mcherm

mcherm, 25 days ago

Yes, that is exactly what he is saying. Yes, it is completely absurd and would undermine the bedrock principles of our legal system. However, apparently somewhere between 3 and 6 members of the US Supreme Court may be seriously considering it.

(To be fair, he does claim that this absolute immunity would go away if half of the House and 2/3 of the Senate decided to impeach the President.)

mcherm, 2 months ago

Great question – would someone ask that of my boss please? 😉

mcherm, 3 months ago

Here is my perspective on the answer to your question:

Our government is not functional. It is not that it doesn’t “want” a healthy work force, but that it isn’t capable of setting any sort of a policy.

The last time the US made any meaningful change in healthcare policy was under Obama. My impression of what happened is that there was a brief (2 yr) moment when the Presidency, House, and Senate were all controlled by the same party. The Democrats passed “health reform” which was basically the Republican health care reform package from 4 years earlier.

In the 13 years since then, the only Republican position on health care has been that Obama’s “ACA” law is “bad”. There is literally no suggestion of what else would be better. (I’m not counting the anti-abortion laws as “health care” – they are seen here as a moral issue, not a health care one.) The Democrats’ position has been a mix of “we shouldn’t let the Republicans take us back to something WORSE!” and “the whole system is broken and needs to be replaced”.

We have two problems. First, our government is structured so that it cannot easily accomplish anything, at least without cooperation between the two opposed parties. Secondly, one of the two parties is insane and wants to destroy the government (and has enough electoral support to win almost half the time).

mcherm, 3 months ago

Yes. The average cost of cancer treatment is around $150,000 USD here and expensive cases can be much more.

mcherm, 3 months ago

How concerned should I be?

What are the unspecified policies the developer claims that the company has failed to uphold? Who is this particular developer, and how much should I trust them? (I don’t follow nginx development at all.)

I celebrate the fact that open source licenses exist specifically to allow people to make a fork like this when they have disagreements! But I don’t know enough about this particular case to decide how it should affect my own plans.

mcherm, 3 months ago

On my profile it says “redditor for 18 years”.

mcherm, 3 months ago

Here’s what I use:

• LGBT+ most formal (and old fashioned)
• LGBTQ+ less formal
• "people" most inclusive

mcherm, 8 months ago

Under the government’s theory, in this case, I cannot understand how the Google App Store is a monopoly, but the Apple App Store is not. Can anyone explain that to me?

mcherm, 9 months ago

The ad hominem criticism is irrelevant. The communities should be removed or not removed based on the server’s policies regardless of who first raised the question.

mcherm, 9 months ago

That sounds like it might be worth trying. Where can I find it?

mcherm, 9 months ago

Thank you. That worked.

mcherm, 10 months ago

My approach was something like this: for a few years (maybe until all my kids were at least age 3 or 4) I simply didn’t try to push my career forward.

When I was at work I put in plenty of effort, but I didn’t work much overtime, I didn’t do my own software projects outside of work, and I didn’t even spend much time reading programming blogs.

Young children are really overwhelming, if you are going to really parent them!

My career was fine. Career advancement is a marathon, not a sprint. Mmmm… that’s not true – I’ve seen people sprint through the career ladder. But if you want advice on how to do that you’ll need to ask someone else. MY approach to career advancement has been a marathon; keep improving until I am so ready for the next level that it’s really obvious, briefly do enough politicing to secure a promotion, then go back to the self-improvement. For me, the approach worked (I’m a “senior director” level non-manager-track software engineer today.)

When my kids were young I really just focused on them; these days they are in highschool and college and they work WITH me on my outside-of-work person programming projects.

mcherm, 10 months ago

It really needs a fourth block that just says “Python”.

(For those who don’t get the joke, in Python the way that one exits a loop over an iterator is to keep going until the iterator throws an exception. It sounds dumb at first, but in truth, that’s only if you think that exceptions are incredibly heavyweight compared to other operations.)

mcherm, 10 months ago

Wait for a passing blimp. Project the bat signal on the blimp.

mcherm, 10 months ago

Congratulations and welcome to the industry!

So, what are your first impressions? Is there something so far that has surprised you about the job?

mcherm, 10 months ago

Hmm… A few thoughts based on my somewhat extensive experience (~25 years working in this industry now).

How hard it is to get used to conventions. So I’m doing TS React and C# .net. I know react but this app is something else. So many custom hooks.

There are two things here. One is getting used to the conventions – that’s something you actually pick up fairly quickly after you’ve done it a while because you start seeing the same (or nearly the same) conventions in new locations. The other is getting used to a new codebase you haven’t worked in before – and that one never goes away. As far as I can tell it ALWAYS takes a while to get familiar enough with a new codebase to feel comfortable in it.

there are no timescales (only 6 employees). I get given something to do and left to it. I’ll be wondering am I doing it right is it taking too long but nobody ever comes for an update

That can be a bit of a red flag. For the moment, while you are brand new, just take advantage of it. But in the longer term you probably want to push for some clearly expressed expectations, or else set some yourself. A project with no dates tends to float along blithely for some time until one day someone suddenly decides it’s 3 weeks overdue and has to be finished by tomorrow or heads will roll! Once you have enough experience to be confident in your estimates, you’ll probably want to head this off by creating estimates even if they aren’t requested.

It’s just difficult as I’m used to working shitty jobs where you are pestered all the time.

And THAT, unfortunately, isn’t really a feature of the job so much as a feature of having a good boss. Poor tech managers will micromanage and pester you all the time; skilled tech managers will set clear expectations then let you handle it yourself. You likely won’t always get a manager who does this well but you should enjoy it while you have it.

mcherm, 10 months ago

Honestly, from what you are saying it sounds as if you have a fairly GOOD boss who just isn’t giving you the level of support that you need as a brand new developer. My advice would be to say that to him something like this: “Boss, I understand you are busy and have a lot of other things requiring your attention, and you have been very understanding when I’ve tried to operate with little direction. But I am feeling that as a relatively new developer I need a bit more mentoring and direction. Are there any assignments where I could pair up closely with another developer and do the work together? I think that after one or two assignments like that I would be much more effective.”

mcherm, 11 months ago

I like the way you express this. "Cis / Trans" isn't about your gender, it's about whether your gender has CHANGED. (Although it may not be your GENDER that changed, but what people THOUGHT your gender was.)

In a similar way, I (a cis male) usually call myself "straight", but that's not really accurate. I don't feel like I'm attracted to whatever gender is different from mine (which happens to be women); I feel like I am attracted to women (which happens to be the gender that's different from mine).

Putting it differently, if some magical spell were to transform me into a woman, I don't imagine that I would then be attracted to men, I imagine that I would be attracted to women. So instead of calling myself "straight", I should probably be saying that I am "gynosexual" (attracted to women).

mcherm, 11 months ago

Thank you. It's a thought that has been rolling around in my head for some time and this was my attempt to put it in words.

mcherm, 11 months ago

Thank you, I learned something new today.

mcherm, 11 months ago

Thank you! That was a very helpful review of the game I had never heard of.

mcherm, 11 months ago

A swappable battery. I could buy a few batteries and never be out of power. I could replace the battery on an older phone without pretty much having to replace the phone itself.

mcherm, 11 months ago

I had not seen it before, but it looks interesting. My biggest concern would be about compatibility with US carriers.

mcherm, 10 months ago

As a fairly liberal person who decided to subscribe here in hopes of broadening his horizons, I appreciate that.