Readit NewsA proper execution of a cubicle office is actually quite decent.
But for a good workplace you also need to have good colleagues, including managers. That's universal, whether open plan or cubes.
I've worked at a cubicle farm before. Partitions were high enough to avoid being able to see people in a sitting position, but high enough that you can still stand up and ask your neighbor a question. The cubicles were spaceous, had ample desk space and didn't feel claustrophobic or "caged in" at all. If anything, it felt like I had my own little space that I was in control of.
The partitions had steel sheets in them to allow people to use magnets to hang up documents/whatever. My cubicle walls were covered in [documents and datasheets](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNzIxZmIzYjEtZGMyZi00...). Some of my colleagues had extensively decorated their cubicles with photos and tchotchkes. Others had their entire desk space littered with PCBs and tools.
Managers got cubicles on the sides of the building with windows, theirs were larger and had higher partitions, with a window filling in that extra height.
The extra desk space was great. I worked as an embedded SWE and I often needed the space for tools and the devices I was working on. The few times I needed an oscilloscope, I could easily find room for it, no need to move my setup to a lab.
Cubicles get a bad rep. It's actually quite a nice way to work, if executed properly, that is.
That said, I did have noise issues before. But that was always the same colleague. She luckily only came in on Wednesdays. She totally lacked the concept of an indoor voice while on the telephone.
This was first salient to me when I saw posts about opensource developers who make critical infrastructure living hand to mouth. Then the day in the life of a software engineer working in a coffee shop. Then the bootcamps or just learn to code movement. Then the leetcode grinders. Then developers living in cars in SF due to lack of affordable housing. Now it is about developers vibe coding themselves out of a job.
The issue is and will always be that developers are not true professionals. The standards are loosely enforced and we do a poor job of controlling who comes in and out of the industry. There are no ethics codes, skillsets are arbitrary, and we don't have any representation. Worst yet we bought into this egocentric mindset where abuses to workers and customers are overlooked.
This makes no sense to me. Lawyers have bar associations, doctors have medical associations, coders have existential angst.
Now the bosses are like automate your way out of a job or you will lose your job.
I always ask myself, in what other "profession" would its members be so hostile to their own interests?
Someone who finished a bootcamp might be able to write a simple program in Python, but that doesn't make them a software engineer.
I've said this out loud before and have gotten told I'm an elitist, that my degree doesn't make me better at software than those without one. That majoring in computer science teaches you only esoteric knowledge that can't be applied in a "real job".
On the other hand, the industry being less strict about degrees can be considered a positive. There definitely do exist extremely talented self-taught software engineers that have made a great career for themselves.
But I definitely agree with the need of some sort of standard. I don't care if some bootcamper gets a job at the latest "AI on the blockchain as a service" unicorn startup, good for them. I'd rather have people with formal degrees work on something like a Therac-25, though.
I worked as a tech at a stage for a short while. We always used XLR5 for lighting and XLR3 for audio.
I had a project where I had would make repeated API calls, which returned small to moderate json payloads.
To avoid running out of heap, I had to constantly force python garbage collection. That took a long time, so I wasn’t able to call the APIs on the intervals I needed.
Eventually I gave up and moved to using ESP IDF directly, which IMO was super easy to do - Espressif has made a great integration with VS Code. If anyone’s on ESP32, i would skip micropython.
I've used MicroPython for prototyping. It's quite nice with its REPL.
However, for more than a simple proof of concept I wouldn't use MicroPython at all, on any platform.
My personal gatekeepey opinion is that if you want to learn embedded, you really should go for C. (C++ or Rust also exist, but C should be the first)
And let's not even get started on Taiwan...
It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item. Microsoft Office has the Autosave toggle switch that serves some of this purpose, but it could definitely be better.
I also think about the Zune UI where sometimes a menu consisted only of the icons. How do you enable unique menu designs like Zune without icons for everything?
It originated from when floppy disks were still widely used, yes.
Nowadays, people associate the icon of a floppy disk more with "saving locally" than the floppy itself. Changing it will just cause confusion.
Another example is how the icon for Database was chosen to resemble an old-timey stack of hard drive platters. Everyone knows what it means, even if your database isn't stored on HDDs, so there is no need to change it.
Even the telephone icon on your phone resembles an old-fashioned telephone horn, despite these getting less and less common.