PCF_LABEL_AWESOME Here for software stuff. Cursed with eternal optimism. I want to make it all better. Make Agile Great Again! Views are my own.
Portal Point, Antarctica
Joined March 2010
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There's no award for always being right. Trust me, I know.
We launched an employee recognition platform where coworkers can award points for going above and beyond.
Naturally, IT is getting destroyed.
When the network works for 200 consecutive days, nobody says anything.
When somebody's laptop dies and we fix it, they give us 50 points.
Our senior network engineer has received zero points this quarter.
Meanwhile, Brandon from Desktop Support has 2,400.
I investigated.
Brandon has been manually delivering replacement keyboard batteries to people's desks.
He refuses to leave spare batteries in the supply cabinet.
Says it "removes the human element from IT support."
Every delivery earns him 50 points and a public thank-you.
He's currently ranked #1 in the company.
Last Friday the CEO recognized him at the all-hands for "consistently exceeding expectations."
Brandon got a $1,000 bonus.
My network engineer asked whether preventing problems counts as going above and beyond.
HR said employees have to nominate him.
Nobody knows his name because nothing he manages has ever broken.
Brandon is now being considered for a leadership position.
I ordered 500 dead batteries.
Time to get promoted.
"The Beatles invented music and did everything first. All other bands are shadows, and the Beatles are the sun. And everyone who disagrees is stupid."
I don't care what they did. They had a few good songs and some pretentious garbage.
We've gotten better at writing maintainable, well-architected code within the team. Not perfect, but definitely adequate.
If you take a step back and look at our larger ecosystem of microservices, those improvements are undone. Everything problem we've fixed locally still exists at that larger scale where it's much harder to see or improve. There's no will to address it or even acknowledge it.
The classes within a domain are reasonably well-designed with clear responsibilities. At the service level, ten services participate in what should be single responsibility. One might "own" data, but it allows others to freely update it, making it effectively shared global state.
I can test the services we own easily and reliably. The larger system they're part of is full of bugs. Dozens come out, and countless are hiding. We end up doing a lot of slow, unreliable manual tests, which is exactly what we'd do if we hadn't designed our services to be testable.
No one looks at the larger system from the outside the same way that I look the pieces we own. I don't know why.
My company could function with maybe 1/3 fewer developers and managers. That's a very rough guess.
We would need more product-minded developers, a major process overhaul. It would require prioritizing architecture.
I want to like Korean shows and TV. There's a lot of it. But without fail, it seems to get dragged out and the climax is sentimental and weepy. Someone makes a noble sacrifice and everyone else is crying about something.
It's not a bad thing. They like it, and so do lots of other people. I just can't get into it.
Google knows how many cars are where and how fast they're moving. They could use AI to generate the voice of the guy in the helicopter and no one would know the difference.
If they're smart enough to know that I searched for toilets, why aren't they smart enough to know I already bought one so they can stop showing me ads for toilets?
From reading The Systems Bible by John Gall, I have concluded that systems are bad. Do all you can to avoid making a system.
From shared experience I have learned that distributed systems are bad. Do not distribute a system unless you must.
If a politician from one party is investigated or indicted, always investigate or indict one from the other party, preferably of comparable rank. That way no one complains that it's unfair.
There are enough corrupt politicians that this should work.
I'm neutral in politics, but I can still solve your problems for you.
I have to side with the company on this one:
"If I can get so much more done with AI, why don't they pay me more?"
It's not free for them. My productivity increased because they're spending $2500 a month on my tokens.
Everyone is going to start talking about the Oscar again because he's doing what every other actor has done a dozen times, but it's supposed to be special because it's him.
Dwayne Johnson transforms into a 70-year-old man in shocking photos from the set of Benny Safdie's "Lizard Music."
• The movie is based on Daniel Pinkwater’s children’s book and follows a young boy who “stumbles upon strange lizard musicians on late-night TV, leading him to befriend a peculiar man with an elderly chicken.”
• The cast also includes Rachel McAdams, Colman Domingo, David Krumholtz, Jeff Goldblum, Alicia Silverstone and Regina Hall.
• From Amazon MGM Studios, “Lizard Music” is set for release on Christmas Day 2027.
variety.com/2026/film/news/d…
Friend groups are like insurance groups. They're usually groups of people who found themselves together for some other reason, but became friends.
If you don't have friends, the solution is to join one or more groups that exist primarily for other purposes. There's no guarantee, but that's how it happens.
You can't form an insurance group just to get group health insurance. If you do, it will be full of the sickest people who can't get insurance any other way.
The same thing happens if you form groups just so people have friends. Imagine advertising a group: "If you don't have friends, join our group. We don't have friends either."
I'm sure something like that exists, but it sounds depressing.
And, of course, it depends on us individually. If we can't make friends anywhere, there might be something about ourselves we can change.
I'm reasonably friendly. My wife knows that if she invites a couple over, she shouldn't expect me to magically become the husband's friend. It's better to invite a few more people.
It's insane to think I'm going to be some dude's friend because he sits at the desk next to me.
The political bias in reporting is exhausting. I just want to know what's happening. I don't need the extra mental effort to try to figure out which side they're on and calibrate what I read. If I have to do that I don't trust it anyway.
I listened to my wife talking to an Amazon's AI customer service trying to get it to send a missing item. I had no idea the bar could be so low. It's like they didn't even try.
The robotic voice goes in circles. If you make a sound, it says, "I didn't hear that," and then forgets everything you said and starts all over again like it just answered the phone.
I'm working on building one of these. Trust me, we would never consider releasing anything like that. If we thought early on that we couldn't make it 10x easier and more pleasant to deal with, we'd stop and work on something else.