You could sum up this whole article to "don't hire assholes" but I am not sure why that should be limited to tech? You probably don't want assholes in your business/ops side of the organization either. Most of the gripes in the article sound like management/culture issues as opposed to developer issues.
> Many business folks begin by asking for a specific feature or function. For example, maybe you want your billing system to send out customer payment reminders as text messages. Sounds straightforward. But a good technologist, before rolling up her sleeves, flexing her fingers and firing up a text message cloud service and a windowful of code, will ask questions.
If every company is now really a tech company as the article claims, why is it only the responsibility of the developer to extract requirements/intent? I am not saying that developers should not try to clarify problems but why is the onus of clarity on the implementer instead of the requester? Should business folks not be expected to clearly communicate the business goal that they are trying to accomplish?
> One bad actor can do more damage than you can imagine. I have seen a multimillion-dollar, high-stakes initiative almost derailed by one jerk who didn’t think he needed to prioritize a colleague’s project above his own and masterfully exhibited passive-aggressive behavior for weeks before getting called on it.
A single point of failure in a multimillion-dollar, business-critical project sounds like a management issue to me.
> Hiring a developer? Check out the GitHub “repository,” which is essentially the portfolio site for coders.
That is going to be a mixed bag. My GitHub account is a graveyard of half-finished toy projects in different technologies I felt like trying out. I would not say it is representative of my proficiency.
Counterpoint: I had not even heard about the whistle-blower until seeing stories about the outage. One of the largest web services in the world being out of commission for multiple hours is a big deal in 2021. It's a top story on most news sites and other social media (e.g. here at HN, reddit, twitter). If you want something to pass under the radar, it's probably best to not attract global attention.
> it crashes all the time, features are so amateurish (vs teamcity especially) that we're struggling just to do basic things.
Do you have an on-prem instance? What sort of features does teamcity have that are not there in Gitlab CI?
Teams in my org are currently switching from Gerrit/Jenkins combos to Gitlab and I have been pretty pleased so far. I do wish there was a nicer way to experiment with different CI configurations from within the browser to prevent a bunch of pointless commits messing with your config YAML; but, otherwise I have been pretty happy with the flexibility.
Well gitlab has all the features of teamcity on paper: it can run a remote script and build any random thing.
But why do we need so much work to write the script ? Why is the reporting so bad on test failure, why building complex dependency chains running in parallel and in sequence doesnt work ? Why do we need to touch the repo to change the build descriptor?
It's just not as fun to use, immediate, beautiful, and productive. It's thrown on top of the git part, half assed.
> Those images won't be flagged because they aren't in the database provided to Apple
This is not accurate. Apple is using perceptual hashes. If the features of an image are close enough to an image in the NCMEC database it may generate a matching hash.
Not defending the new tech by any means, but you'd have to have enough matches to exceed some hidden threshold, which would first trigger a manual review by Apple. It seems very unlikely to have your own family photo result trigger anything.
This seems dumb. I'm sure that sophisticated bad people will just alter colors and things to defeat the hashes and meanwhile trolls will generate collisions to cause people to falsely be flagged.
The perceptual hashes are specifically designed to correlate images that are visually similar while not being exactly alike, even when the colors are altered. See:
> I would gladly take this if it removes a barrier to making iCloud E2E encrypted; they are likely bound to do this type of detection, but doing it client-side before syncing feels like a sane way to do it.
But there is an issue there. Now there is a process on your phone capable of processing unencrypted data on your phone and communicating with the outside world. That is spyware which will almost certainly be abused in some way.
Processing data locally and maintaining information locally is wholly different from reading (supposedly encrypted) information from your device and reporting it back.
1) Fertility treatments are expensive and don't work for everyone
2) "1 in 10 healthy women in their 40s will get pregnant in any single menstrual cycle". I.e. there is a 90% chance that a woman over 40 will have at least some difficulty getting pregnant. Likely more than that if their partner is similar in age because male fertility declines with age as well.
3) Getting pregnant is only the first step. Miscarriage rates also increase with age.
> 2) "1 in 10 healthy women in their 40s will get pregnant in any single menstrual cycle". I.e. there is a 90% chance that a woman over 40 will have at least some difficulty getting pregnant.
That is not what it means. It is unlikely at any age to get pregnant in one menstrual cycle.
"Each month, the average 30-year-old woman has about a 20% chance of getting pregnant. A 40-year-old only has a 5% chance of getting pregnant each month."
Unfortunately, a few of my friends fell victim to the Qanon conspiracy bandwagon and the fact that mask pore size is wider than the virus was heavily circulated as a reason for mask ineffectiveness.
Everyone is having assumptions about these observations. The conclusions might not be always right, but at least the observation is real. And when you observe that mask mandating states don’t do significantly better than mask-free states, then a curious mind rightfully starts pondering. No need to unterstand conspiracy theories (a difficult topic) to understand that science isn’t getting it right yet.
> And when you observe that mask mandating states don’t do significantly better than mask-free states, then a curious mind rightfully starts pondering.
If this is true, which I haven't confirmed, wouldn't that say more about the effectiveness of political policy rather than about masks themselves? When we have seen throughout the pandemic that healthcare workers have a dramatically lower rate of infection compared to the general population, despite having more direct contact with infected populations, it is clear to the that proper precautions including protective equipment (principally masks, for a respiratory disease) can impede COVID transmission heavily. With that being the case, the question becomes: has mask policy been effective in getting enough people to wear masks properly and consistently, in states where it is mandated?
That wasn't a Quanon conspiracy: that was misunderstanding that I saw plenty of mainstream doctors and other health professionals promote. What it showed is that either they were intentionally lying - which I kinda doubt - or that they were so confident in what they had heard that they never bothered to do any research for themselves. Just reading the relevant wikipedia pages carefully would have corrected that misunderstanding.
This is your not frequent enough reminder that "doctor" is not a synonym for "scientist", or more specifically epidemiologist.
Medical doctor's are basically mechanic's for the human body. The human body is complex, so this is a high bar to clear and an important function, but it doesn't magically grant them knowledge about concepts outside that field.
> Many business folks begin by asking for a specific feature or function. For example, maybe you want your billing system to send out customer payment reminders as text messages. Sounds straightforward. But a good technologist, before rolling up her sleeves, flexing her fingers and firing up a text message cloud service and a windowful of code, will ask questions.
If every company is now really a tech company as the article claims, why is it only the responsibility of the developer to extract requirements/intent? I am not saying that developers should not try to clarify problems but why is the onus of clarity on the implementer instead of the requester? Should business folks not be expected to clearly communicate the business goal that they are trying to accomplish?
> One bad actor can do more damage than you can imagine. I have seen a multimillion-dollar, high-stakes initiative almost derailed by one jerk who didn’t think he needed to prioritize a colleague’s project above his own and masterfully exhibited passive-aggressive behavior for weeks before getting called on it.
A single point of failure in a multimillion-dollar, business-critical project sounds like a management issue to me.
> Hiring a developer? Check out the GitHub “repository,” which is essentially the portfolio site for coders.
That is going to be a mixed bag. My GitHub account is a graveyard of half-finished toy projects in different technologies I felt like trying out. I would not say it is representative of my proficiency.