bendixso

Fair point. It's a thought that has gone through my head a few times. There are places that want you to conform to whatever it is we call "modern" software development, and I often find myself feeling uncomfortable about expressing an alternate viewpoint.

There's no conspiracy or anything going on here, and you're right it's wrong to assume. That's the general sentiment of what I was trying to say though.

It is telling that the person arguing in favor of native C/C++ has to use a throwaway account for fear of going against the dominant force of opinion in our industry. We should be able to have these conversations openly without wondering if it makes us less employable.

Seriously. Just keep piling more bullshit on top of the bullshit

Yeah, I have the same concern. This is great for those situations where declarative works but sometimes you really want to get low-level and do some custom stuff with imperative code. I suppose we can use the old frameworks for that?

I get the feeling that many elements of your story don't add up. How can you work 10-12 hours a day and only have $1000 saved up, especially if you're in a tech-related field? I know kids can be expensive, but they're not that expensive.

In life, unless you can learn to put away a huge pile of cash, people are just going to walk all over you. When you are vulnerable, it sends a signal and they pounce on it. Your boss will stop abusing you the moment he realizes he can't use it to control you anymore.

Save your money. Pick up new skills. Become less dependent on others. Bike instead of driving. Cook all of your own meals. Learn about investing. Get out of debt. Maintain your own vehicles. Plant a garden.

Take literally any step to make yourself more independent and your boss will lose power.

I have never worked in a field more obsessed with talking about how it does its work. Today we're standing on one leg. Tomorrow we're programming in downward dog stance. Next week, we're gonna try the Red Bull diet and see how that goes.

This really doesn't have to be that hard. You talk to people. You figure out what's important. Then you do that stuff. Then you talk to more people again.

Seriously. Development phase or iteration is way better. It's also more of a flexible concept. It doesn't need to always be two weeks or whatever. We just decide what to do next and then do that.

Is anybody else a little creeped out by this recent insistence that we refer to everything being done as an "issue"? I never agreed to this. I don't know where it came from, but it's really weird.

Issue implies something is already wrong with what is being built.

How can we be wrong when we haven't even started yet? It's utter madness

Never take a code test until you speak on the phone with an engineer at the company. That way, they need to at least trade something valuable of theirs (expensive engineer time) for something valuable of yours (your time). When you adopt this policy, all kinds of B.S. magically vanishes from your life.

After all, you would never continue to try to win the affection of a guy/girl who wouldn't at least give you a first date? Why do the same for a company that can't bother to give you some of their time?

Yeah, depends on how you define "retire". There are plenty of people who hit financial independence and "retire" but still choose to work. I'd go so far as to say you should keep working after you hit financial independence or else life gets kinda drained of its meaning.

For me, "retirement" doesn't mean quitting work but rather having the ability to choose to only work on things I find meaningful. I'm also pretty horrible at dealing with authority and too insistent on knowing why people order me to do stuff at work. Most of the time, I can keep my irritation hidden from others but it would be nice to not have to deal with that irritation at all.

So long as the bulk of your money comes from one or two main "clients," you more or less have to do what they say, and they don't have to explain why. "Retirement" means having a diverse enough source of income that you no longer have to follow orders and can push back or simply decide not to work with them because you don't need the money.

TL;DR - we're obsessed with early retirement because we are human beings who crave autonomy mastery and purpose.

If there were a way to gain all of those benefits without having to pass through the process of accumulating vast sums of material wealth, I would certainly do that instead. And I am trying to find ways to get there without simply saving a ton of money. Having said that, even in the best of situations, human beings are gonna human and that means authoritarian leaders naturally emerge when money is involved. I'd rather have a giant sack of cash to shield myself from that inevitability.

Park is fun for me. It's relatively cheap too. You just need a ski pass and your gear. I would also qualify as a tech d-bag but I don't spend a ton of money on the sport and generally look like a dirtbag when I'm out and about

lol, you invest a few grand one year up front but it smoothes out over the coming seasons to roughly one grand on average because you keep your gear and don't have to invest in new stuff every season.

Also that's not the super frugal version of this. If you really wanted to, you could just buy all of your stuff on Craigslist. I've done that with some of my stuff, and you can get a huge discount.

You wouldn't believe the kind of people who buy gear, ride like two days, and then sell it a few years later. The market is glutted with this kind of stuff.

