bennysomething (u/bennysomething)

bennysomething commented on Build your career on dirty work staysaasy.com/career/2022... · Posted by u/Tomte

I’m in this spot now. Being invaluable to a project just means more work gets piled on me because it’s valuable work that needs to get done. I think I have something like 20 jira tickets in my board at the moment. Maybe half of them are complete with a deadline on Friday.

But it also puts me in a spot where my manager feels he has to micromanage me. If I up and quit, it’ll pretty much derail the project many months. And I do feel like quitting. Not because of the amount of work but because I have this micromanager breathing down my neck every day.

bennysomething · 3 years ago

I was in this position recently. It's pure hell. I moved teams internally. Now I'm happy. It feels like an abusive relationship, you don't realise how bad it was until you leave.

bennysomething commented on Porsche boss faces software woes keeping VW a step behind Tesla bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/belter

jq-r · 3 years ago

I think its very spread out at least in Europe in my experience. Hell even my own brother is envious on my salary because he got a engineering degree (vs my IT degree), so "by right" he should have a higher salary than me. Aside from the fact that he's employed by the local government to move paper from a desk to desk or rubber stamp documents. My parents also think the same as being civil engineers themselves. Paraphrasing: doctors, lawyers and engineers should have the highest salaries whatever job they do, everyone else should just fight over leftovers.

bennysomething · 3 years ago

Good grief! I'm in the UK, I haven't come across this sort of thinking before but "working in IT" isn't high status I guess.

bennysomething commented on Johnny Mnemonic in Black-and-White screenslate.com/articles/... · Posted by u/keiferski

bennysomething · 3 years ago

So no changes have been made apart from being in black and white? I tried watching it a few months ago. It was awful (imo), I turned it off half way through.

bennysomething commented on Some things to learn from the British East India Company's growth and demise strangeloopcanon.com/p/so... · Posted by u/kvee

pinkwinds · 3 years ago

The Empire podcast by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand has been fascinating and the first few episodes are exactly about the British East India Company.

bennysomething · 3 years ago

This looks great. Thanks

bennysomething commented on Porsche boss faces software woes keeping VW a step behind Tesla bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/belter

gumby · 3 years ago

I've been following this debacle in the German press and I think there's a structural problem that they will struggle to dig their way out of. And by "they" I don't mean just VW, but much of European industry.

Software is simply not valued in Europe, and not because there aren't amazing developers there -- there are many. But software isn't considered important

Let's start with cars. Back before cars were just computers with wheels I was briefly involved in a software project at $SERIOUS_GERMAN_CAR_COMPANY. Mechanically their cars were outstanding -- I still drive this company's cars today. This project was some cool "by wire" stuff, all modeled in Matlab, just as the ECU code was. But it was clear that the mechanical guys were the top of the pyramid; the safety guys were all mechanical engineers with some programming experience. All the user-visible electronics (radio, controls, etc) was subbed out to a low-price bidder because "who cares about that stuff anyway?". This wasn't VW, but I have some family exposure to VW specifically and that mentality still comes through deeply: electronics are added to the vehicle, not integral. The mental and organizational rewiring will be very hard. These are not companies who believe you should "eat your own lunch before someone else comes and eats it for you". The long institutional problems seen in yesterday's post about Nokia and the "Burning Platform" memo are pervasive throughout Europe (and most places, including a lot of USA): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698044

You see this in the salaries. Sure, take-home salaries in the EU are lower than US ones in across the board, but the delta in the high value professions is extreme and quite telling. My son's partner's parents in Europe are offended by what Amazon pays him in the US because "he just works in IT". Well, he's a developer in their highest revenue area, so Amazon think it's worth investing in. Tesla cars ship with all sorts of fit and finish bugs, and are above average in mechanical problems. But ("FSD" excepted) they spend more of their attention on what really matters: treating their vehicle as a modern electronic device. But the European car companies are still stuck in the mid 20th century and make the opposite branch cut. The rest of European industry is the same.

