Michael O. Church

This link has already been posted, but I think it deserves some discussion around the subject of unions.

https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/programmers-dont-need-a-union-we-need-a-profession/

A union doesn't necessarily seem suited for software development. As people have already explained in much better details than I'd manage, a union aims to help all, but exceptional programmers would be limited by trying to keep everyone to the same level. Some of us would get a pay rise, but many more of us would see a significant drop in salaries, and that's not really fair to those that can justify that kind of salary.

Turning Software Development into a chartered profession seems like a no brainer to me, and I'd be interested in opinions as to why this hasn't happened already. In my mind, one reason is obvious, and that's the fact that hardly anyone seems to know the best way to do anything. More often than not, there's a huge difference in how one company and one stack will do something compared to another. Hell, two groups could write entirely different code based on something ultimately trivial, like their choice of CMS. Any professional body would need to be tech agnostic while also being able to set a high standard for anyone in professional development.

In all honesty, I think most software developers write code for absolute peanuts when you consider how vital the code is to the running of a business. I imagine that becoming a chartered profession would go much…

Yup, this seems very directly like a transfer of risk from the employer to potential employees.

But remember -- there's an engineering shortage! We can't hire good people! We need ten times as many h1b visas! (Pay more? Take a slight risk? Hire someone without five years of experience (in a four year old tech) doing exactly what we think we want them to do? Now why would we do something like that?)

Edit: and nonsense like this is going around. I recently talked to a very early stage startup that just raised either a very large angel round or a smallish round A. The phone screen went well, and my experience and skills were a great match. But then the ceo wanted to do a reference check to proceed not to an offer but to an in-office meeting with the other founders! I said that, well, my references are ceos and chief scientists and they're very busy; I can't impose on them just to see if maybe there's a fit. But again, I'll bet good money he's complaining to his peers about how hard it is to hire.

edit2: I'm gonna channel michaelochurch: this is beyond fucking amazing.

Not all positions lend themselves to candidate auditions. At Entelo, Joor
and Weebly, candidates for senior executive positions rarely go through a
trial process.

So yeah, all that shit about how execs are treated better? That's it right fucking there. At Entelo, Joor, and Weebly, if you're a regular asshole and dumb enough to want to work there, you gotta suck it up and audition. But…

> Since the parent mentioned C and Java. What are you missing in Go compared to Java besides generics?

That's a clever way to attempt to constrain the conversation away from the elephant in the room. "Other than the bullet in your stomach, how are you feeling?"

Not having at least Java-style "dumb" generics, in 2015, is unacceptable; the existence of `go generate` should mortify everybody involved with Go. Not having better than that--consider what you can do with Scala even before you get to something like Shapeless--is not quite unacceptable but short-sighted and limiting because suddenly I as a human have to do what a moderately smart compiler can do around type checking and leveraging types to solve problems.

Go's general ignorance, and the community's general ignorance, to really basic functional programming that so hugely improves your life is probably borne out of the stupid type system; things like composition (Try monads) for error handling, so I'm not vomiting `if err != nil` everywhere, things like functional transforms for data structures so I'm not writing for loops until my eyes bleed. And you can't really do that in a statically typed language without either blind casts (which Go partisans recommend, because clearly everything should be `interface {}`, remember the days when java.util.ArrayList just gave you Objects?) or generics.

It's just...dumb, written for the lowest common denominator, and I guess the lowest common denominator is dishearteningly low.…

I have been working 25 hour weeks for a little over a year now, but agonizing over finding a good number for years before that. I've found that for difficult problems to crack, I may only work 1 or 2 hours per day. But for easier stuff like initial setup, a little refactoring, translating wireframes to layouts, etc, I can easily manage 6 or 7 hours per day. 8+ is too much, and working 3 or more days in a row at that level has a taxing effect on my health. I just don’t think humans are built to be sedentary with high levels of cortisol. So short prolific bursts interspersed with long hours of introspection seems to be the best route to writing the least amount of code for me. I would say 50-75% of my efforts are subconscious, so I spend 5 or 10 minutes as I’m falling asleep thinking about the problems to be solved the next day, and the answers either come to me or suggest some way in which I misframed the problem (wow misframe is not in the Mac OS 10.9.2 dictionary, but I digress).

I spend my off hours with a few dozen windows open with 50 or 100 tabs each, basically a web of interests. I use Javascript Blocker in Safari to reduce overhead, and periodically turn off Javascript and Flash then force quit and relaunch to restore my workspace. It’s crude but until I have an indexed, version controlled browser with everything I’ve ever viewed, it gets the job done. The number of days since I’ve viewed HN is a good barometer for either how far in the zone I’m in (if I’ve…

This does bring up the general question of who is sensitive or insensitive to humiliation.

I am reminded of something Michael O. Church wrote a few years ago [0] in connection with agile/scrum and the issue of intense observation of an employee's work process:

"Another topic coming to mind here is status sensitivity. Programmers love to make-believe that they’ve transcended a few million years of primate evolution related to social status, but the fact is: social status matters, and you’re not “political” if you acknowledge the fact. Older people, women, racial minorities, and people with disabilities tend to be status sensitive in the workplace, because it’s a matter of survival for them. Constant surveillance into one’s work indicates a lack of trust and low social status, and the most status-sensitive people (even if they’re the best workers) are the first ones to decline when surveillance ramps up. If they feel like they aren’t trusted (and what else is communicated by a culture that expects every item of work to be justified?) then they lose motivation quickly.

Agile and especially Scrum exploit the nothing-to-hide fallacy. Unless you’re a “low performer” (witch hunt, anyone?) you shouldn’t mind a daily status meeting, right? The only people who would object to justifying their work in terms of short-term business value are the “slackers” who want to steal from the company, correct? Well, no. Obviously not.

The violent transparency culture is designed for the most…

Five letters: BATNA

What is your best alternative to a negotiated agreement?

In any negotiation, with any party, your strength lies in your ability to walk away. If a vendor isn't offering you the product, or features, or price, you want, then having the alternative to walk elsewhere gives you strength. It's what lies at the foundation of the concept of a competitive market (though there are other elements as well, many involving information access).

Businesses, and recruiters, such as the one offering this exceptionally poor advice, have far more data, and far more experience than any given single worker in engaging in labour negotiations. Hell: It is their core competency.

Accepting the terms of an employer or recruiter in engaging in the battle directly is the worst possible thing you can do. Which includes this still-born advice to never accept a counteroffer.

Are there counteroffers you shouldn't accept? Yes. Are there counteroffers you should accept? Yes. You'll find discussion in this thread on both sets of circumstances.

(A general guideline: if it's the money that's been what's making you unhappy at a given job, go for it. If it's been other matters, that is what you should be negotiating on, though sweetening the pot doesn't hurt either.)

The degree of ignorance exhibited by far too many technologists on the concepts of negotiating, power, leverage, and advantage is vast. I include myself. I can only suggest: go out and start studying the…