I remember sitting in on a sales meeting early in my career. I kept quiet, but afterwards I complained to my manager that they were selling features that didn’t exist and conflicted with core concepts of the product. My manager told me that was how sales were made. I left the company not long after, I was already disgruntled prior to that discussion.
I’ve seen the same thing everywhere I go. I don’t have the disposition to be in sales, but I periodically daydream of making huge commissions by straight up bullshitting people. There seems to be no downside.
I don’t have great hearing, so I’m not sure I can really weigh in here (thanks punk concerts in my teens). I remember similar arguments around screens and 60Hz vs ‘the human eye’. I think a lot of people, myself included, can easily perceive the difference between 60Hz and something higher- given the right conditions. I would not be so quick to disregard claims of more sensitive hearing.
I’ve been very involved with the DNS blocking scene- and it’s extremely easy to circumvent. I always wonder if there are some principled nerds on the architecture side purposely designing things to be easily blocked with DNS blocking. Or perhaps the mercenary nerds are just that inept. Maybe a mix. I also don’t think the numbers of users with DNS blocking are large enough for the mercenary nerds to care about. However, the math for LoE to bypass DNS blocking has certainly changed recently.
I doubt the ‘average consumer’ is even using a password manager, let alone going to change their password because of something so common place as it being compromised.
My experience is not much different then what you listed, except I discussed programming with my math teacher. She said as long as I was the one who programmed it, and that I didn’t share the program with anyone else, the I could use it.
Looking back on that experience, I’m very grateful to her, but she also probably didn’t realize I was programming it to also show the individual ‘steps’ to get the solution instead of just the solution.
I’ve seen another pattern, I call it “The Document Mongerer”:
I regularly work in a largish monolith. We have micro services too, but most things are in the monolith. Over the years there have been multiple pushes to split it up into micro services. These efforts invariably fail because the _goal_ is the micro service architecture itself instead of something useful to the company, like the ability to do fast releases or better organized code.
Anyways, in the past few months I’ve seen multiple people individually ‘attack’ this insane goal with AI. The first step is always to generate massive amounts of documentation describing the current state of code and proposing areas to split up. Then, after the engineer generates this huge store of documents, they say ‘looked what I created’ and then drop it and move on to some other shiny toy. No one will ever read these documents. They are out of date before they ever get ‘completed’, their sole usage is to waste credits.
I’m seeing big wins with AI, but not at the product level. I’m excited about the progress, though maybe I should be questioning our priorities more.
There is so much hype around AI and using it to move faster that the extreme focus on ‘product’ and prioritizing ‘impact’ has greatly relaxed.
For the first time in my entire career, I’m able to prioritize addressing technical debt and friction in our SDLC processes.
Normally, these types of changes get bundled in with regular product work and cause timelines to grow. Nobody paid down technical debt unless it came due and was no longer optional.
I am using AI to address tech debt, but these are all things I identified as problems - and big improvements - long before AI was a regular tool in the toolbox. I just could never demonstrate how addressing them early would pay off in the long run through faster project turnaround. Fixing known issues simply doesn’t rank against new features when it comes to prioritization.
Anyway, I’m thankful to finally get to fix these things, and our ticket-to-deployment time is going way down - but none of this matters if ‘product’ doesn’t streamline their goals and priorities as well.
My kids are young enough that I don’t need to worry about it yet, but I can totally see how I might have the same issue. Beyond just myself, my partner is just as invested in the kids and I can foresee needing to rediscover ourselves together. Do you have any advice, tips, or insights for new empty nesters?
I’ve seen this too, but mostly with the ‘team lead’ seniors- the ones interested in the management track.
On the other hand, a SE2 was asking me for help with something that was way off track from what they should have been doing. This isn’t a new SE2, but someone who seems the have topped out as an SE2. Anyways, they were not understanding anything I was pointing them towards, so I got frustrated and just gave them the exact prompt to feed into their AI. The AI fixed it for them. They were amazed by the result, but should have been horrified by their uselessness instead.
I don’t think it was clear, but thanks for the insight.
Was WolfSSL forced upon Elixir or Erlang? Did they purchase it and received a defective product? Are they held hostage by WolfSSL’s decisions? Are they not allowed to modify WolfSSL as needed themselves?
I fail to see any victims beyond perhaps the WolfSSL maintainers for having to suffer such entitlement.
> Asking me to open a new issue to discuss this behavior instead of it being a high priority for them to open up a new issue internally to fix this is odd. I'm not here to do their homework for them.
Why are people so entitled? How much is the author paying WolfSSL to make demands of them?
> Currently I've only identified one victim of this decision, but there's bound to be more out there.
Oh yes, he has become a victim of using a FOSS library.
I know this is a joke, but in all seriousness it will probably be locked to a Samsung Thermostat controller with a screen - which can absolutely show ads - and require an App with GPS permissions to work (and use your location history to drive the advertisements)