Some CS rep said to me the other day when I was asking about a bogus charge on my account, “thank you for being part of our family”

I said “family doesn’t usually charge money, but go on”

I got a partial refund.

I imagine if all you do is watch films, you get tired of common stuff. You’ve seen it before. But if you only watch films sometimes, some of that is still interesting to you.

Kind of like how some video game nerds will be only “only double soj 2x blan Blah is viable” but like other builds do fine for everything except some optional mega bosses

I think most people are kind of bad with money, and I think that scales with income.

I think a lot about some old coworkers (six figure salary). We all wanted to go out for a party after work. A bunch of then paid like $80 for a car. I paid $3 for a subway ride. Got there at the same time.

Maybe that’s not so much “bad at money” exactly as have incomprehensible to me values.

When making small talk I usually explicitly differentiate between “what do you do for money?” and “what do you do for fun?”

Sometimes people are surprised by the latter, but it’s usually a more fun topic.

Saw the comic and knew the thread would be a train wreck. So many dudes take this kind of thing deeply personally and throw up colored flags about themselves.

Yeah I’m at a job that pays dirt, and doesn’t pay for holidays. I asked my boss if he could just say my assignment on Thanksgiving was to eat dinner, and pay me for the day. He was like “mm maybe”, but had to ask his boss. She, allegedly, said no.

I’m not watching a video but based on the title “capitalism is theft” I can guess what it says.

The problem is we can barely get people to understand that the company is not their friend and they have any rights at all.

You can’t teach a child calculus if they can barely do arithmetic. People are fish that don’t realize there’s water. It’s going to be hard to get them to build a space program. A noble goal, but not one with an easy direct path.

I feel like every retro I’ve attended has been a farce.

“What went bad? We said doing it this way would be harder and more risk prone. Management insisted we do it that way, and it took longer than and caused a site outage.”

"What should we do differently?’

“Listen to the team next time”

“That won’t happen”

I have several stories on this I like to tell.

I worked at a startup in NYC that was doing job-search related stuff. Find job postings, get resume advice, that kind of stuff. Someone in the customer service department found an article online about salaries, shared it, and then people were talking about how much they got paid. Management came down hard on this, and said it was a fireable offense to talk about salary. Everyone got real quiet on the topic after that. Was it illegal for them to do that? Maybe! But laws only matter when they’re enforced, and a bunch of entry level people making $30-50k a year don’t have the means to launch a legal challenge. That’s even if there’s enough solidarity to try, and the effort won’t be scuttled by scabs and bootlickers.

For extra irony, a couple years later the company launched an “Are you getting paid enough?” salary comparison tool.

I worked at a different startup in NYC. This one loved data. Data data data. They had t-shirts made that said stuff like “Data doesn’t care about your feelings” or whatever.

People started agitating about salary transparency. They wanted to know how much people were being made, because there was a sense that not everyone was getting paid the same for the same work. Also, some of us had in secret started comparing notes, and found some wide gaps.

Well, the CEO wasn’t having it. He said “we have salary bands”, but wouldn’t provide more detail on the range of the bands, who was in what band, and how it all worked. Just we have salary bands and they’re fair.

People didn’t like that, so he tried changing tactics. He said, “Who here thinks they’re being paid too much money? No one? No one wants a pay cut. Right. So that’s why we’re not going to release the specifics.” As if the only solution to Amy being paid too little is to lower Bob’s pay.

This is the same CEO, at the same “we love data” company, that when people brought up studies about four day workweeks being more effective, just shut it down with “We’re not doing that.”

Management and ownership don’t care. They don’t care about what’s legal or just. They care about power, and profit as a close second. I knew a guy that worked in a factory, and the owner reportedly would say stuff like “If you assholes unionize I will burn this place to the ground, and I don’t care if you’re inside or not.”

There need to be institutions, with teeth, to stop these kinds of things. If ownership even whispers an anti-union sentiment, they should lose everything.

I think out of hundreds of matches I’ve had like one person ask about my height. I’m pretty average, height-wise (under 6’)

There’s definitely a lot of cargo cult* thinking in software. People don’t understand the why of things but they want the results. That’s why most “agile” I’ve seen is a waste of time.

*Is there a less problematic phrase for this?

I’ve wasted entire days with people like that because they couldn’t be fucking arsed reading error messages and figuring things out by themselves.

I’ve had a couple interview tasks that are like “clone this repo and run it. Try to do [action]. Tell us any errors you find and how to fix them”

One of them was some sort of redux app, and the problem was a state mutation. Another one, the CSS had some weird so stuff rendered crazy. Both were pretty easy to track down and fix. You could probably also do something that’s like an error thrown, but people would probably just feed that into an AI now.

One of the guys I worked with said be prefers the chatbot because stack overflow always made him feel stupid when he’d ask for help. The emotional dimension is big for some people.

The worst is when people don’t know how the system works, and then won’t listen to answers

Like I was at a job and product was going on about “our system has no concept of project owner. We have all these projects but there’s nothing unifying them under a single owner. We need to build this!”

I was like “… what? That’s just not true. There’s a “company” object that does that. It’s got a foreign key with project in the database. I guess it’s a weird name but it’s there”

It took several back and forths over multiple meetings. They eventually got on the same page and I saved us doing a whole useless project, but they did insist I rename it to “account” in the database and code. I would’ve rather left it because that could’ve been dicey, but alas. (The rename did go out fine, but I had to go looking for every reference.)

For the code, open source is probably the way to go. People should be able to build from source. Otherwise, how do they know you’re not doing something shady. Open source is generally a net improvement on security, assuming people actually look at it.

For screenshots, first fix it so the screenshots render nicely on narrow displays.

Would probably need to be open source to be trustworthy. Running a random executable from the Internet seems dicey.

Needs more screenshots. The two that are on the site don’t render great on mobile. Can only see a small portion.

I’m unclear how you find another user and verify who they are.

Website should have a clearer feature list. The user manual wants to download a text file instead of showing it in the browser.

No one needs more than 5 million dollars. That’s enough for a comfortable life without laboring every again.

If they make a shit load of money doing concerts, that money needs to keep moving. Tax it so it can go into schools and infrastructure and such. They don’t need a mega yacht. People are starving and suffering from problems money would solve.

Oh I read about that but never played it. Thanks for reminding me of it.

You would likely find the end of the stairs, and then more rooms and hallways. You need to walk without purpose for a while for it to pull up the final room.

The dungeon was heavily inspired by the novel House of Leaves. Endless, featureless, black hallways. Great book.

One of the clues they found was from a survivor from the antagonist’s party who had gone in ahead of them. He said the boss-man had kept asking them lots of questions about their youth, where they’d grown up, their hobbies. Just a lot of personal questions. The survivor didn’t know why, since boss-man had never taken an interest in them before.