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Well written article full of humility and vulnerability? I love it. My reaction: you don't need to feel ashamed of not knowing something, there is far too much

Well written article full of humility and vulnerability? I love it. My reaction: you don't need to feel ashamed of not knowing something, there is far too much to know and I'm still learning new techniques and concepts 37 years in, so I would never judge you for it. I would also not judge you for having your own preferences and opinions. I too prefer working in an office to remote work, but when I say this out loud other developers take it as advocating RTO or saying remote work is worse when it just doesn't suit my personality. I get that it's a touchy subject but there is no need to get up in my face about it. You mention bullying and brigading and that seems to be an unfortunate reality of this industry. I suspect there is a lot of insecurity and imposter syndrome that causes people to write hyper-confident blog posts about why they are better without AI and how their tests have 100% coverage and how (unfashionable language which half the world uses) is garbage etc. Maybe if we all follow your example and be candid everyone could chill out a bit. I'll go next: despite trying several times, I have never successfully written anything more complicated than Fibonnacci in Lisp or Haskell. I know it's clean and pure and all that, but my brain just won't work that way.

socalgal2 10mo ago
> I have never successfully written anything more complicated than Fibonnacci in Lisp I hadn't until a joined a lisp based project. Learned a ton. My brain didn't work that way at first either, but working with it every day I eventually got it.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  Alternatively, learn little by little, eventually your brain will grok it. I think it took me more or less two years before I could actually write Lisp code I felt confident about, from the first moment I started reading books at night about it.
saghm 10mo ago
I don't take issue with what you've said about remote work despite very much having the opposite opinion to you because you phrased it as your own personal opinion. This blog post does pretty much the opposite though; its analysis of remote work is pretty much entirely just generalizations of their own experience, but phrased as if they're objective truth. It was an especially weird editorial choice to make use of the "general" second person given how much outside of that one paragraph was written in the first person. In an article that's ostensibly trying to be humble and vulnerable like you mention, it just comes across as patronizing. I can't say I'm surprised that the author might have been judged for expressing this opinion because it's not about their personal preference, but a judgement of its own. I think a lot of people genuinely struggle with the idea that sometimes how something is said can matter just as much as what's being said. Being correct and being respectful are orthogonal concepts even when talking about objective truth rather than opinions; if someone asks what 7 times 9 is, there's a difference between telling them "63" and "Well, obviously it's fucking 63, duh!". For a subjective topic like remote work that some people's lives have been quite significantly affected by, it's even more important to put some effort into understanding how one's words will come across, because if the phrasing is poor, people aren't necessarily going to feel the need to go out of their way to try to give it the benefit of the doubt. I can't know what exactly the author was thinking when writing that paragraph, but I also can't distinguish between whether they have the same viewpoint as you but communicated it poorly or if they genuinely think that there's some sort of objective truth than I'm worse at my job working remotely than I would be working in person. Given the amount of care I've put into addressing many of the exact issues they've raised due to needing to work remotely because of a medical condition of an immediate family member, it was quite hard for me not to have an immediate strong angry reaction to how flippant they seem to be with what's at best their phrasing of their opinions. My point is that it's a lot more work to actually care about how one's point comes across than it is to claim that people are overreacting after the fact, and it's worth considering how much of the reaction the author mentions having gotten in the past is reflective of this.
- ryaniscool 10mo ago
  It feels like you're blaming the author for the lazy thinking of someone who might read his opinion and take it as objective fact. The 7 times 9 analogy doesn't track it all. 7x9 = 63 is an objective fact by definition. His thoughts on remote work are an opinion by definition. If other people decide that what he says is dogmatic, blame it on their own lack of critical thinking skills. The meta-point of the article is that we should express are thoughts without qualifiers and embellishments to manipulate other people's perceptions of us.
  - j-bos 10mo ago
    > The meta-point of the article is that we should express are thoughts without qualifiers and embellishments to manipulate other people's perceptions of us. In my experience this is a common failure point among tech/analytical folks (myself included) which leads to their words and actions being genrally misconstrued and effectively misunderstood by the larger segement of the population which is rarely able or disposed to handling communications without embellishments.
    - Ar-Curunir 10mo ago
      “Technical” people are also people, and that doesn’t exclude them from communicating like reasonable adults. Blaming the rest of the world for an inability to communicate effectively is not orienting the blame correctly.
      - ryaniscool 10mo ago
        You're wrong (IMO) The onus should not be on the communicator to qualify every statement of opinion. This is tedious and unreasonable. Not prefacing what clearly is an opinion with "IMO" is not a jedi mind trick that makes others believe it as fact. You're also demonstrating some hypocrisy by presenting your own point of view in the same manner. No qualifiers. You're simply stating something as truth
        10mo ago
begueradj 10mo ago
Unlike the author, Youtube and such are full of coding gurus who know everything and whatever you do is never the right way.
wiseowise 10mo ago
> I would also not judge you for having your own preferences and opinions. I too prefer working in an office to remote work, but when I say this out loud other developers take it as advocating RTO or saying remote work is worse when it just doesn't suit my personality. I get that it's a touchy subject but there is no need to get up in my face about it. You ever wonder why? Serfes finally got freedom after corona, but apparently some actually prefer to be in a serfdom instead of having freedom to choose for yourself. You're being a useful idiot for managers, that's why you get backlash.
- TRiG_Ireland 10mo ago
  That is a very strange (and very emotional) take. I find it easier to focus with some other people around me, so long as they're being quiet. An office (or a library) is easier to work in than my house. I also really like the idea of separation between my home and my workplace. If I was rich and had room in my house for a separate office I could close the door on when the workday was over, perhaps I'd feel differently. So I'd prefer to work in an office, so long as it was nearby and the commute was short and my officemates were fairly quiet. This does not mean that I'm "advocating for serfdom". Working for an employer is no more (and no less) serfdom in an office than it is at home.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - venturecruelty 10mo ago
    Nobody is stopping you from spending time breathing the same stale, rhinovirus-ridden air as other people. What people take umbrage with is the idea that the rest of us should be forced into propping up the commercial rental market as well.
    - diordiderot 10mo ago
      Dude chill. It's an air-conditioned room with desks and a coffee machine, not a cotton field. Some people like having an office. I could call someone like you a hyper dramatic agoraphobic socially inept recluse over a simple posted opinion but that wouldn't be kind,fair, or mature
venturecruelty 10mo ago
>I suspect there is a lot of insecurity and imposter syndrome that causes people to write hyper-confident blog posts about why they are better without AI... I mean, it's better than the hyper-confident blog posts about how AI made them an ubermensch superdooper 100000000x developer but "no you can't see the code because it's for WORK". Nice subtle dig, though.
rekabis 10mo ago
> about why they are better without AI Except… science has shown this to be true. Even after a year-plus of work, less than 2% of devs work faster or more efficiently with AI than without it. And for almost 90% of the remainder, regression analysis strongly indicated that none of them would ever be better with AI than without it, regardless of how much practice they had with it. These general results have come up with study after study over the last few years, with very consistent patterns. And with AI becoming more hallucinatory and downright wrong with every generation - about 60-80% of all responses with the latest models, depending on model being examined - the proportion of devs being able to wrestle AI into creating functionally viable work faster than they could to it themselves has also decreased slightly.

