AdrianB1

One year ago I was very skeptical about such attempts. Today, it would be my first choice as LLMs evolved a lot and the result of carefully using a LLM for this task can be very, very good.

As much as I like Patrick Stewart, the actor, I must remember that Captain Picard was a role in a script someone else wrote. Picard's management style is what you admire, not the actor's personal management style.

I have the same attitude with House MD lead actor Hugh Laurie: the actor played the role greatly, but the actor was not the fictional person of the role.

Because the people with automation targets are not the same people responsible for the quality of the process and you get what you measure. Been there, done that.

I mentioned Italy for the case of an existing employee (with several years of employment) that we cannot let go. It is just another example where "fire fast" does not work.

Maintenance is not sexy for anyone; there was an article posted earlier with "advice for junior engineers" that had the top advice "(1) Pick business impact over backlog". Maintenance is backlog.

Is resignation a true restitution for wasting a quarter billion euros? Is the tax payer made whole?

Automation of a bad process or security measure is not a way out of the incompetence of people who designed it. Automation of garbage only brings more garbage.

Incompetence and laziness are very different things. You can have very hard working, engaged, active people that are still incompetent for the job they are supposed to do.

I am also European and I did a lot of recruiting: in my country, at least, there can be a test period but you must hire the test employee if you cannot prove they are not qualified. For example, you cannot get 2 people for testing with the plan to keep only one, which would be in line with the idea of "hire fast, fire fast".

Also in Europe, more precisely in Italy we have existing employee that we are trying for over 5 years to get rid of; as long as they come to the office every day, HR said we cannot fire them. This is also blocking new hiring because the positions are occupied, even if they don't do anything useful. Also because of that we had to send people to early retirement in other countries just to free up headcount for new people with specific skills we need.

"hire fast and fire fast" is great way if you are allowed to. But there are 2 huge impediments to this: legislation (for example in Europe) makes it very hard to fire, sometimes almost impossible and, in many companies, the hiring manager does not have the authority to simply fire someone, especially fast. You need to do PIP for months, involve HR, internal procedures, legal procedures, it is a nightmare.

There is a third, very egotistic reason: for many managers letting go of someone is considered a negative, so they avoid doing it. I saw cases when the direct manager of a very weak contractor took almost one year to be convinced to end the contract, he gave second, third and infinite chances to a lost cause. But this is a case of a bad manager, can be solved.

But when it can be done, it is great.

I have a big problem with the "(1) Pick business impact over backlog" part as advice for a junior engineer. It always comes from people that are not only not juniors, but from people that are no longer engineers, but entrepreneurs.

A junior engineer's focus should not be to deliver the work that is important. The business impact is the problem and responsibility of management, an engineer should do engineering and not be asked to take business responsibilities. If you design a new car engine, the sales volume and market strategy is none of your business and it is way above your pay grade. A junior engineer is the one that does what is asked to do, in the best way possible. A senior engineer is at the border to business impact, maybe, but even then the lead engineer for the rocket engines at SpaceX is not responsible of the business impact of the company.

But some bad people are trying to push more and more responsibilities to people that should focus on their domain. I also see now a push on low level engineering managers to do "organizational work" that usually does not have any meaningful impact and nobody cares about, just to be a differentiator for a promotion to the next level of even more meaningless work. Leave the junior engineers alone.

The answer is also a bit of a cliche; the people who can stop working, and don't, have a different motivation than "work for paying the bills". They don't "work", they actively have fun doing what they like to do, with no financial pressure, they are living the dream.

> But not finding joy in anything is an actual sign of depression.

Moving to something else that provides joy is a sign of healthy life, not depression. If you don't like modern media, you don't have to find some that you like, you can look somewhere else, in a completely different area.

Your are overestimating by orders of magnitude. There is not even one excellent game per year, lately.

You don't need to be depressed to see a decline in the outside world. For people that are old enough, it is quite obvious.

The market is oversaturated of mediocre games, but I struggle to find any notable titles in the past 5 years. 30 years I was pirating games I did not afford, in the past 15-20 years I bought all the games I played, but in the past few years I don't remember buying too many games because there was nothing interesting. The last games I bought were Cyberpunk 2077 (+ extension), an indie game (Forgotten City) and Stalker 2 (a disapointment).

If you build a really good game, there is a market for it. Otherwise it will be lost in an ocean of not-interesting titles.

I am not talking about graphics or bugs, but about story and immersion. I don't care at all about the Witcher 3 remastering, but I loved the land, story and feeling of Toussaint. Cyberpunk does not reach that level, even if it is quite good.

Unfortunately CDPR is showing some signs of Bioware-ing. As much as I liked Cyberpunk 2077, it was visibly "less than" Witcher 3 in too many ways. This is a sign of decline.

In the late '90 I participated to SETI@home, donating free CPU cycles over nigh on some servers that were running 24x7 and were not utilized at night. Power saving was not a thing, so all that electricity was wasted, I found a use for it.

These days energy is expensive. It may be better to shut down home computers and let organizations use optimized hardware for such type of processing.

I was not interested about smart home. At all. Then my father asked me to help him install an automatic switch for external lights in the yard. I never did that, I used a Shelly relay and Home Assistant, it was simpler (yes, sounds strange, but it was simpler). Then I found that I can automate some stuff in the house that was manual until then, so I did some.

4 years later I have more than 50 relays and sensors in 2 houses, controlling water pumps, irrigation, AC, thermostats, monitoring energy consumption and allowing energy optimizations and saving manual work. I have a smart water valve on my desk waiting to be installed and I need to add a few more thermostats (energy is so expensive these days), otherwise I am almost done.

I have nothing fancy like light themes and moods. I have solid solar-AC-heating optimizations with the temperature sensors and window open sensors; I have a decent irrigation setup and also external lights control. That's it. I am not a fan of tinkering with microcontrollers, I did not even modded or used custom firmware to any of it, I am just pragmatic in using the tech where I need and for what brings me benefits.

Real example: my company is US based, top and middle management is in US, some middle management and lower in Europe, managing workers in India and Manila. Same scheme with Costa Rica, but managed directly from US.

Sounds great on paper, but in reality it is a program to bring mediocre workers that would do anything for the opportunity, including being underpaid. My company did this, on a smaller scale than Microsoft, and the result is the worst employees we have in US.

> program itself is racist as hell. Microsoft is literally bringing in foreigners, paying them much less to do the same damn job

This is not racism, it is abuse of the visa system. It can happen to any race.

There is a "work and travel" program for students in Europe with valid visa and everything. I know lots of people who did that for a summer or two, it was an opportunity to see USA and also it was a great thing to list on their CV when getting a job back home.

Why don't you have the choice?

Net worth is the estimated value, not sell value. For example, Tesla shares owned by Elon don't have the same value if Elon is leaving, they are less worthy.

Your 1 billion dollar dog that will die 2 days after someone takes it from you. Tax that, please.

More efficiency in spending? We have newer tools and equipment, technology, automation etc. Do more with less, that is called productivity.

There is no way to take anything like that. Net worth is quite similar with me saying you are worth 1 billion dollars, but you have zero money in the bank. What do you take, super-rich billionaire person?

Almost. I would still want a location sharing app on my kids phones, a navigation app, maybe a sport tracking app. That would be a locked down smartphone with a few apps I would install and no browser access.