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Solutions usually come from people who see in the problem only an interesting puzzle, and whose qualifications would never satisfy a select committee. -- John Gall in Systemantics[1]

A very short read, and quite interesting. It touches on a lot of the same points already made in this thread (people will game metrics, etc). The biggest argument that the book makes that is trying to set up a system to accomplish something will cause the system to do everything but accomplish its goal, which leads to the above quote. You can't set up a system to achieve a goal, only set up an environment that allows the goal to be achieved.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics


There are tradeoffs to all software.

I use lastpass with a yubikey for 2fa and I feel safe enough. I briefly looked at other password managers when I was evaluating lastpass, but convenience won out for me. I haven't looked at moving out of lastpass, but 3 years ago no other password manager came close to the mobile and platform support that lastpass had.

I considered keeping my passwordDB local, but the inconvenience of needing it and not having it wasn't it worth it to me. Do I know I'm making a tradeoff? Yes.

I also have a nasty habit of setting things up on a local server and then never updating it. Instead I decided that lastpass was worth the $12/year so I wouldn't have to manage anything locally.

So while lastpass may not be perfect security, I'm a lot better off than I was three years ago when I used the same few passwords everywhere.

It also helps me share passwords with my wife, so that's nice.


You underestimate how lazy and unmotivated most people are.


You overestimate how easy IRS instructions are. A 1040EZ is easy, but anything beyond that and it becomes very complicated in a hurry.


You underestimate how much people's time is worth to them.


I feel like all of this just comes back to judgement calls. You can't pick technologies in a vacuum, and you can't generalize technology choices.

It's not very fair to make these claims without knowing all of the details around the situation. Microservices CAN be a pain, but it might offset a greater pain of trying to coordinate a monolithic deployment. It depends on things like team size, budget, and technology available to you.

This is where I see the disconnect between employers and most developers. "Programming" isn't a job. Your employer doesn't pay you to write code. They pay you to solve problems. The good employers don't care what tools you use to solve the problem, just that you solved it. The bad employers will force you to use technologies and buzzwords that probably don't apply to your situation. You should be able to defend all of your decisions and have good reasons for them.

On the flip side, not everything you try will work - that doesn't mean that it's a bad option, just that it didn't work for your situation. You don't need to have a redundant low-priority memo system because you don't get enough value out of it to justify the overhead of maintaining it.


If the taxi even shows up at all...


Or you hail one and they don't want to go where you're going.

It amazes me how consistently poor the service is from old-style taxis across the world.

Is there a worse industry for consumers?


Not to mention the blatant racism of many taxi drivers.


Being able to remember and implement those algorithms in under 20 minutes on a white board is not applicable to programming at Amazon, Facebook or Google at scale.


If an interviewer is just testing your memory of an algorithm, it's a bad interview.


It sure is, but it still happens a lot.


But Facebook doesn't get any cut of a sponsored post. (meaning a company paid an individual to write a post)


> But Facebook doesn't get any cut of a sponsored post.

"Sponsored Stories" and "Promoted Posts" (one of which I expect is what was meant by "sponsored post") are the names of specific kinds of Facebook ads.


If the service won't be responsible for incorrectly validating the ID, what's the point? Seems like you'd be paying for nothing, really.


Why do you need to disclose your salary? It's just as easy to say "I won't accept the position for anything less than $X"


Well now when someone removes left pad from npm your whole terminal can break.


No it can't. After that whole fiasco npm has made it so packages once published cannot be removed after a 24 hour window without npm manually doing it on your behalf, that is to make sure this instance never does happen again.


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