socalgal2 10mo ago

> I have never successfully written anything more complicated than Fibonnacci in Lisp I hadn't until a joined a lisp based project. Learned a ton. My brain didn't work that way at first either, but working with it every day I eventually got it.

embedding-shape 10mo ago
Alternatively, learn little by little, eventually your brain will grok it. I think it took me more or less two years before I could actually write Lisp code I felt confident about, from the first moment I started reading books at night about it.

saghm 10mo ago

I don't take issue with what you've said about remote work despite very much having the opposite opinion to you because you phrased it as your own personal opinion. This blog post does pretty much the opposite though; its analysis of remote work is pretty much entirely just generalizations of their own experience, but phrased as if they're objective truth. It was an especially weird editorial choice to make use of the "general" second person given how much outside of that one paragraph was written in the first person. In an article that's ostensibly trying to be humble and vulnerable like you mention, it just comes across as patronizing. I can't say I'm surprised that the author might have been judged for expressing this opinion because it's not about their personal preference, but a judgement of its own. I think a lot of people genuinely struggle with the idea that sometimes how something is said can matter just as much as what's being said. Being correct and being respectful are orthogonal concepts even when talking about objective truth rather than opinions; if someone asks what 7 times 9 is, there's a difference between telling them "63" and "Well, obviously it's fucking 63, duh!". For a subjective topic like remote work that some people's lives have been quite significantly affected by, it's even more important to put some effort into understanding how one's words will come across, because if the phrasing is poor, people aren't necessarily going to feel the need to go out of their way to try to give it the benefit of the doubt. I can't know what exactly the author was thinking when writing that paragraph, but I also can't distinguish between whether they have the same viewpoint as you but communicated it poorly or if they genuinely think that there's some sort of objective truth than I'm worse at my job working remotely than I would be working in person. Given the amount of care I've put into addressing many of the exact issues they've raised due to needing to work remotely because of a medical condition of an immediate family member, it was quite hard for me not to have an immediate strong angry reaction to how flippant they seem to be with what's at best their phrasing of their opinions. My point is that it's a lot more work to actually care about how one's point comes across than it is to claim that people are overreacting after the fact, and it's worth considering how much of the reaction the author mentions having gotten in the past is reflective of this.

