   businessinsider.com/ibm-c... · Posted by u/nabla9
bodge5000 · 14 days ago
This is the exact kind of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place, and I'm not blaming you for it, it seems to be something all of us do to an extent. We don't look to Meta, who only a few years ago thought that the Metaverse would be the "next big thing" as an example of failure to identify the future, we look to IBM who made that mistake almost 30 years ago. Underestimating a technology seems to stick much harder than overestimating one.

If you want to be seen as relevant in this industry, or as a kind of "thought leader", the easy trick seems to be to hype up everything. If you do that and you're wrong, people will quickly forget. If you don't and you're wrong, that will stain your reputation for decades.

benchly · 14 days ago
Good point. That kind of thinking is an absurdity. Saying IBM dropped the ball 70 years ago without acknowledging that lessons were learned, leadership has changed hands a lot since then, and most importantly, the tech landscape back then was very different from today unless you grossly oversimplify everything amounts to nothing more than a fallacious opinion.

Not even much of an IBM fan, myself, but I respect their considerable contribution to the industry. Sure, they missed a shot back then, but I think this latest statement is reliably accurate based on the information we currently have.

benchly commented on Cartographers have been hiding illustrations inside Switzerland’s maps (2020)   eyeondesign.aiga.org/for-... · Posted by u/mhb
Rendello · 16 days ago
> "'This is not as offensive as it would have been years ago. We can see the humor,' said Public Safety Commissioner Keith Flynn, a former state trooper and state prosecutor who was named commissioner a year ago. 'If the person had used some of that creativeness, he or she would not have ended up inside.'"

I read (and re-read, and re-read) the book You Can't Win on recommendation of a HN user. It's about a thief from the late 1800s-early 1900s, and the crimes he and his thief buddies did were pretty creative. A lot of crime is more brute-force than clever, but people can do some pretty interesting things if they want something and don't care if they lose everything.

benchly · 16 days ago
> You Can't Win

It's pretty entertaining!

And free to read for anyone interested: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69404

benchly commented on What happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?   theparisreview.org/blog/2... · Posted by u/benbreen
pessimizer · a month ago
The CIA funded an enormous amount of the anti-Communist left and elite art. It was the best investment they ever made.

I'm sorry, but that confident citation of the reddit thread is the same confident dismissal that CIA funded outlets were giving contemporaneously. The CIA didn't "come up" with abstract expression, it poured money into it (and mostly the ecosystem around it) and made it far more dominant than it would have been. The way you got a book published about art is to have indirectly taken money from the CIA at many points in your career, likely with absolutely no awareness of it.

The reasons those paintings were selling for enormous amounts of money, especially to institutions, is because intelligence would grease the wheels on some other deal they wanted to make, and buying a painting that was just paint splatter was the payment. That created a market that unconnected people would enter organically, and tastes would reconfigure around what sold (because art is what rich people will pay for.)

It's a tactic that is still very much active for the intelligence services. They offer quid pro quo to shills who finance things that they want to happen. They finance media outlets who employ critics and pundits with the tastes they want to encourage, and fluff the incomes and find tax breaks (or just direct grants) for the people that produce the stuff. And upper-middle class elites follow the herd and ridicule the people who don't understand nuance.

Now it's so cheap, too. They just have to hand out "upvotes" and get control of the algorithms. They don't even have to write the comments, just virtually praise establishment-loving morons who will say anything for more praise. Also make sure they never go broke or stay in jail for more than a week or two.

benchly · a month ago
Some days, everything feels like one big psyop.
benchly commented on Checkout.com hacked, refuses ransom payment, donates to security labs   checkout.com/blog/protect... · Posted by u/StrangeSound
ummonk · a month ago
I don’t see how any of what you’re suggesting would have prevented this hack though (which involved an old storage account that hadn’t been used since 2020 getting hacked).
benchly · a month ago
You don't see how preventative maintenance such as implementing a policy to remove old accounts after N days could have prevented this? Preventative maintenance is part of the forethought that should take place about the best or safest way to do a thing. This is something that could be easily learned by looking an problems others have had in the past.

As a controls tech, I provide a lot of documentation and teach to our customers about how to deploy, operate and maintain a machine for best possible results with lowest risk to production or human safety. Some clients follow my instruction, some do not. Guess which ones end up getting billed most for my time after they've implemented a product we make.

Too often, we want to just do without thinking. This often causes us to overlook critical points of failure.

benchly commented on Checkout.com hacked, refuses ransom payment, donates to security labs   checkout.com/blog/protect... · Posted by u/StrangeSound
markdown · a month ago
> Maybe it's the dad in me, years of telling me son to not apologize, but to avoid the behavior that causes the problem in the first place.

What an odd thing to teach a child. If you've wronged someone, avoiding the behavior in future is something that'll help you, but does sweet fuck all for the person you just wronged. They still deserve an apology.

benchly · a month ago
Sorry, I should have worded that as "stop apologizing so much, especially when you keep making the same mistake/error/disruption/etc."

I did not mean to come off as teaching my kid to never apologize.

u/benchly

KarmaCake day195January 15, 2025
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