thesmokingman

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

thesmokingman , to Satisfactory in Price will increase by $10 for v1.0 after the Steam Summer Sale

While it’s certainly true that some classes of bugs are very easy to fix (“oh shit I forgot to apply the correct style”; “I mean to use this method whoops”), many bugs that exist in later-stage games require pulling a bunch of shit apart to figure it out. They’re in the same pool of difficulty usually as performance optimizations or balancing new functionality. Getting a successful test case can be difficult even if the bug is readily apparent. Getting the regression test to pass is the subject of a plethora of literature. It can be hard and difficulty often scales with codebase. If the bug was obvious and easy, it would have been done before.

If it was obvious and easy and wasn’t done before because of time constraints, devs can still charge more because their wages should have gone up. This whole thread OP is kinda nuts (not the commenter I’m vehemently agreeing with and expanding on).

thesmokingman , to Work Reform in I love gen-Z's attitude towards corporate culture

How Women Rise touches on this to an extent. With just a little bit of editorializing,

  • What do you want to do? Have interesting experiences and spend time with your close ones? Work is a necessary means to that end in probably any system to provide the resources you need. Your perspective stops being “fuck I gotta go make widgets for a bit” and becomes “making widgets helps me achieve my goal of doing cool shit.” This also changes the discourse to “how do we the widget process better for people just trying to do cool shit” and “Is making these widgets the best way for me to do cool shit?” You’re not telling the widget maker you’re perfect for this role, you’re excited about this role because of its ability to help you achieve your goals. Note that goals are not just capitalism. Several of my goals revolve around me being a better person and a better partner.
  • Networking specifically is only gross if you view as taking advantage of other people. If you shift your perspective to “we all gotta work together so let’s figure out better ways to do that” networking becomes a conversation about how I can achieve my goals while helping you achieve yours and is only gross if I’m not going to help you achieve yours. Sometimes helping you achieve your goals is just being around until you need something from me, even if I’m getting things from you the whole time. As a mentor, most of what I get out of networking is practicing teaching. I give a lot more than I get from a certain perspective. Some day I might need help and the people I’ve mentored will hopefully be willing to pitch in.

There’s no world where the things you have to do to survive make you happy all of the time. Ask any neurodivergent person with executive dysfunction about necessary chores. There’s also no world where you’re happy all the time even with a perspective shift. There is a world where we recognize that we all have to do things to get along. If we’re honest about that from the start, the hiring conversations get better.

thesmokingman , to Work Reform in Why does a prospective employer need my address?

In the US this is a web search or two away. I’d assume a majority of other places have similar setups from phone companies, public records, and data brokers.

thesmokingman , to Work Reform in Why does a prospective employer need my address?

I feel like you missed that this is on a job application, not an offer letter. Unless I’m actually hired and get paid by you, you aren’t going to send me tax documents so you don’t need my address.

thesmokingman , to Work Reform in We're we are as a society -- 'I'm proud of being a job hopper': Seattle engineer's post about company loyalty goes viral

Quoting my response from elsewhere:

… FAANG. Hiring 500 engineers and bragging about it something you can do when you’re just interested in shareholder value not customer experience.

I wouldn’t hire the guy in the article because I haven’t seen strong candidates come from FAANG and I’ve been very happy to lose the people I did to FAANG because they weren’t good engineers, they just knew how to leetcode and tunnel vision trivia.

thesmokingman , to Literature in 'It’s totally unhinged’: is the book world turning against Goodreads?

Have you documented your setup? I’d be curious to learn more

thesmokingman , to Personal Finance in Mint.com is going away. Are there any alternatives that are as automatic and simple?

Doesn’t matter. They have a massive lobbying arm that keeps the US government from making taxes automatic. Unless that lobbying goes away (or politicians start caring about constituents which is much less likely), Intuit will continue making money hand-over-fist from tax software that it can use to fund other dumb shit like acquiring then closing Mint.

thesmokingman , to Personal Finance in Mint.com is going away. Are there any alternatives that are as automatic and simple?

YNAB pulls in most transactions programmatically if you connect accounts. Some accounts don’t sync (eg Apple) and other accounts will only do an initial sync (most 401ks and loan accounts). I think the sync restrictions are a factor of the accounts themselves and not YNAB; I’d love to know if I’m wrong there.

YNAB does not categorize things for you. It’s a different approach where you define money buckets, assign funds to the buckets, and categorize transactions into those buckets. I moved over when Mint got acquired because fuck Intuit and I haven’t really put a ton of time into trying to understand the different paradigm, so I’m not sure I’m explaining it properly. I didn’t use YNAB before because the paradigm isn’t how I’m used to thinking about my spend.

Don’t start the trial unless you’ve got time to think about setting up your buckets and spending targets. Or, if you just want to test the import because you’ll make time later to set it up, it’s probably worth the trial. There is a “family” plan that allows an account owner to share things; I think that’s worth it if you’ve got some people you share financial info with who also budget and you want to keep costs down.

thesmokingman , to Work Reform in Bosses and workers still can’t agree on whether the commute is part of the work day, and it’s creating a $578 billion productivity problem

If I’m actually onsite, my employer has tremendous control over that. They can play the music they want and ban headphones. They can put a bunch of informational literature all over the bathrooms (this is a thing Google does/did). If I start getting paid for the commute, suddenly my employer has the ability to start controlling that.

You and I agree that commute should be paid. What I think you’re lacking right now is my point about the commute being controlled. If it’s paid, it can be controlled, and that’s something I’m personally not comfortable with.

thesmokingman , to Work Reform in Bosses and workers still can’t agree on whether the commute is part of the work day, and it’s creating a $578 billion productivity problem

Everything I said applies to office work.

As a manager with a limited budget that I want to stretch as much as possible, I need to limit the amount of it I spend paying for commutes. At the same time, I need to make sure my team is protected from the company abusing a commute cap.

Similarly, if I’m paying for an employee’s commute, I’d like to get some value out of that. That’s money out of my budget I’m spending for no appreciable gains unless they’re producing. I can build work that’s doable on a train or a bus.

Of course, all of this is solved by WFH as I said at the end of my previous post.

thesmokingman , to Work Reform in Got laid off today.

Having come out of the music scene in that part of the US, I vehemently disagree. There used to be some really cool weird shit. That’s been displaced now and the slogan has been co-opted, sure, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t rad as fuck a couple of decades ago.

thesmokingman , to Work Reform in Bosses and workers still can’t agree on whether the commute is part of the work day, and it’s creating a $578 billion productivity problem

In the US, commutes aren’t covered and that’s part of law. However, the FLSA was passed in the 30s and the Portal-to-Portal Act was passed in the 40s so it’s arguably time to reevaluate.

As pro labor as I am, I do think it’s reasonable to put some cap on commute times so that commuters can’t abuse it. The hard part is coming up with a good one. You can’t give a max time without some idea of things like housing, public transportation, commute costs, etc. because then employers could abuse it by setting up offices away from everything or setting the radius too low.

A completely different problem for paid commutes is that suddenly it becomes work time. When I had a shit job doing pool inspections, the city controlled my time in the car from the office to the pools and back. The city did not control my time commuting. If the company is paying me for my commute, I’m on the clock, which means they can reasonably ask me to do things like not listen to my podcasts or take specific routes. If I’m on public transport, they can reasonably ask me to do work because I’m being paid. My solution here is working from home.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • random
  • All magazines