Andreeson wrote "Software is eating the world" 11 years ago. Apparently nobody on the continent of Europe has read it. Sure, software is considered important, but it's just another part of the BOM, not something strategic.

IMHO the only countries that really understand software at both a technical and business value add level are US, AUS, Canada, China, with India less so but in that group and Japan just barely getting in. Pretty damning.

FWIW I've worked in France and Germany (and non-European countries), including some car business, but most of my career has been in the Valley (starting 38 years ago). I am not from Europe or USA so in that sense I don't have a preference for either side. I prefer living in Europe but vastly prefer to work in the US.

bennysomething · 3 years ago

How on earth can someone be offended by their son in laws good salary!?

bennysomething commented on Samsung Loses a Ton of User Data – Offers Nothing to Victims makeuseof.com/samsung-dat... · Posted by u/dddavid

bennysomething · 3 years ago

Just got a new Samsung sound bar. Can anyone explain why when I connect via Bluetooth (or maybe it was their smart things app) it wants access to my phone contacts and messages!?

bennysomething commented on How Crash Bandicoot hacked the original Playstation (2020) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=izxXG... · Posted by u/agomez314

louthy · 3 years ago

I'm not sure if delaying it would have made any difference. PS1 was a zeitgeist machine, especially with titles like wipEout. I remember going to underground nightclubs in London and there'd be a chillout room with Playstations in. The Dreamcast just wasn't cool enough I guess.

I think Sega also seriously fucked up with the Saturn. There were lots of claims of it being more powerful than the PS1, but nobody could extract that power really. A Saturn dev at a studio I worked at had a complete breakdown just trying to keep up with what I was doing on the PS1. I feel they burned a lot of industry bridges with that machine.

I'd have loved to see the Dreamcast succeed because I'd always been a big fan of Sega, but I think a lot of things just went awry for them.

bennysomething · 3 years ago

Ha! I'm still playing wipeout (on retro arch though). I only bought a PS1 around 2010 as I'd been an N64 fanboy. I really had missed out.

I heard the Saturn was originally designed as a 2d machine, sega saw what the PS1 was going to be capable of and bolted on 3d. Hence it was a mess. Is it true it could only use quads not triangles for polygons?

bennysomething commented on California passes law requiring companies to post salary ranges on job listings bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/jd_illa

ChrisMarshallNY · 3 years ago

I'm curious. We hear a lot about gender pay gaps, but I suspect that H1B pay gaps may be more extreme.

Will this expose that, or do you think that companies will find a way around that?

bennysomething · 3 years ago

To (probabl mis) quote the Economist magazine, when adjusted for other variables the gender pay gap disappears.

bennysomething commented on California passes law requiring companies to post salary ranges on job listings bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/jd_illa

bennysomething · 3 years ago

I'm not sure I agree with this type of legislation. Most of us have experienced that developer value add varies hugely. I think what bothers me most is that it seems to be a push for pay banding. We re individuals, I'd prefer to neogitate on my own terms.

bennysomething commented on How Crash Bandicoot hacked the original Playstation (2020) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=izxXG... · Posted by u/agomez314

louthy · 3 years ago

Yes, although not a full title. It was the period between PS1 and PS2 and no publishers were committing until they knew what was happening with PS2 (because of the outrageous success of the PS1). I built a bezier-patch based engine for it and physics system, and we produced two fun little game demos to try and get publisher funding, but it didn't come.

It was super easy and fun to develop for (which after the pain of the Saturn was a relief). It's a real shame it didn't get more support, it just arrived at the wrong time.

bennysomething · 3 years ago

That's interesting. Would it have been better if sega had wait until post PS2? The Dreamcast was the last console I loved. I bought one on launch day. But I think looking back it was always doomed. I can't recall properly but I think it was someone in EA or high up in sega America who tried to persuade sega Japan that they wouldn't survive with the type of games they were planning for the Dreamcast. Oh well in those two years the Dreamcast had some of my favourite games.