strangetimes | 5 years ago | on: Behavioral Immune System
I wonder if this explains why people forced to work in open plan offfices become less sociable? It’s well documented how illnesses travel in open plans.
strangetimes's comments
strangetimes | 8 years ago | on: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself
Great point. Developers are usually very smart folks, and we like to believe that we know everything. There's no substitute for context.
strangetimes | 8 years ago | on: How and why we teach non-engineers to use GitHub at Thread
What the heck are "data files"?
strangetimes | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: One thing you wish would happen in the next 10 years?
50% of office jobs are performed > 50% of the time from the worker's home (or remote location of their choice).
strangetimes | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: What sort of side-projects are useful for getting jobs?
Teach yourself test automation (Selenium, etc.). Shockingly few QAs know even the basics of scripting/programming.
strangetimes | 9 years ago | on: Employee #1: Amazon
I was hoping Shel would talk about using Lisp in the early days of Amazon.
https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-...
strangetimes | 9 years ago | on: Twilio's Seed Pitch
> I would be impressed with a tool to quickly design a web application in the same way Visual Basic did 25 years ago instead of talking about Bootstrap, Foundation, AngularJS, React, etc.
It's called ASP.NET Web Forms. Version 1 was released in 2002. Demos of it back then were quite impressive.
strangetimes | 10 years ago | on: Live Writer Is Now Open Source
MarsEdit is the client most people mention as a Mac replacement for Windows Live Writer, but after using WLW for years and then trying MarsEdit, it didn't hold a candle to WLW. It's shocking--WLW is a free tool that hasn't had active development since 2012--but true.
strangetimes | 10 years ago | on: Live Writer Is Now Open Source
To this day I run a Windows 7 VM in Parallels on my MacBook Air in Coherence mode just so I can write blog posts in Windows Live Writer. I looked for years for a setup that could beat this, and unbelievably, never found it.
strangetimes | 10 years ago | on: Why Software Outsourcing Doesn't Work Anymore
> It's hard for a lot of people on here to imagine dealing with 100k+ other coworkers but at a point you oftentimes have to abstract away what makes people human to work in most large corporations.
Working myself for a company of 150K+ employees, I can confirm this is totally true.
I hate a lot of high-level business speak like "resources", but what I've come to realize is that one cannot think of 150K people as individuals. It's too much for the human mind. If you see this as an indictment of large corporations, I wouldn't blame you. Just realize it's a reality of operating inside them.
strangetimes | 10 years ago | on: A Startup That Designed Its Office to Confuse Workers
Maybe they should add some tigers roaming around the office to keep the workers extra alert?
strangetimes | 10 years ago | on: Just Wear Headphones
I had the same experience working for a company that did pair programming 100% of the time. Very productive but exhausting, and in my mind, not sustainable.
strangetimes | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2015)
Location: Grand Rapids, Michigan
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Probably not
Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattblodgett
Email: mattblodgett [at] gmail [dot] com
Blog: http://mattblodgett.com
---
My blog posts this year about the non-technical aspects of software development (in particular office design) have made the front page of Hacker News, received over 200K views, and gotten me interviewed by Wired magazine. I'm looking to transition away from programming and into a role writing more prose than code.
strangetimes | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?
"A Pattern Language" by Christopher Alexander
strangetimes | 11 years ago | on: Take the Money and Run
This was posted on HN a few days ago, which largely discusses how the weather in LA is luring New Yorkers...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/style/los-angeles-and-its-...
strangetimes | 11 years ago | on: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”
I actually believe that Scrum is a way to avoid micromanagement. There's no way of getting around the fact that the people who pay you want to see steady progress toward the thing they're paying you to do. One 15-minute meeting each morning to assuage that concern is a reasonable solution to me.
strangetimes | 11 years ago | on: Ending the open office epidemic
How about the entire company sits at one continuous "superdesk"?
"The challenge was to create the most collaborative, creative environment possible. The result? A desk that we could all share, literally--4,400 square feet of undulating, unbroken awesomeness to keep people and ideas flowing."
You can't make this shit up.
http://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/meet-the-barbarian-supe...
strangetimes | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: Do you hate iTunes?
My Spotify Premium subscription is worth it just for the fact that I haven't had to touch iTunes in months.
strangetimes | 11 years ago | on: China
I've run into this before as well, where guys will brag about how much (unpaid) overtime they put in, how early they get to the office in the morning, etc. I feel pity for them, not respect.
strangetimes | 11 years ago | on: The Open Plan Office and the Extrovert Ideal
> Open-plan began to go into vogue as a backdoor mechanism for age discrimination, due to studies showing that older people were quick to associate them (and visibility from behind) with low status and therefore leave.
Do you remember where you read this? The bit about visibility from behind being associated with low status is especially interesting.
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