I want to go on a tangent here and say I completely agree. I don't know how it happened but many people around me now express how they love this or that, most things are amazing or awesome, and they click on heart emojis in Teams on more or less every message. Not sure if it is generational, or cultural or whatever. I can imitate but to me if feels odd. I prefer a more balanced language. Btw I am in a large well known company in Europe with people from all over the world, but quite young for the most part.
Yeah, for me the key thing is professionalism (a loaded word, worth an entire book). If everyone on the team "has it", then whether people are more direct or less direct probably won't matter, because everyone understands their role and their duty, and aligns their behaviours and their interpretations accordingly.
Anecdotally, for every "bad situation" I've ever been in in the workplace, I could point to at least one person who was not being professional.
Many disciplines have a real "culture of professionalism" (and I've operated in these disciplines prior to switching to to eng), but I don't think software engineering has that. I think it's probably related both to the relative abundance of workers without formal instruction, and to the lack of standards across academic programmes / bootcamps etc.
It’s also sign (IMO) of the rapid growth in the field.
When there is a severe shortage of warm bodies and things go up and to the right, a lot of ‘less important’ expectations get overlooked.
When it does that for a long time, people sometimes forget why the original expectations were even there in the first place. Then, when it’s no longer up and to the right, we have to figure it all out again or it falls apart.
Do it enough time and it gets embedded in official professional standards, etc.
That said, I’ve certainly run across many Engineers (with the ring type) that do plenty of unprofessional things. They just figure out how to do them passive aggressively or sidestep what would run afoul of the official standards. But it’s the same thing.
That's pretty much in line with my observations as well.
It's not to say that accredited engineers are automatically better, or that accredited engineering programmes are perfect, or anything like that. Like you pointed out, there's no shortage of examples/arguments to the contrary. (Personally, my background is medical, so it's a bit different than accredited engineering programmes, but I also am familiar with those having been involved in a bunch of senate-level evaluation of programmes, etc, at my school.)
But I do think accredited programs have certain benefits, and that the software world should pay attention to what other engineering disciplines get right.
I agree with you and can't stand the fake-friendly speak many of my countrymen use. Additionally:
> But if people are adults, having a little friction is not a big deal. We don't need to appreciate all behaviors to live together.
This is, in my opinion, a hilariously French thing to say. Although I am by no means an expert on France I did study the language for many years and lived with a Parisian family for a semester in college, with some travelling to the south. "Everyone is a little bit pissed off at each other, but that doesn't really bother them and they still quite enjoy life" is exactly what I thought of the French. (With the exception of my hometown culture, I preferred life in France to life in the US.)
> As a Frenchman, many Americans find my totally France compliant speech a bit rude.
I call it exact. But indeed, it takes a little while to get used to it. I recall someone at a tech company here in the Bay with a French manager that thought his manager didn't like him, until he read his feedback during his first performance review.
French Canadians sounds like Americans with accents.
You mean, unlike the genious idea of stealing MS-DOS from Gary Kildall?
I mean, sure, you can make great profits when you put morality asides.
Which Gates did again and again.
People forget about this today because of the extensive PR of the last decades to wash the sins of the past, but Gates and MS were basically in the middle of a scandal every 6 months in the 90. Quite amazing since twitter did not exist to report it.
Although Microsoft has stolen things (e.g. from Stac Electronics¹) in this circumstance I believe you've confused "stealing" from Gary Kildall with "licensing" from Tim Patterson².
In fact, when IBM came to Microsoft to talk about licensing their programming languages for the PC, it was IBM who wanted a packaged deal i.e. get the OS from Microsoft as well.
And it was Gates who told IBM reps to go talk to Kildall.
Only when Kildall apparently blew them off Gates took a great risk by promising to deliver an OS as well. And he did it by buying an existing product to use as a base and evolving it.
It's all well document from both Microsoft people and IBM people.
> false positives... 10Mo URL crashes my Python interpreter? I'm ok with that.
Either you're wrong about the "false" part or you're testing the wrong entry point.
Fuzzing has a long warmup time but probably the lowest false positive rate of any testing technique - if it crashes you're wrong about some invariant, even if that's only "I need to fuzz parseX, not decodeX".
I think it just depends on how critical the software is. If it's just a webpage running in your browser then it's not a big deal if it crashes on some weird input. If it's a database, each crash can cause huge amounts of damage.
The linked post doesn't actually say "If you don't pay your credit card bill we disable your iTunes/iCloud"
What it actually says is "If you don't pay your credit card bill, we decline new transactions since you're at your credit limit. If your iCloud uses your Apple Card and that transaction is declined, then your iCloud may be disabled."
Apple apologists should probably work on replacing their "bUt GoOgLe!" routines, since people have largely moved on from the Google ecosystem as a whole - and in some cases, like this one, Google is not even present in the same market (credit cards).
Given we are in the AI revolution right now, a part of those workers, often quite well paid so they have a bit of cash aside, have taken the opportunity to explore that.
Maybe those layoff will create tomorrow's unicorns.
Was laid off Thursday after 10 years. This is exactly what I'm doing for the immediate future. In no hurry to go through the dog and pony show of groveling and prostrating myself for the opportunity to make money for someone else.
I did my first actual prostration last week. Let me tell you, I’d much rather lower my heart to the earth for someone who moves me with her singing than play ego minesweeper on a whiteboard for an engineer who happened to be hired earlier than me at a company revolutionizing the used tire industry.
