Extinguished Engineer

This is also the story behind my current profile name.

We're all responsible for our decisions. I have some sympathy because they had the necessity of college drummed into them from childhood by every adult they trusted. They were taught that they had no hope without it, it would pay for itself, and the loans were to help them succeed.

WHINER: You don't understand how tough we have it. BOOMER: How so? WHINER: Our tuition was too high. Now, we have all this student debt. BOOMER: Whose fault is that? WHINER: I had to get a college education, so I had to take out loans. BOOMER: Did you consider having a job to offset some of the costs? WHINER: I had to devote myself to my studies. BOOMER: But why go to college? If your average starting salary is so low, and your tuition is so high and your debt is so burdensome, why didn't you consider getting into a trade? WHINER: Everyone knows you need a college degree to succeed. BOOMER: Who told you that? WHINER: Our guidance counselors. BOOMER: Sounds like you listened to the wrong people. Whose fault is that? WHINER: Everybody's but mine. BOOMER: I think I'm starting to see the real problem here. WHINER: The average house costs $450,000 now. Yours only cost $18,000. BOOMER: That's true, but consider this. In my day, an automobile cost $2,000. Now they cost $38,000. But do you see any difference between the cars in my day and the cars today? WHINER: What do you mean? BOOMER: Well, the cars back then had no computers, no smog controls, no automation, no seat belts, an AM radio, no air conditioning, and none of the safety features today's cars must have by law . . . WHINER: So? BOOMER: So aside from inflation, cars today have much more equipment, have much more costly regulations and CAFE standards, and much more capability that those in my day. So, they're a lot more expensive. Now, relate that to housing. WHINER: What do you mean? BOOMER: That $18,000 house in today's dollars is about $155,000. But let's look at the house. If you were lucky it had two bedrooms and one small bathroom. It was built of materials one step up from cardboard. It was about 800 square feet. It sat on a small lot. There were very few costly regulations and codes to meet. It didn't have air conditioning, it only had some kind of heater. If it had a garage at all, it was for only one car. Now, compare that to what that $450,000 house gets you today. Probably three bedrooms and two and one-half bathrooms, with a dining room and attached garage, and probably a laundry room. 2,000 square feet, upgraded amenities like lighting and phone and cable outlets, air conditioning. a fairly large lot. At least a two-car garage, if not three . . . a hell of a lot more house than we were able to afford back then, even if it had been available. Would you want to live in a house like mine was? You could probably get one like it for $155,000, if it was available. Which it isn't, because it can't be built today - it wouldn't meet building codes. WHINER: But it still takes a lot more earning power to buy it now than it did back then. BOOMER: That's certainly true. But that leaves you with two choices: whine about it, or adapt to today's reality. Come up with a financial plan. Save rather than spend. Cut non-essentials such as Starbucks and lunches out. Learn to be frugal. Lower your sights: start out with a condo or townhouse, and grow your equity. You may not be able to do it as quickly as we did, but what you're going to get is a hell of a lot more than we got. And be thankful for what you have, and for the opportunity this country gives you to get more over time. Just keep at it, and you'll make it.

@AuthorGFAllen If the trailer shows the characters dancing, the movie is bad. They're advertising to stupid people who think that if dancing is fun, a movie with people dancing must also be fun.

What’s a sign that a movie is going to be bad?

@omgsidewalks They make time for volleyball, square dancing, and pointless arts and crafts projects. But math, reading, and writing? Those aren't school things. Do them when you get home.

l've concluded that the sole purpose of homework is to condition children into accepting that unpaid overtime and ridiculous hours and not even being able to escape work even in your own home are a normal things to expect in their future.

@sesigl Whether it's concurrent or not isn't a property of the code. It's a behavior that does or doesn't happen at runtime. Async/await can enable the system to do things concurrently but can't cause or force it to.

Hot take: Most async/await code is not actually concurrent. It's just wrapping blocking operations with async syntax. The problem disappears when you understand: await does not parallelize. It just pauses. Concurrency comes from having multiple things pause and resume independently. Most teams conflate "async" with "I don't need threads" and then spend years debugging why their "concurrent" system saturates at N requests. Am I wrong?

Barbies we need but don't have Prison Barbie Radiation poisoning Barbie Shark attack Barbie Betty Davis eyes Barbie Eczema Barbie I'd say amputee Barbie but it's easy to make your own

I disagree with what she's saying so bad that I attack it. But if she responded, that would make it personal, and I don't want it to be personal. To me there's not a debate because companies are going to do what they're going to do. I work on a team of people where none of us are in the same city, mostly not in the same state. We have an office, but there's zero interest in hiring people nearby so they can work there. The executives are out of state too. If they did call us back to the office, it would have nothing to do with the op-ed. It would be a cover to reduce headcount. At least in my industry, I think that's the only reason for RTO, that you aren't trying to compete for employees. You need to get rid of some. Otherwise, that policy just creates opportunities for other companies to hire people.

@ExtinguishedEng @NataliaHEmanuel @nytimes I would LOVE it if she responded to this tweet. She won’t. She just yelled this thread into the void and walked away. These Op-Eds being (poorly thought out) one-sided arguments has frustrated me for SO long.

Published an op ed in @nytimes: remote work hurts mental health. Let me explain why 🧵⤵️

@patilvishi 0 is an actual position. An exception would be like yelling at someone when they ask you for something when you could just say no. Null would mix different types of comparisons. If you assigned it to a variable and tried to use it later, the error it caused would be unclear.

