SE4L's comments

Seems to me the problem is the shared libraries. Yes, without sharing it means you have to repeat a fair amount of code, but in most cases the representation that each service cares about is not necessarily the same, which reduces the value of these shared libraries. It seems that they would have solved a lot of the really critical issues by simply not sharing as much code.

I would be interested to know why anyone would consider it hate speech. Maybe some of the things the founders said or did could be considered that when looking at it through the lens of modern society. But aside from the King of England, who does it inspire hate against?

Agile methods improved things for a while in my book. Because the old style was WAY worse. Long projects that were designed by people who knew little about the problem or the complexities involved. Everything was under bid and it resulted in every project going through at least 1 death March period. But I think SCRUM has made things too formulaic and it causes bad decisions in project management. I still think it is better than waterfall.

To me, burnout is a symptom of always feeling hopelessly behind. My identity as an employee was always in knowing what was going on, where trends headed, new projects, side work, etc. I now have 3 kids and just navigating the whole parent scene takes up the time I would have spent keeping up. It makes me feel like, if I sit down and watch a TV show it was time wasted so I feel guilty about it. That has really had a negative impact on my own enjoyment in programming.

But it's a business decision to pay expensive engineering time to automate what can be done by people for much cheaper. If the people become too expensive, the business decision becomes easier.

There are places in India where they pay 100 men pennies to dig a trench. Sure, they could buy a machine so 1 person could do the work of 100, but if the machine costs 100k and the guy who is trained to operate it makes 10 an hour, the payoff time is too long to justify. If the guys digging the trench demand 5 an hour, the barrier to the investment goes down significantly.

This is why, if a 15 dollar minimum wage is passed nation wide, you will never order from a person at McDonald's again... and any niche restaurant that does use people will cost significantly more. A large business like McDonalds benefits from this because they can absorb the cost. A small business can't, so big corporation's have less competition and can make even larger profits because they have less downward pressure on their prices.

People who make 100k per year feel like they are struggling. Their feelings about their finances place the company under no obligation to pay them more.

Equality of what? Should one of the people who works in their warehouse in North Carolina make equal pay with a software engineer who lives in Seattle?

Cartels exist to make money. The criminal element is not created by unfettered capitalism, it is created by prohibition. Prohibition is what raises the risk level to the point where people who are willing to break the law are able to demand a high enough price to make it worthwhile. If you compare the impact of the drug war with alcohol prohibition, the similarities are hard to miss.