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Comment Re:I find them to be useless... (Score 1) 52

I'd suggest that it's not the Chromebook's fault, but rather, the lack of real effort to turn it into a teaching tool.

yes. The fact of the matter is that creating teaching content that works without a teacher teaching it is much, much harder. A prof that had 30 years experience with (classical) distance education gave me an estimate of 10x more effort, possibly higher. This is in addition to specific teaching skills being needed that are different from in-person teaching and it is no surprise that we do not have much good teaching content suitable for computer-based self-learning.

Comment Re:Screens don't teach. (Score 1) 52

Again there are nuances. I do not know why Americans hate nuance so much but it's pretty deeply ingrained in our culture.

Well, nuances require insight and understanding. Simplistic and unsupported "I love xyz" or "I hate xyz" does not. Americans all think they are geniuses, when in reality most people are average in mental capability and the average is not that impressive. The cultural response in America is to deny reality and ignore things like nuances and details that make it clearer where you stand mentally. It gets replaced by grandiose language, grandstanding, deep unsupported beliefs and other cult-like behaviors.

There is a group of US citizens that have moved abroad and compare their cultural experiences on YouTube. They basically all find a strong disconnect between reality and self-image in American culture.

Obviously, stating such facts will get me moderated down. Because disagreeing changes reality. Right? Right?

Comment Re:Screens don't teach. (Score 1) 52

Yes. But that level of reasoning is too complex for most people. Hence they say "screen", but what they really mean is a specific environment. Sure, the UI has some problems of its own, for example you learn better when handwriting things on paper (not in cursive though, that causes too much cognitive load) than when typing on a keyboard. But these effects are relatively small.

Comment Re:The original agile manifesto made sense (Score 1) 80

Well, yes. But it started with "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".

Respect individuals? That is not something management does! Cannot have that! So the usual "Agile" implementation starts with disregarding the first line in the Agile manifesto. And usually it goes downhill from there.

Comment Re:Larger teams will move faster than smaller team (Score 1) 80

Incidentally, just in case you are unaware of it, there are only 3 developers in what Brooks in "The Mythical Man-Month" describes as the perfect software engineering team: There is the "chief programmer", the "copilot" and the "toolsmith". Nobody else writes code, they are all support for those that do.

Depending on the task, I would think you can extend the number of coders a bit, but not much without efficiency and effectiveness suffering. I think, for example, that you can have more than one tool-maker in some contexts. You may also have a, say "data engineer" or the like. But that is essentially it.

Comment Re:One behemoth isn't a trend (Score 1) 80

Excellent. I applaud your stance. Good managers do indeed exist, even if they are pretty rare. You clearly are one. There is one quality good managers and good engineers share: They want to do a good job. Many managers just want to climb the corporate ladder and that is not good at all.

Comment Re:Mythical Man Month (Score 1) 80

Indeed. But "managers" are typically fully incompetent and do not even know these basic and well-established facts. And hence the same stupid and expensive mistakes are being made time and again.

My guess would be that some senior engineers at Fidelity told "management" these basic facts and that what "management" was doing was not going to work. Hence "management" decided to get rid of all these naysayers and hire young and clueless people. Expect Fidelity to not exist anymore in no more than 10 years.

Comment Re:Larger teams will move faster than smaller team (Score 1) 80

There is a well-known ideal team size for engineering design work (which software is) it is around 5-10 people. Go over that and you lose efficiency. Go significantly over it and total (!) productivity drops. Above some size a team cannot deliver results anymore at all. This has been known for a long, long time, but "managers" are typically ignorant.

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