AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?
Well the usage of the word "work" here is peculiar. Has "work" in our society already become a word equal to "travail, toil", "something done with the explicit intent of earning one's living but uninteresting"? Isn't "work" supposed to be fun, challenging and rewarding in itself? The article surely reads a little bit weird to me in this sense, though I get the idea.
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire
This sounds a bit cynical and negative to me. Probably if your company is too big then these are quite inevitable. But at least at where I work now I feel free. There's enough transparency, candidness and equality among all. Don't know whether things will change in the future, but a relatively "clean" state is certainly possible, at least according to my current feelings.
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire
I've always figured that the thing about an "absolutely impartial" standard is a mirage. Go way too much into it and what you create will be deformed, mechanical processes which largely deviates from the thing's original intention and end up worse than what it intends to replace. Look at any huge national exam system(China for example) then you'll perfectly understand what I mean. Students get absolutely no space for personality, and nothing else than abilities to do specified types of exams get evaluated. No holistic abilities at all. A process with space for subjectivity certainly isn't perfect, but it allows so much more to be evaluated than purely mechanical and many times deformed narrow "skill sets", if so can be called. I remember reading Peter Thiel say PayPal didn't recruit a guy because "he loved playing basketball", although all other attributes looked great. That might be a little bit extreme but it says a lot about how hiring, and generally admission processes, isn't a precision science, and that's actually probably how lots of decision-makers want it to be. It requires dynamism, interactions and gauging between people. Simple blind mechanical assessment results aren't equal to "justice" in any way. It's the same thing as you cannot just choose your friends nor your mate by "assessment scores". I feel many commentators are stressing too much on another extreme of things here.
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire
Just be yourself. Interviews are not equal to acting like an extrovert, and any attempt to "fake" will likely backfire. But indeed I have to admit I was quite shocked at how incredibly unsociable and inexpressive those programmers are at my first work. Probably it's just because I'm not working at a world-class place yet and the sample size is way too small, I can only assume.
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire
Couldn't such absolute statements actually be your own "rationalization" and prejudice? How can you be sure it was others who messed it up, not you, if you keep thinking this way everywhere? Very probably you indeed have some aspects to improve, but you just convinced yourself that "no, I'm perfectly capable, but that interviewer sucked and judged me arbitrarily. That was his fault, not mine." Thus you look at the world through hostile, cynical eyes and miss up on the opportunity to improve yourself. Isn't that even more harmful and irrational thinking, which you seem to be up against?
In short, possessing such a mentality is dangerous and likely to keep your mind shut.
I don't doubt that you might happen upon some pathetically incompetent interviewers. But if you treat every "no" response in this same manner it's awful.
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire
Honestly I don't get what you're trying to say here at all. Sorry to be rude, but please either have something constructive, or don't leave senseless comments that are unpleasant and pointless to read.
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: IBM Design Language
What's the issue with Google Drive? Do you suggest they should come up with their own whole backup solution? Why reinvent the wheel anyways. Not to mention it's possible that only certain teams use it, not all the teams, nor the teams who have truly sensitive information in the spirit they don't want Google to see.
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: IBM Design Language
That's probably not comparable at all.
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: A Pragmatic Guide to Getting Things Done
That kind of "planning" mostly won't work. I've tried to do exactly that but it's really just IMPOSSIBLE to get your planned actions done exactly on planned timeslots. In the end the whole "planning" unravels. GTD makes a lot of sense to me because it completely avoids the problem by detaching actionable items from specific time slots: you just do pre-specified items one by one whenever you can. It doesn't deviate you from long-term plans at all, because you'll put them into "in" list also, and then write out the step-by-step thing to do. The only slight difficulty might be with repetitive items.
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: Screeps – the world's first MMO sandbox strategy game for programmers
I guess you're misunderstanding the intention of the developers. If they are truly just wanting to make a huge profit out of a brainless game pattern then they won't go with this design. Those "repetitive attention" games inevitably make you feel empty and waste your time in the end, and shouldn't be any self-respecting programmer's dedication. That's why there should be alternatives.
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: Pro Git, 2nd Edition
That is dangerous - you could very well be missing out on very important features all along the way without ever knowing it, wasting tons of time and productivity in process. This happens also when you directly start using an appliance without reading its manual first.
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: The Fourier Transform, explained in one sentence
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: Startcraps
A major contribution by tech industry is how it fundamentally transform the way we live, work and interact, in a mostly positive way towards higher efficiency. The effect is everywhere. I don't think you can find many tech companies which are not contributing something to this landscape. Are some of them possibly "more trivial" than others in a perspective? Might be. But it doesn't change the fact that they are having positive impacts on the world.
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: Startcraps
By "physical world" we don't necessarily have to do some groundbreaking theoretical physics discovery. Software like online collaboration tools, marketplace apps and search engines have already greatly transformed the way people interact and work. Isn't that change "physical"? Way too many people who study "hard science" end up being able to contribute nothing and just drop out of the field, or just passing their time on pointless researches supported by funds. The field was already overpopulated and what makes it worse is that its hard problems are few to come by and solving them requires luck. If you are out of luck then you're wasting your life. This is different from the world of software where you are almost always doing things that have an immediate positive effect on the lives around you.
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: The Writer Automaton, Switzerland [video]
We also have one in China, in the Forbidden City. It was a present by certain western diplomat in 1700s/1800s. I'm pretty sure this kind of thing was actually quite popular back at that time.
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: Always bet on text
Text existed before the proliferation of other media probably because it was primitive and inferior. Chimpanzees lived for eternity before human beings appeared. I don't see anything great in that. We didn't use a lot of multimedia in the beginning, primarily because of tech limits. Now that the conditions are ripe, why not? If everybody is using more and more of it, it's for a reason. Apple and MS brought about a revolution, exactly because they unlocked the killer feature that was the GUI. Ask if many of us would like to go back to the 80s regarding computer UI, that would be a nightmare. I certainly feel a 2-min video overview of product features is tons better than an one-hour read. Images and in general sensory feelings are always much more natural to human beings, which in essence are still a kind of animal. Texts were invented to maintain civilizations and enforce social hierarchies, but it was never ever
natural nor great in this matter.
The Twitter icon takes a lot of space in a digital form, yet it only takes one minute to draw by hand, while the author probably wrote for an hour.
In all it's just a pointless, childish and tunnel-sighted rant. "Bet" on text? Bet what? I'm quite amused by the number of upvotes here. Though gladly I see many sane counterarguments high up there also, which is quite reassuring :)
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: Tilde.Club: I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds
Right. At least that's how we use it in China. Probably also in a few other East Asian places.
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: Write every day
You certainly have to make some trade offs. But as long as you achieved what you want to do, how could that cost be "unacceptable" in any sense? You expected it and wholeheartedly embraced its existence in the very first place!
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: Write every day
I don't see anyone here talking about insidious, negative "competition" at least
AnonJ
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11 years ago
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on: Design for programmers
What do you mean. I dont get it. It's just a skill, as everything else.
