1. It's very clear that his office has no qualms with filing cases that include untrue statements.
2. It's also the case that this group of claimants is strongly associated with a government official who is very angry at companies and has been trying to attack a communications law from every angle he has. One cannot help but wonder at the timing of all this.
It may very well be true. Sadly, we have to be skeptical now.
It's amazing to me that something as innocuous as, "Professional conduct includes at least an attempt at constructive criticism as opposed to venting" is now a heretical concept on this website.
Derision makes an unmistakable point. Is nothing worthy of derision? I say nothing rather than no one, because to deride a product's failings is not the same as belittling a person.
Let me add that Google has outsize power and influence, and the idea that we need to be nice to the corporate juggernaut is completely ridiculous.
We're not talking about 3rd party opinions here, we're talking about colleagues at the same institution being aggressive and destructive with professional designers.
Eye strain and inscrutable UI elements sound like concrete complaints. Whether they were phrased diplomatically, I'm not sure, and I'd concede it might be construed as venting depending on the delivery.
That being said, assuming it was brought up constructively, I see nothing wrong with the criticism except for the specific designers' refusal to consider it.
It would be great if it was brought up constructively. However, this thread appears to be about mocking the concept of psychological safety in the workplace.
I personally can't really see any evidence of mocking or any psychologically-unsafe ideas in any of the comments in this thread, so I'm not sure what you're referring to. You can criticize a product (design) without disparaging the person who created it, and I hope we all can take constructive criticism without making it personal.
Good UI design shouldn't be strictly for design's sake, so it can be frustrating when something is difficult to use because 'looking good' was prioritized over usability.
There's a quote I've read here that I like and think is appropriate: "Accessibility is for everybody."
Really, so this quote by ewmiller that I responded to:
> I wonder how long my employment would last if I just stopped doing a good job and then said that as a response to any effort by my manager or teammates to criticize my output.
was not a direct attack on the notion that professional conduct should include some degree of psychological safety?
Or perhaps this post [0] that says:
> In regular companies, employees who are bad at their jobs shouldn't feel safe, as they are likely to be fired.
I'm a Google SRE. I'm not actually a big fan of the Gmail interface either (and it'd be better if they actually followed material design, imo).
But this spirit is fundamentally opposed to people in corporate environments doing good work. Blameless portmortems exist for a reason. Because otherwise, every systemic or personal failure devolves into a scapegoating competition designed to find and remove the most vulnerable member of the team. My criticism is directed specifically at folks suggesting that internally peers at my workplace should harass designers.
I think that at this point, folks have realized this is not in fact true. If anything, lax parsers made the evolution of the web more difficult and more subject to corporate cooption.
Ignoring for one second the specifics of <img> in relation to SGML's `O` option (which was rectified in XML), this doesn't really need to have been the case. HTML could easily have said "if you encounter an unknown tag, render its contents as PCDATA" and sites would have degraded at least as gracefully as they do today. (If less gracefully than they did in 2000.)
(Heck, it could've been a generic SGML feature! "Unknown elements' contents are CDATA, unless they have this attribute in which case they're PCDATA, or this attribute in which case they're ignored" as a rule the DTD...)
But it didn't! The problem with being strict here is that every possible usage has to be pre-imagined and perfectly implemented. You're suggesting the original developers should have just made affordances for everything that will be added in the next 30 years. That's easy to say now. The first web browser was essentially just a hugely successful prototype.
And can you imagine having to type all your tags in upper-case? Yuck. :)
We never needed to parse tag soup. We only needed to say which DTD defines the new elements a document uses, and what a browser should do with valid but unknown elements. The latter could use #FIXED or default attribute values in the DTD, because some new elements have human-readable content and others don’t.
The looseness of html is usually in regards to automatically closing tags or unquoted attributes. You can keep strict syntax enforcement and still recognize and skip unknown tags or attributes.
