rp3
Next, let's get a little more general by talking about opportunity cost. Assuming Patrick's writing really is responsible for 7% of Stripe's engineering team (which is a huge assumption), what would happen if Patrick had never written anything? Maybe the company would flounder and die, or, more likely, engineers would still be attracted to a high growth startup and Stripe would largely be in the same position.
Finally, I'd like to make a statement about writing in general. The goal of writing is to convey an idea. What constitutes an acceptable conveyance of an idea is context-dependent, but generally you want to convey an idea for a reason, e.g. you may want to convey the design of a system you're building. In these cases, creating the idea to convey (e.g. designing the system) is so much more important than the actual conveyance of the idea (e.g. explaining the system), unless you're so bad at explaining that people are hopelessly lost after reading your writing. Most people know when they understand something and know when they need clarification. Humans are consensus builders by default, which makes ok writing and great writing equally good in many contexts. The person who started this discussion may have been offended at the insinuation that they can't program, but I largely agree with such an assumption. Writing is a tool ultimately used in our profession to aid in the building of things. To focus only on writing means you're not focusing on building.
I can’t find where that stat comes from, however. As for everything else you said, it would be great to have sources. As far as I know, cooling is one of the major costs of running a data center. It would be illuminating to know why that’s now false.
Obviously dedicated testers can't fix bugs themselves, so cannot be to solely to blame for bugs. Similarly, it's possible to write bug-free software without a dedicated tester, so testers can't receive full credit for bug-free software.
However, a testers job is not to play a game haphazardly. Rather, the job of a tester is to develop a methodical way testing software that is under rapid development. This can mean creating test plans, understanding the most important user flows, understanding common failure scenarios, and even light automation. Games are hugely complex pieces of software. This large breadth means that the test workload is too big for the engineering team. Also, the systems underpinning a game are usually very tightly coupled, meaning that changes in one system can break things in a completely unrelated system. Having good testers is an integral part of delivering a bug-free experience in this type environment.
> In the first camp — the randomized trial camp — we have one very large-scale study from Belarus. Known as the PROBIT trial, it was run in the 1990s and continued to follow up as the children aged.
And then later
> The researchers analyzed the impacts of breastfeeding on allergies and asthma; on cavities; and on height, blood pressure, weight and various measures of obesity. They found no evidence of nursing’s impacts on any of these outcomes.
If you go to the PROBIT trial, you see it clearly stated that they did find an impact from nursing:
> Conclusions: Our experimental intervention increased the duration and degree (exclusivity) of breastfeeding and decreased the risk of gastrointestinal tract infection and atopic eczema in the first year of life.