I think it's caused by the nature of how most companies scale their productivity up, which is by adding more people and creating more teams. As a result the codebase for any given product starts to reflect this organizational structure.
For example, a bank app might have a team for user management, and another team for product management. Then in the bank app, the designers added one module for selecting products on one page, and another module for selecting users on another page... and even though at the implementation level, these two modules are essentially the sam, they are implemented separately, as there is a lot of overhead in communication to have both teams implement one that handles both requirements.
I think this phenomenon guarantees that as codebases grow they accumulate tech debt. As more and more people develop on one application proper global abstractions that would be more efficient are not as common because of how the teams are structured in a way that is not aligned with this abstraction and instead is aligned with how the business side decides to structure teams.
I think it is born from a fundamental misconception of how software should scale as you add more and more features, and typically companies favor adding more people instead of asking their engineers to do the scaling using the software itself. Within a certain domain, there is very little reason not to abstract the implementation of features themselves, which would scale the application just by adding a few lines in a configuration file. Then a single engineer can be developing multiple features in the same amount of time an entire team completes only one. This might just be a blind side of someone who has not studied computer science theory, and instead thinks that if you want more software you need more people.
I can resonate with this. We do well in a space with a commercial program. It's been under constant development for 27 years. It has never had more than 2 developers at a time (only 2 project leads).
This means the system is "coherent". Things are where you expect them to be, in code, and in the UI. it has scaled very well starting out for "small businesses" and today runs in big enterprises.
One benefit of this leanness is that there are very few meetings. When something is needed by sales, or there's a tricky design question, or hard programming, then a simple ad-hoc phone call moves things along.
That said, having 3 or 4 people going can be advantageous, but team-management goes up exponentially.
Software Engineering is not yet standardized as a proper role, at least in the US. The boundaries are fuzzy and often overlap a lot with management and business related tasks and responsibilities. In my opinion this is definitely a problem for setting proper expectations and hiring the right people. Companies are definitely bending the role to suit whatever needs are necessary from the business standpoint. For example a decade or two ago there was more a difference between responsibilities of creating software requirements, testing, and measuring the usage, but these have shifted considerably and are mostly done by the feature level engineer.
Engineers have become something like Product Technologists, or a generalist technical person that must also produce and manage a slice of the overall product from idea to launch and analytics. It would be great if the role was formalized and it added guard rails to the industry in order to avoid this never-ending evolving definition of the role.
We will never extinguish dangerous ideas from existing. Exposing them is the best way to prevent those ideas from spreading because it gives a chance for the good ideas to create the proper contrast.
The line between not tolerating intolerants and the intolerants themselves is not there. Once you say a certain group of people cannot participate in society because of their ideas, it only takes a small effort for corruption to take over and use that tool against everyone else. It's the same reason a monarchy is a bad idea and has been the cause of many injustices in history.
I don't think that is the case. Amplifying would be if X promoted the tweets, or allowing ads of that kind. What exactly is censorship preventing? Is it that normal people would be convinced by this and a larger movement would form? I would hope that there is a lot more than censorship in the way of people adopting bad ideas, with the exception of children, which is what this boils down to... treating the majority as children that need to be protected from certain ideas (which is arguable since the Internet is not safe for children for the most part, but that is a different matter).
I don’t use Twitter anymore, but folks on Reddit are saying that they’re getting recommendations and even push notifications for right wing pundits, despite not being subscribed to anything remotely right wing: https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1cj5jw7/elon_mu...
Well, these days people will call anything that is not far left, the far right, so I'm a bit skeptical on that front. Also the problem in that case is twitter's suggestion algorithm, if there is any, because you can always block and mute anything you don't like. If twitter gets taken over by extreme far right accounts then one of two possibilities is true - the app sucks and most people leave, or if most people stay then most people agree with it. I don't think there is a scenario in which most people do not agree with it, and then they change their minds because the app has a bad suggestion algorithm.
Games and interactive media is the film and moving pictures of the 21st century. It still amazes me people think it's a waste of time or somehow only for kids.
> Just 16% of girls think a career in engineering is suitable for someone like them, compared to 44% of boys.
Serious question, why is this "bad"? Is absolute equality in everything intrinsically valuable always? It seems progressives have taken the idea of liberal equality under the law and extend it to human nature for no reason other than to achieve a contrived version of a utopia. There are many ways to achieve a good society, and I don't see why differences existing between different groups of people needs to get in the way of that. Furthermore, I don't think this can be top-down engineered by politicians (and in fact attempting it has caused historic catastrophes). Maximizing individual freedom has been the most consistent producer of progress.
> Maximizing individual freedom has been the most consistent producer of progress.
