Genuinely curious what Microsoft products people actually like? VS code might be the only one I’ve ever heard of.
Excel is brilliant.
Readit Newsmbrodersen commented on How does Windows decide whether your computer has full Internet access? devblogs.microsoft.com/ol... · Posted by u/sohkamyung
In my view there is no such thing as “tech debt”.
The way I look at it, there will always be a delta between the code you have and the business features you want/need. Independently of whether the code was written 30 years ago or yesterday.
So the only question worth asking IMHO is how best to reduce the delta while maximising the business value/cost ratio.
If you talk about “tech debt” without talking business value/cost then you are indulging in “what would be fun to do” and not “what is the best next step for the business”.
The biggest lie by the way is “it will improve maintenance!”. Maybe for you (because you spent years rewriting it and know it inside out) but not for the unlucky next person who has to take over your code.
Another lie is using words like “Modern!” and “Brand New!” as if it is a good thing. I want the old software that has proven itself for more than 30 years. Not the “Modern! New! Shiny!” crap that has been implemented by bright eyed inexperienced beginners, is full of bugs, implemented using a “Modern!” framework that will stop being maintained in a year, and has 5% of the features of the “old” software.
“was previously fired from her job for sleeping in her car behind her place of employment.”
The cruelty of managers never stops surprising me. As long as she is doing her job and is presentable etc. what’s the problem? Worst case just ask her to park her car somewhere else?
I remember reading about people crossing the border to sell plasma for money over a decade ago. This isn't anything new. America is a meat grinder, and, increasingly, I'm glad I don't live there.
Agree. I was offered a green card and a 6 digit salary to move to the US. I declined and instead moved to Australia. One of my best decisions ever.
mbrodersen commented on Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly? · Posted by u/throoooooowa
In my experience there is a strong correlation between your ability to communicate clearly and your ability to write clean maintainable code.
The 10x developers I have worked with are all excellent communicators. The worst developers I have worked with most definitely weren’t.
As someone that spent a decade in the Australian tech industry, and then a decade outside, I can say that Australia is famously a tech backwater.
London might be seen as conservative/cautious compared to SV or Austin or Lisbon, but it's far ahead of Australia where bloated big bang projects are well supported, and lean projects by actual tech companies are ignored.
Aussie here. Speak for yourself mate. The tech I am working on in Melbourne (Rostering/Pairing) is world class. We are routinely beating international companies 100x our size.
mbrodersen commented on Is 40 hours a week too much? okta.com/au/identity-101/... · Posted by u/deterministic
Most of these conversations seem to come down to weird definitions of "productive time".
Most of us managers would consider meetings, mentoring, work-related Slack conversations to be productive time. Yet I read a lot of the comments here where people don't consider anything to be productive time unless they're actively writing code, which ignores the realities of working in a team environment.
A better metric might be tracking the amount of non-work time: Time spent on HN, social media, reading news articles, running errands. Again, us managers are realistic that everyone can (and should!) take small breaks throughout the day. However, if those breaks expand to fill 20-30 hours of the supposed 40-hour workweek, something has gone very wrong. That's certainly not normal at any well managed company.
I work for a company where meetings are extremely rare. We only do formal meetings when everything else fails. It is one of the most efficient/productive companies I have ever worked for.
The least efficient/productive company I have ever worked for had formal meetings all the time. What takes a week where I work now would take 6 months there.
So no I don’t agree that meetings are automatically productive/useful in general. I am pretty sure you can measure how productive a software company is by the following formula:
Time spent working on projects divided by Time spent in meetings.
mbrodersen commented on ZX Spectrum BASIC programming (1983) worldofspectrum.net/ZXBas... · Posted by u/guytv
I have such fond memories of the ZX-Spectrum. I learned how to program machine code using it (hand translates from Z80 assembler) when I was 11 years old. No internet. Nobody I could ask for help. Just a book explaining how to do machine code programming on a ZX-Spectrum. The satisfaction of getting this working was amazing to me.
There is nothing magical about 40 hours. It just happens to be the number of hours that most companies (in the west) happens to choose for historical reasons: