Thanks for that very complete view of things.

Things are quite different since I last was doing hiring, which was pre-COVID.

Yeah, my experience leading a remoted team in India also showed the importance of cultural awareness and good requirements: I ultimately got into the habit of, after the big meeting with the boss were all the work was given to the various teams, get my guys individually on the phone (so that they feared not “losing face”) and carefully coach out of them any questions or doubts since otherwise they wouldn’t voice them and just end up implementing something they misunderstood or which wasn’t explained correctly and indeed they also needed very detailed requirements which was a problem because the senior guys on the other side who ended up having to write said requirements could pretty much have done the job themselves in that time.

This was a big Investment Bank and some top level manager in NY decided to create a division in India to outsource work to, but it definitely didn’t get the cream of the crop over there and the career structuring there was so shit that the few good techies we got would quickly end up as (bad) managers - their pay scales followed the stupid idea that “nobody can be paid more than management” so good mid level techies had to become junior managers to earn more, and they invariably were crap as managers.

You’re one of the servants, not the house owner.

Well, I was just an immigrant in the place for a bit over a decade.

Still, having seen first hand the long term consequences of the purest expression of her and Reagan’s ideology (that shit also got copied all over Europe, including my own country, but in a diluted form), pure hate for Thatcher was one of those things I quickly learned from Common Britons and took into my heart.

The West has been fucked by that shit but I got the impression that the US and the UK got especially fucked and endured (and still are enduring) a much larger fall because of it.

In the UK, when Thatcher (who was their version of Reagan) died, the lyrics “Ding, dong, the witch is dead” from the Wizard Of Oz suddenly became very popular.

Evil + Hypocrisy always beats mere Evil.

Having spent most of my career working as a senior contractor, which often meant landing on code bases with 3+ layers of fuckups, I can only imagine how painful it will be to end up having to clean and fix AI generated code, since that doesn’t even have a consistent coding style or pattern of design errors and bugs.

More specifically: the same kind of decision makers are behind both.

Surelly lots and lots of psychadelic drugs would achieve a similar effect!?

To quote the greate Mahatma Gandhi: “Yes”

A recent study publish in the Lancet - a medical journal - estimated the deaths in Palestine to already be over 180k.

This was a few months ago.

Just because they share the same religion doesn’t mean they’re the same kind of people.

That bunch in Israel have even accused a Holocaust Survivor of being an anti-semite for criticizing Israel, and most modern Israelis did not came from Western Europe. Most of them they share no other characteristic with the victims of the Holocaust than religious affiliation, certainly not being against racism or having other modern humanist values.

“They made me do it” has been the main axis of Israeli Propaganda since the start and that’s just a variant of that.

How about this alternative explanation: they’re stealing Palestinian land, want to ultimatelly steal all Palestinian land, are led by Sociopaths and Psychopaths and have an extremely racist society anchored on the kind of ethnic superiority ideas that would make Klanners blush, so they were always going to do something like this sooner or later to get rid of the rest of Palestinians and get the rest of their land and do it in the most inhuman ways because a large part, maybe even most, of Israeli society see themselves as “the chosen people”, a superior ethnicity and what the previous famous group of ethno-Fascists would call übermenschen, whilst they see Palestinians as lesser people, “human animals”, untermenschen.

This is the kind of mass murdering Western nations used to do back in the days of Colonialism. It’s only shocking for us nowadays because we’ve evolved as societies and adopted Humanist values (though by their support of Israel you can see that many politicians in several countries and even a large fraction of people have in fact not evolved). Israel does in fact have Western Values, it’s just they’re the White Colonialist Values that many European nations had back in the 19th Century, not 21st Century Western Values.

I see. That does change the idea I had about things a bit.

It’s been a while since I was last hiring.

I wasn’t aware that the problem nowadays in the West (or at least the US) was an excess of people who don’t really have a natural skill for it choosing software development as a career.

That kind of thing was one of the main problems with outsourcing to India maybe a decade ago: the profession was comparatively very well paid for the country so it attracted far too many people without the right skills resulting in a really low average quality of the programmers there - India had really good programmers just like everywhere else but then had a ton of people also working as programmers who should never had gone into it, so the experience of those having to deal with outsourced programming in India usually was pretty bad (I remotelly was a technical lead for a small outsourced team in India from London, and they were really bad whilst, curiously, the good programmers from the Indian Subcontinent I worked with had emigrated from there and were working in London and New York).

I think it’s even worse than just the bar for competency going up: even for a coding wizard going into the career, it’s a lot harder to squeeze through the bottleneck which is getting an entry level position nowadays unless they have some public proof out on the Net of how good they’re at coding (say, commits in open source projects, your own public projects, or even Youtube videos about it).

This is something that will negativelly impact perfectly capable young developers who have an introvert personality type (which are most of them in my experience, even in domains such as Hacking) since some of the upsides of Introversion are a greater capacity for really focusing on on things and for detailed analysis - both things that make for the best programmers - and self publicising isn’t a part of the required skillset for good developers (though sooner or later the best ones will have to learn some “image management” if they end up in the Corporate world)

I’m a bit torn on this since on one side salesmanship being more of a criteria determining one’s chances of getting a break at the start of one’s career as a developer is bad news (good coding and good salesmanship tend to be inverselly correlated) but on the other side a junior developer with some experience actually working with other people on real projects with real users (because they contributed to existing open source projects) has already started learning what we have to teach fresh-out-of-Uni developers to make them professionals.

Sound like a variant of the good old saying “pay peanuts, get monkeys” only using a stick and threats instead of payment.

Mind you, it does sound like the kind of think somebody with his kind of personality - narcissistic shameless and dishonest salesman - would think it’s a great idea.

In my experience working for almost 3 decades in software development, passive-agressive shit from upper management just causes the best people to leave (as they’re the ones who easilly find better jobs) leaving behind mainly a mix of the incompetent and those who never worked anywhere else (who are either already incompetent or will become so, as only ever having worked in just one company is far too narrow professional experience for anything beyond junior/mid level - you need to have seen more than one way of doing things to understand certain higher level concerns and choices in software development).

The one time some manager voiced such an idea, I very overtly in front of everybody offered to make “loop unrolling” software working at the source level (compilers already do it at the Assembly level in some cases for performance) for me and my colleagues to really boost that code line count (while totally screwing maintenability).

Mind you, all devs in that meeting were loudly against measuring performance by code lines, but I like to think that suggestion of mine really hammered down the coup the grace on that “brilliant” idea.

I’ve worked as a freelancer (specifically as a Contractor) in Software Development for over a decade and more often than not I ended up having to work with some existing code base, having to deal with the design choices, coding style and bugs of somebody else, often multiple somebody elses.

There’s nothing quite as “entertaining” as having to deal with 3+ different code and design styles in the same code base because all previous developer thought their own way of doing things was the superior way so just added one more layer of their style (not just coding but, worse, software design) on top of what was already there increasing the mess, rather than work within the existing structure and style and doing some refactoring.

Anyway, in my experience having to read, understand and work with existing code that you yourself did not made is way more time costly and less pleasant than actually doing your stuff from scratch.

Outsourcing killed a lot of the junior and even mid-level career level opportunities in CS and AI seems on track to do the same.

The downside is that going into CS now (and having gone into CS in the last decade or so, especially in English-speaking countries) was basically the career equivalent of just out of the starting line running full speed into a brick wall.

The upside is that for anybody who now is a senior techie things have never been this good because there are significantly fewer people at that level than there is need for such people, since in the last decade or so a lot of people haven’t had the chance to progress in their careers to that point.

Whilst personally this benefits me, I’m totally against this shit and what it has done to the kids entering my career.

I have the impression that most people (or maybe it’s my faith in Humanity that’s at an all time low and it’s really just “some people”) just want pre-chewed explanations given to them rather than spend time and energy figuring things out themselves - basically baby pap as ideas food rather than cooking their own ideas food out of raw ingredients.

Certainly that would help explain the resurgence of Populist sloganeering and continued popularity of Religion (with it’s ever popular simple explanations of “Deity did it” and “it’s the will of Deity”)