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Comment Agile is part of the problem (Score 5, Insightful) 296

Agile programming and how it is used is a big part of the blame. The constant need for more features every sprint. It takes a serious effort to get a sprint to cleanup and remove dead code and optimize. One has to file a bug to get some of that done and even then, if not justified it will just get added to the back-burner and eventually closed due to age. This has been happening for decades.

While agile is mostly better than waterfall, the problem falls on people running it and their inability to schedule code-wellness time in sprints. When success is rated by how many features were added, it's all additive to the management types. Developers need to push back during sprint planning and demand time to cleanup and update the codebase.

Comment Re:Defeats the purpise (Score 1) 41

This is a process issue, developers should never be able to deploy.

They push to the repo on github/gitlab/etc and let a continuous integration system (jenkins/etc) do unit tests/integration tests/acceptance tests/verification and then deployment only allowed for some users and after proper approval. Having local changes will mean nothing if they are not pushed, this is the purpose of distributed nature of git. This is how you prevent foolish mistakes.

Comment Spotify is making a mess of JRE (Score 1) 14

Spotify will fail unless they make their UI more than a simple streamer for podcasts. They don't have the capacity to stream video+audio and JRE (joe rogan exp) has been glitchy and sometimes unwatchable (there is no way to turn off video at this time). There is no ability to catchup on a podcast (or bulk mark them already played). The ordering on the app is newest to oldest (sorting the other way makes the UI upside down, next should be the newer). On and on, the usability features are just not there yet and any semi-decent RSS player is more than adequate.

To suggest they are going to charge for it when they have done almost nothing to make it comparable to existing podcast app is a joke.

I use spotify for music and mostly it's ok, but the app on android, windows and browser struggles with video. The JRE mess is causing me to look at amazon and google for music.

Comment Spotify UI is pretty bad (Score 1) 64

There is no way to stop video when bandwidth is limited, most of the time I am not watching a podcast I am listening to it while working/walking/etc
There is no way to "mark all played" on windows client (useful when subscribing to a podcast for the first time)
Next podcast is not chronological but instead jump to the older one that was already played, so have to manually start them
Resume playing fails most of the time and starts from beginning
Very jittery during playback, RSS clients pre-download the files while spotify tries to stream, you have to manually download it (not missing just tedious to use)

I have premium subscription and like it for music but their functionality with podcasts is so bad that I am not listening to JRE anymore and sticking to the reliable and functional RSS based podcast clients.

Comment Coding is an art (Score 2) 88

Coding is more art than science, which is why there are more than 1 paths to a given problem and seldom is there an optimal path to solve it. It also explains the 10x gap in programmer skill, art has a very similar pattern, you have great artists and you have people claiming to be artists and a huge gap in-between. A true artist can always spot another true artist; just like a 10x developer can spot another one during an interview (which is why not everyone is qualified to hire developers, but this is another tangent). Lots of great developers also seem to have great interest in music and other arts, it's just fits the thought pattern and creativity.

Yeah, it's more an art than science.

The Almighty Buck

Who Americans Spend Their Time With (theatlas.com) 115

Data scientist Henrik Lindberg has a series of fascinating charts based on data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that show who people in the United States spend their time with over the course of their lifetime. Check out the charts here. From a report on Quartz: Some of the relationships Lindberg found are intuitive. Time with friends drops off abruptly in the mid-30s, just as time spent with children peaks. Around the age of 60 -- nearing and then entering retirement, for many -- people stop hanging out with co-workers as much, and start spending more time with partners. Others are more surprising. Hours spent in the company of children, friends, and extended family members all plateau by our mid-50s. And from the age of 40 until death, we spend an ever-increasing amount of time alone. Those findings are consistent with research showing that the number of friends we have peaks around age 25, and plateaus between the ages of 45 and 55. Simply having fewer social connections doesn't necessarily equal loneliness. The Stanford University psychologist Linda Carstensen has found that emotional regulation improves with age, so that people derive more satisfaction from the relationships they have, whatever the number. Older people also report less stress and more happiness than younger people.

Comment All that glitters is software. (Score 5, Interesting) 453

I think there are many talented and smart developers in India (as anywhere else). The biggest issue is that they mostly want to work for very large companies (prestige), they are in a hurry to be promoted to managers (many are not good at managing anything but it's all about the title) and thus good developers become weak managers. This depletes the software developer pool so they have to hire people less and less qualified to do the coding.

Another is that there are a lot of "software consulting" companies that handle outsourced work, they tend to have some good developers and a lot of "junior" developers, so when they sell themselves to a customer they can say they have a staff of 100 developers ready to go. This is compounded with the problem of developers trying to get promoted into management (again, title and status are very important to people).

I am not sure if 95% is an accurate number (seems a bit high), but the problem exists nevertheless.

I have read that a lot has to do with sociological issue of being used to a caste system, and while it's not as prevalent as it used to be, rank and status are very important. While this is also true in many other countries (I have worked with many Eastern European and Far East companies), India remains as the place where every developer seems to be looking for a promotion. Some companies placate the developers by giving them over-inflated titles like chief architect or senior staff engineer; but in a company with dozens of chief architects the title no longer has a significant meaning.

Anecdotal evidence: I worked with a developer who was young and his mom kept emailing him to get promoted to a manager so that when she went looking for a wife she could pick from a nicer "deck" because he was a manager ( a deck of pictures/bios is how moms and matchmakers and astrologists get together to determine who gets to marry whom, it's very complicated from what I have seen). I thought it was funny, but he was very serious that the "quality" of a wife his mom could get depended a lot on where he worked and what his title was. At one point he lobbied to get a temporary title and we put him on a short term support project where he was handling issues for one single customer and had a temporary title of a "Senior Customer Manager". He was married within 3 months.

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