What A Time To Be Alive

14 Replies to “What A Time To Be Alive”

1. Well, “per Wired” means you can assume it’s complete bullshit.

   That said, most software “engineers” can’t find their own ass with both hands and a compiler and have no idea how computers work, so forcing them to justify their own code is probably long overdue. It’s called a code review, they’re supposed to be doing that anyway.

   On the other hand I’ve had to maintain codebases older than some of these allegedly 20-something autistic engineers; they simply haven’t the real-world experience to understand the tradeoffs involved. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is rampant in software.

   Ehhh. My biggest fear is that the Elon Musk Wrecking Ball will become the latest fad in software engineering and we’ll have to deal with that for the next ten years.

2. DR, can you explain that last bit?

   1. Sadly I can’t find the source, but there was an IBM exec who said “software engineering is more prone to fads than women’s fashion”. Software engineering is still an incredibly immature discipline, in part because the people in it are so incredibly immature. Every new Thing becomes the magic bullet that’s going to solve all our problems – OOP, Rational Rose, Agile/XP, monorepos, Rust, whatever. The notion that different problems require different tools and different approaches is completely foreign to the industry.

      The Elon Musk Wrecking Ball can be the appropriate tool if you have a sclerotic organization full of goldbrickers. I’ve been through two such reorgs in my career and they were necessary to save the org as a whole. But I can absolutely see every C*O deciding that it’s the go-to strategy for any tech company that isn’t performing absolutely perfectly and scuttling their own org for no good reason.

      1. Frankly, I can’t help thinking that an organisation that gets scuttled for no good reason had a good reason to get scuttled. Perhaps I’m just superstitious.

3. Hahahaha … the people complaining about this have been CHEERING every 20yo computer savant who was being hired at Google and Apple in lieu of College … since they weren’t gonna learn anything in college that they didn’t already know.

   To quote JD Vance … “Do you even hear yourself talk?”

4. I can’t wait till those same autistic kids start looking at the code and programming of all the evidence they put out to for climate change. Based on history the stuff is written to produce climate change is, global warming, if you inputted to numbers in the phone book. Itll get amusing because the Trump team won’t hide to truth.

5. Agree on the need for skepticism in judging this “ story “. Is it 99, or 100% bullshit? Nice slur about autistic people there. ( Elon is said to be autistic in story after story. I guess the label is now a cope for the left, who in general, fail at everything they do, and will never accomplish anything positive in their lives.

   If the left gets people to believe this story, they’ll soon try even more outrageous ones.

   Look out for Business Insider stories, as well. They are another distributor of stories that turn out to be 100% bullshit, pitched as “ insider “ sourced stories.

   The majority of media is simply wild lies about the right designed to prop up the left and its institutions.

6. I guess the writer of an article trying to imply that the qualified, experienced, software engineers in government service are being replaced by lesser quality people from the private sector assumes all of us just forgot that when the government was executing a multitrillion dollar overhaul of our health care system they couldn’t even build a functional website.

7. I have posted many times before and will again post – at least 50% of government employees (municipal, state/provincial and federal) NEED to be told “Your services are no longer required!”

   1. Try 85% or higher and I’m right there with you, Big Momma.

   2. JMM 100% right on that point. but i would add the cavet that a take-it-or-leave-it severance package be offered, and none of this “month-salary-for-year-worked” BS either( the exception being new hires <7 years).. make it a flat amount equal to the yearly salary, averaged over the years of employment . Benefits.. you're on your own….
      NO GOVT FUNDING FOR RELIEF PROGRAMS FOR ANYONE !!!!!

      anyone who has been in the work force( either govt or private sector) for more than a couple of years should have been saving toward retirement, even if it was only a little bit. If they didn't, well, sorry about your situation, but a little self-control would have gone a long ways.
      I'm guessing that there's gonna be some hard landings… those who have been contributors to a supportive network , like a church for instance will do ok… as for the rest, well there's plenty of cheap housing in rural western Canada and lots of food available. Saddle up, son…gonna be a hard ride but worth it in the end

      1. Where is this “cheap housing” of which you speak? Do the houses have roofs? Are they able to be heated? Do they have enough land for a garden?

8. what makes you think any government employee actually wrote any code? Almost certainly all code was out sourced to the lowest bidder. Which likely tells you how clean that code is.

   The government folks in question are likely experts in USING the software but are unlikely to be experts in the design of that software.

9. Link is broken 🙁