ryaniscool 10mo ago
It feels like you're blaming the author for the lazy thinking of someone who might read his opinion and take it as objective fact. The 7 times 9 analogy doesn't track it all. 7x9 = 63 is an objective fact by definition. His thoughts on remote work are an opinion by definition. If other people decide that what he says is dogmatic, blame it on their own lack of critical thinking skills. The meta-point of the article is that we should express are thoughts without qualifiers and embellishments to manipulate other people's perceptions of us.
- j-bos 10mo ago
  > The meta-point of the article is that we should express are thoughts without qualifiers and embellishments to manipulate other people's perceptions of us. In my experience this is a common failure point among tech/analytical folks (myself included) which leads to their words and actions being genrally misconstrued and effectively misunderstood by the larger segement of the population which is rarely able or disposed to handling communications without embellishments.
  - Ar-Curunir 10mo ago
    “Technical” people are also people, and that doesn’t exclude them from communicating like reasonable adults. Blaming the rest of the world for an inability to communicate effectively is not orienting the blame correctly.
    - ryaniscool 10mo ago
      You're wrong (IMO) The onus should not be on the communicator to qualify every statement of opinion. This is tedious and unreasonable. Not prefacing what clearly is an opinion with "IMO" is not a jedi mind trick that makes others believe it as fact. You're also demonstrating some hypocrisy by presenting your own point of view in the same manner. No qualifiers. You're simply stating something as truth
      - 10mo ago

begueradj 10mo ago

Unlike the author, Youtube and such are full of coding gurus who know everything and whatever you do is never the right way.

wiseowise 10mo ago

> I would also not judge you for having your own preferences and opinions. I too prefer working in an office to remote work, but when I say this out loud other developers take it as advocating RTO or saying remote work is worse when it just doesn't suit my personality. I get that it's a touchy subject but there is no need to get up in my face about it. You ever wonder why? Serfes finally got freedom after corona, but apparently some actually prefer to be in a serfdom instead of having freedom to choose for yourself. You're being a useful idiot for managers, that's why you get backlash.

TRiG_Ireland 10mo ago
That is a very strange (and very emotional) take. I find it easier to focus with some other people around me, so long as they're being quiet. An office (or a library) is easier to work in than my house. I also really like the idea of separation between my home and my workplace. If I was rich and had room in my house for a separate office I could close the door on when the workday was over, perhaps I'd feel differently. So I'd prefer to work in an office, so long as it was nearby and the commute was short and my officemates were fairly quiet. This does not mean that I'm "advocating for serfdom". Working for an employer is no more (and no less) serfdom in an office than it is at home.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- venturecruelty 10mo ago
  Nobody is stopping you from spending time breathing the same stale, rhinovirus-ridden air as other people. What people take umbrage with is the idea that the rest of us should be forced into propping up the commercial rental market as well.
  - diordiderot 10mo ago
    Dude chill. It's an air-conditioned room with desks and a coffee machine, not a cotton field. Some people like having an office. I could call someone like you a hyper dramatic agoraphobic socially inept recluse over a simple posted opinion but that wouldn't be kind,fair, or mature

venturecruelty 10mo ago

>I suspect there is a lot of insecurity and imposter syndrome that causes people to write hyper-confident blog posts about why they are better without AI... I mean, it's better than the hyper-confident blog posts about how AI made them an ubermensch superdooper 100000000x developer but "no you can't see the code because it's for WORK". Nice subtle dig, though.

rekabis 10mo ago

> about why they are better without AI Except… science has shown this to be true. Even after a year-plus of work, less than 2% of devs work faster or more efficiently with AI than without it. And for almost 90% of the remainder, regression analysis strongly indicated that none of them would ever be better with AI than without it, regardless of how much practice they had with it. These general results have come up with study after study over the last few years, with very consistent patterns. And with AI becoming more hallucinatory and downright wrong with every generation - about 60-80% of all responses with the latest models, depending on model being examined - the proportion of devs being able to wrestle AI into creating functionally viable work faster than they could to it themselves has also decreased slightly.