slothario

Well, this is the way I saw it as a student: the purpose isn't to provide "the right answer," the purpose was to understand the test, give the answer that they wanted, and use school as a springboard to better things. If you treat it as a system to be gamed you don't have to worry about what the truth really is.

I actually was always better at English than I was at math (much better). I even won an NCTE writing award in high school, and found math difficult. But I studied physics in college because I'm someone who can't stand BS and don't like the way English is taught at the college level. The idea of pure, simple truths deeply appeals to me.

But I feel even writing this is heresy. Maybe I'm just being a smug STEM type and I don't appreciate the world of literature. Maybe I just don't get it. But I went into college wanting to understand things, and making a game out of extracting hidden meanings from books just didn't offer anything I was looking for.

I'm assuming you mean you try to give people honest feedback, but people object to it because it's too harsh?

It's completely possible to honest, assertive and kind at the same time. I see this false dichotomy all the time: "be honest and make enemies" or "be silent and watch a project tank." There's a third option: be frank and kind. (And yes, there are environments where no form of honesty, gentle or harsh, is welcome -- smile, put in your 40 hours and try to find employment elsewhere.)

If you're constantly angering people with your honesty, the problem is not with your honesty but with your people skills. You need to cut the pity party and take a hard look at your communication habits.

America copied a lot of ideas from England during the industrial revolution. From my cursory understanding of things it seems like copying technology is how you get up to speed, before you can start really innovating yourself.

I think a lot of the ideas about how China isn't capable of innovation for cultural reasons is frankly rooted in racism. Not long ago they were a developing country, and they are rapidly, rapidly getting up to speed. If you were raised by subsistence farmers, you can rise above that but it's hard to become a technological prodigy.

But there's a whole generation of Chinese people being raised in a modern, prosperous economy, and I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be capable of the same contributions that Western students will make.

It's fake work until your web application reaches a point where server loads take your web API down, and endpoints frequently take well over 10 seconds to respond.

Yes, I worked at a place where both of those things were true.

Switching some services out to a service (in this case, Azure functions) saved my company like $10k/mo, too.

> All that said, I of course don't promote saying only hello and then waiting for a reply before proceeding. That's just silly.

Well, that's what the article is arguing against. No one is saying you shouldn't start your question with hello. You should just say, "Hello X, I was wondering..."

Someone needs to write a Slack extension (or whatever the plugins are called) that simply replies to "hi" or "hello" with "Hello! How can I help you?" and hides those opening salvos from you.

That's the main reason I would write a book: to tell people that I wrote a book.

You can literally say, "I wrote the book on that."

Actually, I started to type "I don't know why a company is willing to pay twice as much for an engineer in Silicon Valley than for one in Houston," but as I was typing that I had an epiphany.

What they're REALLY paying for is knowledge from other companies. A person who has worked at Google and other innovative shops has (hopefully) learned a bunch of great processes, and will (hopefully) implement them at their new workplace.

So an area like the Bay Area is filled with collective knowledge because there are great companies there, and all that talent is jostling around.

> As income inequality has grown dramatically in the nation, the very wealthy are blamed for all manner of social ills.

Boo hoo.