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ghevshoo | 5 years ago | on: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

I was fired once in one of the worst ways possible. It came as a total surprise.

My boss and my boss’s boss booked a meeting with me at 17:00 in an external meeting room. My boss’s boss did the actual firing. My direct boss just sat there like a sad puppy.

They handed me a piece of paper and I signed it. I was still in shock. I was escorted to my desk to collect my things and then taken to the head of HR for my “exit interview”.

I told her the whole story and she actually seemed shocked herself. I think I spent over an hour with her, holding back tears, explaining “I wasn’t even told what I did wrong. What am I supposed to do now?”

She told me that she thought what the company was wrong. It didn’t change anything but it meant something at least, considering the state I was in.

I noticed from her LinkedIn that she left the company a couple of months later as well.

ghevshoo | 5 years ago | on: Apple takes Prepear logo trademark fight to Canada

> "This is not just Apple's lawyers being lawyers, it appears that the organization at Apple stands behind its lawyers,"

I wonder how much truth there is to this conjecture. It’s seems to me that Apple stand to lose much more than they have to gain by pursuing Prepare like this.

The Apple logo is one of the most iconic in the world. It’s hard to confused it with another piece of fruit. If Prepear was a computer company then it would be easier to see and to sympathize with Apple’s objection, but every way you look at it this seems a PR disaster of Apple’s own creation.

ghevshoo | 5 years ago | on: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

Yesterday I started donating $10/month to the Mozilla Foundation. TIL it’s not the Mozilla Foundation that develops Firefox.

I stopped using Chrome when they added the “feature” that logging into gmail was the same as logging into the browser.

If there was a little notification to the top right in the Firefox with a link to “pay”, even if it was optional, there is some proportion of users who would. And I would bet that your average Firefox user is an order of magnitude more likely to do this than your average chrome user.

So I wonder why they don’t do this? I’ve had similar frustrations for other products I get for free that I wanted to pay for.

ghevshoo | 5 years ago | on: Agile's early evangelists wouldn't mind watching Agile die

In my experience the main reason that agile mostly sux in large enterprises is because it is agile in name only. Not a single one of the people who are responsible from managing the process have even heard of the “agile manifesto” let alone read it, nor have any of them ever worked as a software engineer. So in most cases it could easily be better than what it is.

But I object to the authors complaint “and it’s pushing women engineers into non-technical roles.” and elevating the primacy of engineering above all else.

People come in all levels of competencies and have all manner of skills. I don’t care if you are a man or a woman. I care about how good you are at doing the tasks that need to be done to get the job done. And in large companies there are big jobs that require a lot of people and a lot of coordination.

I work with a woman who is not a very good software engineer, but she is good at administering and coordinating the work among other software engineers and she quite enjoys doing those tasks.

While she can improve on some of her skills as a software engineer and I try to help her with those, the author’s recommendation seems to be that because she’s a woman, I should push her away from work that she likes doing, that she’s good at doing, and which is important work to do.

This is objectively terrible advice, but some might accuse me now of male chauvinism. If so, fine. But I will forward this article to my colleague to ask her what she thinks and I’ll let her opinion be the ruling decision.

ghevshoo | 6 years ago | on: South Korea's drive-through testing for coronavirus

The situation in Stockholm, Sweden right now is:

“You who have symptoms similar to coronavirus will not be tested in the future. This applies regardless of whether you have been in the areas that were previously exposed to infection or had close contact with someone you know is ill in covid-19.”

There are no test kits. Hospitals have run out of face masks. And it’s only just getting started here.

ghevshoo | 6 years ago | on: Ram Dass has died

An exercise I learned from Sam Harris that finally started to convince me that free will is an illusion goes as follows:

1. Choose a movie title

2. Now do it again with your eyes closed and try to figure out precisely how you chose the movie title.

3. Keep doing it.

After a while you realize that stuff just “appears” to us. The same holds true for more than just movie titles. How exactly that process works, or why it appears like as if we have free will is an interesting subject.

ghevshoo | 6 years ago | on: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

Maybe the world has changed now, but around 2006/2007 I was an embedded software engineer for a company that built public transport smart-card ticketing systems.

I was working on a device that sat on a bus, operated by the driver. It had a monochrome screen with something like 640x480 resolution and around 16 or 18 buttons.

One of the things the bus drivers needed to do was to sell tickets, but the number of buttons they needed to press to sell a ticket was like 10 or 12 when I started working on the software.

I explained to our project manager who was in charge of the delivery that I could improve things to reduce the number of button presses to around half that amount, and it be much more usable for the drivers.

She told me very sharply that I was never allowed to improve the software in any way by my own decisions. The only kind of improvements to UI/UX (which was not even a term back then) was after the customer requested it, because then my company would try to file it as a "change request" rather as a "bug" because that way they could squeeze more money from the customer.

The flip side of that argument was that the company all too frequently would accept a loss on the main contract in order to win the bid (working in the public sector and all), and then have to earn money on all the change requests. It was one of the specific responsibilities of a project manager back in those days to drum up as many change requests from the customers as possible.

It was horrible and I'm glad I don't work there any more, but I can sympathize with the problems from both sides of the aisle.

ghevshoo | 6 years ago | on: We can't get enough of audiobooks

Blinkist sounds interesting, even if it feels more like cheating than regular audio books. I already feel a bit guilty saying I read book X, when I really listened to it.

Their website doesn’t explain much and the reviews are vague as usual. Does anyone have a personal reference for it, or know how it works? Is it real people reading or a computer voice? I presume the shortened texts are using something like https://smmry.com/

ghevshoo | 6 years ago | on: The Problem Is Capitalism

> Capitalism’s failures arise from two of its defining elements. The first is perpetual growth.

It's not just perpetual, but exponential. However it has nothing to do with capitalism. How do free markets and private ownership over the means of production demand perpetual growth?

It's our monetary system which demands this growth. Bitcoiners have been harping about this for years, but that message tends to get lost in zealotry.

As long as you have a debt-based monetary system and a central bank that targets 2% inflation per year, you can happily have a communist economy that requires the same exponential growth. And similarly that would not be the fault of communism.

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