Interviewer: Why does String.indexOf() return -1 when it can't find a match? Why not 0? Why not null? Why not throw an exception? 99% of developers use it without ever questioning the design.

Any new code we write has its own complexity and constraints. Unnecessary focus on code re-use adds an artificial constraint. > Do all the complex things this new code has to do, and make sure that you use this existing code so we can say we re-used it. Re-use happens. When it makes sense, let it happen. It's not a goal. It's a tool. Never let the tool eclipse the goal.

A lot of people who used to drive to work now work from home. Every day, people are seriously injured or die in car accidents. I'm not trying to exaggerate. We're not dropping like flies. Still, it's undeniable: Because we work from home, there is a non-zero number of people who would be dead, but are alive. There's a greater number of people who aren't severely injured, haven't been taken out of the workforce, or don't suffer chronic pain. This isn't only about working from home. Maybe working from home wasn't an option for the injured person, but the person who hit them didn't need to be on the road. There are plenty of pros and cons to weigh. We accept the risks of driving because of improved quality of life. There's more to the equation than just not wanting to drive to work. Still, it's huge. If, hypothetically, we all had to return to the office, one of the costs would quite literally be more dead or disabled people. That's pretty heavy. In most cases I wouldn't expect any executive or manager to bear that burden. You can't control your employees getting in car accidents. And even if you call them back to work in the office, they're accepting that tiny risk. But if they were called back for a stupid reason: - This will maintain the value of real estate - I miss seeing people in the office - I'm a bad manager and I have no idea how to foster collaboration, so I'll just put people in the same building and hope for random accidents where they bump into each other in the hallway and start innovating ...then yes, you should feel personally responsible if that person dies on their way home or ends up badly injured, or someone else does. They didn't want to be on the road. They didn't need to be on the road. A little bit of that blame falls on you.

@NataliaHEmanuel @nytimes The headline frames as "we" liked remote work, now we don't. That's manipulative and inaccurate. We always like remote work. Having seen the outcome for six years, we still like it.

Leads with "remote work hurts mental health," then narrows it to people who don't live with family. It's not about remote work. It's about loneliness. You can't engineer a solution to that by assigning companionship based on employment. The idea is so ill-conceived. I've worked in plenty of offices. I was surrounded by people with families. So the plan is to disrupt my life and drive across town, not to solve someone's loneliness, but just to create the possibility of that happening. That's right up there with, "If people are in the office, they might bump into each other and come up with a great idea!" It sounds nice until you think about it for two seconds. It's not really a plan at all. If people can't or don't make friends outside of work, why would they have friends at work? If what they really need is to be in a place where people are, they can go to the mall. What's the difference? You can't use some people to engineer a solution for other people. That's why the idea borders on offensive. It views me as a utility, a tool. Move the plant over here so it provides more shade. For better or for worse, this is personal. You can't pick playmates for adults any more than you can assign dates or spouses to single people.

@ThisBarbara @NataliaHEmanuel @nytimes I thought the worst thing was for one person to expect others to manage their mental health. I was wrong. It's even worse when person A tells person B to manage person C's mental health when person C doesn't want or need it.

@ExtinguishedEng @NataliaHEmanuel @nytimes I also resent that she is calling singletons mentally unhealthy

If someone said that I have to return to the office because loneliness was hurting other peoples' mental health, the first thing I'd do is start looking for a new job. I can promise that while in that office, I would not cure anyone's loneliness.

@kerckhove_ts blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2017…

Has anyone written about the concept of double-entry programming? I.e. programming as if it were accounting

@YounesMeknassi @NataliaHEmanuel @nytimes All of those things add up to better mental health, not worse. And then there's the extra sleep. I hate to be harsh, but what kind of sick person sees people that happy and wants to "fix" it?

@NataliaHEmanuel @nytimes 1/2: I agree that remote work can reduce social interaction at work. But that impact isn’t the same for everyone. For some of us, wfh has meant more exercise, more time outdoors, better food, fewer interruptions, less commuting, and more energy for relationships outside of work.

@rohit_jsfreaky @Franc0Fernand0 For a while this was something people said dogmatically. In .NET, Resharper became popular, and it constantly recommended simplifying with early returns.

early return fights the one thing schools drilled in, the rule that a function should have a single exit point. that dogma made sense in c with manual cleanup, it is just baggage in a language with raii or a garbage collector. guard clauses at the top flatten the nesting and let the reader stop tracking conditions. people resist it because it feels like breaking a rule nobody told them had expired

Early return is such a difficult concept for so many people and I don't get why. It immediately make code 100x more readable

@MuwaffaqBadawi It's odd to think how much less often I use loops now vs 15 years ago.

As a .NET C# software engineer and upcoming software architecture I would like to state that loops are the worst thing in software design and you can't change my mind

@LuluGNavarro Are they incidentally filming you and your child, or is it specifically about capturing images of you? The glasses are designed to make it obvious. I'd be more concerned about the people who don't make it obvious.

Real question: do I have any rights to not be filmed by people wearing augmented glasses? Is there any way to tell them non-confrontationally to not film me or my child? The law in many places means you can’t record a conversation without the other person knowing.

The speakers on my Windows laptop stopped working. I click the Troubleshoot link. Nothing happens. I click it ten more times. A minute later it opens. Only one window, but now it keeps restarting the troubleshooting process, so I have to answer every question 10 times. One of the suggestions on the screen is that I try to use the very troubleshooter that I am using. Thank you.