I dunno. I actually don't think it's all that expensive of a sport if you can invest in your equipment and keep it long term. Sure, you'll spend a few grand one season for a setup that will last you three or four seasons. The season pass will set you back another $600 per year roughly.

I've had my current setup for five seasons. Same board. Same boots. Same jacket, helmet, pants, etc. If I do a back of the envelope calculation, my sport probably costs me $1,000 per year on average.

There really is such a thing as competence, work ethic, and patience. These traits tend to lead to success in other areas of life, including the accumulation of wealth and advancement in one's career. Not everything can, or should, be explained by privilege. Great people really do earn their greatness.

Some of the geekiest people I know have become the best skiers/snowboarders on the mountain. I know a guy who used to regularly show up to the terrain park and do double frontflips over 60 foot jumps. He's got a PHD in physics now.

I know another guy who used to compete in big air competitions. Senior iOS developer.

My friend Brian does double cork 10s. Medical doctor.

This sport is for nerds. If you're nerdy, you have an even greater chance of being successful at it because you know how to focus on getting great at something.

I have found myself saying this in my mobile apps business.

Oftentimes, I will contact someone associated with the community for a product I am building and ask them if they want to help promote the product once it's out. They take this as some sort of partnership where I have to get their permission to publish my products or go in the direction they want to go, just because they might help me out.

And usually these companies are slower moving than I am, so doing the back-and-forth and getting feedback would take forever. With mobile apps, you have no idea if the thing will ever take off, and I have found it is best to just launch the thing and see what happens.

I'm not sure what some of these people think. I'm an independent businessman. I have the right to do whatever I want with my own products, and yes, I can choose to launch something whenever I damn well please. If you like it, go ahead and promote it. If you don't, don't. I honestly don't care.

So I take this saying more as "Doing anything at all will always be perceived as offensive to someone. You might as well do it and let them get offended."

And I know that soundbite lacks nuance and could easily be taken to mean something else, but then it wouldn't be a cool soundbite either. Obviously don't murder, rape, etc, and do take others into consideration when you are working on a team and you need their help longterm.

But I think the essence of the saying is that nobody is purely innocent and anything worth doing will probably ruffle some feathers. If you're overly cautious, you won't ever accomplish anything significant.

In some work environments, you are encouraged to get 40 hours a week, regardless of whether those 40 hours are necessarily put towards what are perceived as the "highest value" endeavors. So if you are blocked on everything else, why not take the remaining time and put it towards things you personally believe to be beneficial to the project? It is certainly better than sitting on your thumbs or asking people who are already busy what they think you should be doing.

What does the company have to lose by your going, and what do they have to gain? If you are asking to take personal time off in the middle of some critical goal/deadline, I could see how your going would negatively impact the business.

In fact, it has happened to me while working on projects. Some key person is off at a conference, while we're all charging to get the thing done, and it's not a good feeling.

In my experience, tech conferences tend to be more for developers and less for the companies and businesses that hire them. Let's be honest with ourselves here. It's kind of self-indulgent, like a mini-vacation.

It's not like you can't watch the videos online or go read whatever tutorial or documentation. I'm only speaking to my experience here, so maybe your conference has something the typical tech conference doesn't have.

I would only go to a conference if I knew that going would more than pay for the cost. If I were certain it would lead to many more opportunities than what I've got going on at present, I would say it's worth paying for the airfare, hotel, and restaurant food.

It seems like you could stand to gain quite a lot from going to this conference, and your company might just lose you. They are justifiably afraid of that, but so what? This is capitalism, man. It's ruthless. Everyone's in it for themselves.

Your company is subject to market forces. You are subject to market forces. They would need to find another developer to train up if you left, and if they let you go because you went to a conference, they would be taking on the risk of having to replace you.

So there's an inherent risk in going (on both sides). Can you currently afford to take that risk? How much do you have saved? How much debt do you have? Would you be okay with being unemployed for a few months while looking for the next thing?

When someone else's interests are naturally at odds with yours, there is little negotiation to be done. They simply don't want what you want, and that's okay. Can you afford to go get yours?

There is an implicit assumption that working for yourself means working for medium to big clients, but that isn't always the case. What if you build a product and have hundreds or thousands of customers? They might leave a negative review here or there, but they aren't going to give a rip which conferences you go to.