That's exactly what the goal is. It's not about making everything equal, it's about counter-acting societal pressures for men and women towards certain career paths and allowing people who show aptitude for certain fields to feel comfortable pursuing them.
That would be equality of opportunity, which definitely maximizes individual freedom. I think the context of the article is the recent push of equality of outcome. It is trying to arrive at a specific destination in terms of the composition of a certain group of people, which leads to the question of why that would be desirable to begin with.
> Serious question, why is this "bad"? Is absolute equality in everything intrinsically valuable always?
I'm not sure it is "bad" from the girls point of view. The are choosing what they like.
But personally, as a male working in stem, I think we would all be better off with a more equal gender balance. Mixed gender team work more efficiently in my experience. If very hard to get a mixed team if no girls apply for the job.
On the first point, that could end up being a discussion on freewill, which makes sense it is such a highly debated topic.
The second point is fair, but would raise questions about why we push society in that direction and not another. It goes back to trying to engineer society instead of letting it happen. I think we can be cautious of where we don't want to go, but pushing in any one direction is imposing values on other people. The flip side would be pushing society in a religious direction as it used to be done in many cases in history.
There is certainly a role that could exist in this intersection of business and engineering, however I feel strongly that pushing all or most engineers in this direction is a common mistake within the entire software industry.
Framing most of engineering from a business perspective creates a serious technical blindspot and it carries with it serious risks of unreliable software, recurring bugs, extremely inaccurate estimations, very slow development, etc. etc.
As someone who as deep dived into the theory of software, it's painful to see the same type of bugs happening over and over again, or the same features being built over and over with slight differences wasting developer hours. These "meta" problems are solved with better engineering, but in my experience the engineering level is never allowed to reach a level that can actually solve them because of the things listed in the article. There is an overestimation of business thinking value, and an underestimation of software theory and its applications.
So is there no water without contaminants? How is this still a problem in 2024, or is it that we have extremely sensitive measuring tools now?
Same with a lot of foods, it shows warnings on the package, like almonds have some arsenic or other dangerous chemical warnings on it. What is even the alternative, grow your own organic food in some remote land?
You will pay more starting next year, depending on whether or not the Commission decide to go forward with the fixed rates which I think is about to happen in July, if I recall From last I checked I would pay about $45 extra a month, but I'm far from wealthy, it's just that the way they are doing the income-based breakdown does not factor in how expensive the area you live in is (Bay Area being quite expensive unless you want to risk living in dangerous areas). Additionally, I don't think this means more reliable power. I have already been through a 24 hour outage last year (and multiple shorter ones every year).
This can be downplayed all day long but it seems obvious to me that CA has a combination of high taxes and poor infrastructure that is incompetently patched with bad policies and all together put a lot of strain on the middle class. If it's not corruption at some level, it has to be greatly incompetent people in power, or a combination of both.
> Individuals and families have access to between $4,000 and $8,000, she said
More and more communism. If you don't let some people fail, then the entire system will eventually fail and take down everyone with it.
You cannot create a utopia. It's a dangerous hubris that destroys entire countries. Some people necessarily fail, and the best hope is for lessons to be learned, and education to prevail and teach people how to avoid it.
Let's watch while California creates a permanent underclass that are hopelessly trapped depending on government help. Let's watch as people's feelings empower bad decisions that do the exact opposite of what they think it will do, again and again.
> While the declaration has implications for the treatment of animals, and especially for the prevention of animal suffering
I don't think it does because you can't derive ought from is. We could know exactly what consciousness is but it says absolutely nothing about whether or not we should be respecting it. Applying the Golden Rule (I don't like pain, therefore inflicting pain is bad) is outside the realm of science and requires another framework in order to justify it.
For example, a bank app might have a team for user management, and another team for product management. Then in the bank app, the designers added one module for selecting products on one page, and another module for selecting users on another page... and even though at the implementation level, these two modules are essentially the sam, they are implemented separately, as there is a lot of overhead in communication to have both teams implement one that handles both requirements.
I think this phenomenon guarantees that as codebases grow they accumulate tech debt. As more and more people develop on one application proper global abstractions that would be more efficient are not as common because of how the teams are structured in a way that is not aligned with this abstraction and instead is aligned with how the business side decides to structure teams.
I think it is born from a fundamental misconception of how software should scale as you add more and more features, and typically companies favor adding more people instead of asking their engineers to do the scaling using the software itself. Within a certain domain, there is very little reason not to abstract the implementation of features themselves, which would scale the application just by adding a few lines in a configuration file. Then a single engineer can be developing multiple features in the same amount of time an entire team completes only one. This might just be a blind side of someone who has not studied computer science theory, and instead thinks that if you want more software you need more people.
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