You should read Alexis King's articles on how this is achieved. One of the most imporant aspects of modern parser combinator libraries is that a very small composable core can be exhaustively tested (importantly: with both hand written and random cases) to provide a reliable kernel for parser combinators.
Given that those cited parsers were built from the ground up to mesh with an effective and expressive type system like Haskell's, this problem was significantly reduced. The downside, of course, is that it became quite opinionated.
There is no magic want to wave, but certainly it's easier to work on a common minimal core of components than work on custom ad hoc validators. Lax parsers are not an inevitable outcome; they're a decision propagated by decades of bad opinions being taken as gospel.
Does LambdaSchool think the thing holding back their developers is that companies cannot onboard new developers?
While many small companies do not pay much attention to onboarding, I'm not sure that this is the actual stumbling block.
I think the bigger problem LambaSchool graduates who've talked to me say is that LambdaSchool's poor reputation and haphazard leadership have left the value of their schooling in question, and that puts them at a material disadvantage compared to people with a traditional college degree. This is a variant of the problem that Udacity and co face: companies recruiting have reservations about that type of education and view it as a risky hire.
AFAIK (it predates my time with Udacity substantially) Udacity discontinued their active placement programs, and generally when they do that (again, I have no special knowledge) it happens because it was neither working nor cost effective.
I think LambdaSchool would be better served using its resources to improve the reputation of its graduates by actually highlighting their work and functioning like a more traditional university; sponsoring open source work and research and showing their graduates and produce such work. Universities get famous and reputable off the back of work like this.
They might also consider not being such shady actors, with a long history of tax disputes and illegal operation. It doesn't matter if state and federal rules are unjust; what matters here is that companies (especially smaller ones) need to maintain the appearance of managing risk. An association with LambdaSchool damages that.
Full disclosure: I don't like the leadership of LS at all. But I have a lot of compassion and respect for the individuals that have taken their destiny into their own hands and learned the trade through any means necessary. I think folks that emerge from these processes are often better members of the workforce than traditionally educated people; because of the tight selection filter (only very talented and motivated people can pass through these processes and succeed, therefore you're selecting from an inherently more dedicated and energetic candidate pool).
> (only very talented and motivated people can pass through these processes and succeed, therefore you're selecting from an inherently more dedicated and energetic candidate pool)
Unfortunately having interviewed a bunch of folks from these programs, I find that to be false the vast majority of the time, from this program especially. I've interviewed probably 5-6 LS folks and over 10 folks from a large program in NYC (you can guess which one) and every time the program has given them an incredibly oversold sense of skill level. They were unequivocally not prepared for the job they were interviewing for but were adamant that they were. I'm guessing they're given interview coaching where they're coached to guide the interviewer towards things that are positive for them (projects they did in the program for example) and away from things that they're not prepared for (such as questions actually relevant to the position). I had one candidate straight up tell me that they were more senior than our senior developers because they spent a year or whatever "living and breathing this stuff everyday, all day" whereas our senior devs wasted their time at college and probably have the same amount of "real practical experience" as this program grad did even though they'd been working there for 3-5 years. Maybe that's gotten better over the past couple of years since I've interviewed regularly, but for a while it was a huge problem where they were ill prepared and then had this massive entitlement about it. I'm guessing that's how the programs were sold to them: finish it and you'll waltz into a six figure job.
That's not universal in these bootcamps/programs, though. I've interviewed a few Turing School folks that are awesome. I've interviewed folks from several smaller programs from all over whose names escape me (a Seattle-based one, one in the midwest...can't remember others) that have been fantastic.
I just _wish_ all of these programs were great at preparing folks and self-filtering on the backside, but unfortunately, I think many of them take their money (or hold out their hand when/if they get hired), pass the people through no matter what, and fill their heads with the idea that they're now prepared and deserve a job.
You're coached to be confident through interviewing. Advice like "apply for anything saying up to five years of experience required". Combine that with a lot of grads who aren't experienced in interviewing can lead to that sort of issue. The biggest thing I'd look for is side projects. The people doing side projects were generally the one who were keeping up, and actually had an interest.