Imagine building a business that passively generates half of your yearly spending. Now you just need to generate the other 50% of your yearly spending from "active" projects like jobs and medium-sized clients. It's not full independence, but I'll take it over being completely beholden to someone else.

It's not childish to take responsibility for your life, to carve your own path and gain greater degrees of autonomy. In fact, it's what fully developed adult human beings do.

That's what I get for not reading the whole thing

Yaaay government deciding it's better for my employer to pay a food service provider instead of just paying me directly.

LOL Disadvantage: "The need to prepare food."

Are we talking about generally existing as a human being? Yeah, until they invent food replicators you're gonna have to prepare your own food. Get used to it.

I'd say getting to use your own kitchen to prepare your own delicious and nutritious meals is one of the prime advantages of remote work. It saves you way more money over going out to eat, and it's a much more healthy alternative to blindly trusting a restaurant or some food service company like Sysco.

Then again, I am a bit of a maverick in that I make all of my lunches at home, even when I have an office I must travel to for work. You can do your entire week in advance on a Sunday evening, spending less than $30. Not. A. Hardship.

We really should push back against the catered meals and supposed "perks." That's money the company could have spent on increasing your salary or paying a higher dividend to shareholders. Instead of doing that, they've decided they're going to spend your money on an army of chefs to keep you at the office 24/7.

I'll take the higher pay, greater freedom and autonomy, and my own home cooked meals, thank you much.

- If any of your actions make me so miserable I get in a fight with my spouse, the contract is finished.

Or worse, you die early.

This kind of reminds me of clients who send emails late at night. My general policy is to just make myself unavailable, or simply send a polite reply telling them I will address it first thing in the morning. I figure if I do that enough, it will nudge them toward understanding which times are appropriate and which ones aren't.

Yeah, so in that case I think it would make sense to tie each code review session to the feature/story you are reviewing. Maybe that's what you were already doing. I'm not sure.

I do. I try to focus on improving my estimates. I find that some things work better when lumped into a general category like "Code Review" while you can be more specific with other things, for example a particular feature or user story.

You have to ask yourself, what value would you get from estimating that a code review will take 10, 20 minutes? Is that kind of information particularly useful for forecasting? I would guess it isn't because it seems too granular. Nobody I know sits down and plans a series or 10 or 20 minute code review sessions. They usually plan out bigger blocks of work.

I use a tool called Track - Simple Time Tracking and Invoicing (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/track-simple-time-tracking/i...)

Full disclosure, I built Track and I own the company that sells it.

I built Track because I wanted a cleanly designed time tracking tool that syncs my data between devices and doesn't make me sign up for an account. It's iOS-only. It works on the iPhone and iPad.

So yeah, I use the tool that I built. I use it every day while I'm working on my client projects.

I'm not sure what would be unpopular about this. It's totally true. When you aren't charging a bazillion dollars an hour to write software, there's much less pressure to hit deadlines. And generally speaking most people perform better on cognitive tasks like programming and learning when they don't have a gun to the back of their head.

If your employer is willing to subsidize your learning, count yourself extremely lucky. Most companies don't have the luxury to do that. They're pressed for time, so instead of having you learn the right way to do something, you tend to get pushed towards quick implementations that 'will do' for now. Even companies with the best intentions face this problem because their clients will set some arbitrary deadline that they have to stick to

When you're on your own time, you can relax and explore the subject matter in depth. It's this process of exploration that will make you better.

Just remember that it's a selfish world out there. Nobody cares if you're getting better as a programmer. If you want to get better, you have to invest in yourself.

I think at the very least we can agree that it is the employee's job to inform their superiors of feature creep, looming technical debt, and whatever bad practices they see.

If you're fixing bugs in production because your manager hasn't addressed longstanding technical debt, then yes, you shouldn't feel bad about the bugs that slipped through against your advice. In that case, I think your indignation at working extra hours without getting paid would be justified.

Ideally, we would do proper estimates upfront without being pushed to grossly underestimate features because so-and-so thinks it should only take a few minutes.

Pushy managers and bad employees are made for each other. It's a feedback loop.

You seem awesome to work for. Need an iOS developer?

Your style totally matches mine.

Regarding point number 2 - A promotion has to get handed to you in some way or another, regardless of how hard you work for it.

I just don't want my career advancement to be up to the arbitrary whims of someone in a position of authority, that's all.

There are many ways to work your way up that don't involve giving all of your free time away to someone else who may or may not decide to promote you for it.