I think Lambda was also a lot more selective towards the beginning (when there were like 12 people in a class) vs now where I think the class size is in the lower three figure range?
> I had one candidate straight up tell me that they were more senior than our senior developers because they spent a year or whatever "living and breathing this stuff everyday, all day" whereas our senior devs wasted their time at college and probably have the same amount of "real practical experience" as this program grad did even though they'd been working there for 3-5 years.
> Talk is talk. Actions should have consequences, which is why we have rules and agreements in the real world.
But threats are talk, and threats often motivate action without undertaking it. So talk is, in a real sense, action. Many forms of speech can have profound effects.
For example, I say, "Pay me $400 more a month or I will evict you." If you believe I can evict you (even if I probably can't) then my talk has changed behavior. Can I then say, "I took no action?"
So if I'm reading this right, the author feels that the reason these companies are so valuable is because it destroys the free market one customer at a time, selling lock ins that would crush a normal business to escape, and that will deliver long term value as a result of said destruction.
We might want new nucelar power plants for industrial centers. But what we certainly shouldn't be doing is using them as an excuse to propagate the idea of a centralized grid of power authorities distributing power nationally or globally.
Centralized grids are incredibly expensive, difficult to manage, and introduce single points of failure in the physical and information domains. We should be doing everything we can to decentralize our grids, promote distributed power generation and storage in urban and commercial installments, and focus on letting the municipal levels of government coordinate bulk storage appropriate to their needs.
Folks get so worked up about highly efficient new nuclear power plants that they forget about transit and storage, or argue that these aspects shouldn't be considered. Both ideas are deleterious to making a modern, resilient power infrastructure that's able to adapt to climate change, changes in the economic environment, and the increasing pace of modern technology in the space of power storage and delivery.
Until these goals can coexist with the call for a "nuclear new deal", we should view them for what they are: short-sighted and misguided attempts to make profit off a need without considering the actual long term goals that society has.
Folks also get so worked up about highly efficient new renewable power sources that they forget about transit and storage.
I don't know about the situation today, but for years the massive wind farms on Tehachapi weren't even connected to the grid. Even after PG&E bought the electricity to meet their renewables quota, it was cheaper to waste it than to build the transmission infrastructure.
Renewables have the inverse of the problem you described: They are too distributed, and it's hard to get enough to power a community without running transmission lines over hundreds of miles.
Yes, the centralization of infrastructure required for efficient nuclear energy production is a problem. But don't forget that renewables have equivalent problems.
Transmission on a local level is a MUCH easier problem to solve. Storage on a local level is plummetting in price and rising in efficiency; while also reducing its reliance in rare minerals.
PG&E's failures should show that running one big statewide grid is so difficult and expensive it shouldn't be done. We should reclaim to copper and use the savings to make communities self sufficient, which for many small communities is entirely possible
I don't understand why you think that writing on a very technical subject needs to build you a ladder to climb on as a prerequisite. There is a link to a very high quality talk right at the top of the article for folks who wanted to dive deeper that specifically makes that effort.
I found the article quite good, and if you had genuinely been motivated to engage with the content you could have highlighted the acronym and searched for it.
There is a wealth of good info for "CRDTs" that comes up on the first page of Google, Bing or DDG.
Does the acronym actually illuminate what they are or how they function? I submit to you that it probably doesn't.
There are practices for informative writing that have been developed over decades and decades that recommend, among other things, defining initialisms on first use.
I read hundreds of pages of such writing a week and I can assure you that if this is a practice, it is not well observed by academics or engineers in the field.
1. It's very clear that his office has no qualms with filing cases that include untrue statements.
2. It's also the case that this group of claimants is strongly associated with a government official who is very angry at companies and has been trying to attack a communications law from every angle he has. One cannot help but wonder at the timing of all this.
It may very well be true. Sadly, we have to be skeptical now.