I don't know why you've been downvoted, since IMO you raise a valid point.
I've known a few prepper types. They had plans for escape rooms, a significant cache of weapons, some ammo, and a few MREs in the closet.
Nobody had more than maybe a few liters of water per person in the home, and when I asked about an escape plan (e.g. there's a fire, get out and meet at John's house on the next street over) they looked at me like I was insane. Oh, and of course they're all in fairly bad shape.
In my opinion, most of the "prepper" stuff is about fantasy role playing. I see it as related to the "middle aged man porn" we see lately in the form of the Taken franchise of movies. It perhaps it gives a feeling of smug satisfaction in a chaotic life. You're angry that you were cut off in traffic on your way to a job that might have layoffs tomorrow, but at least you can tell yourself that when the apocalypse comes, you'll succeed while that jerk will be fodder. Sort of a tough guy variant of the classic "ass pennies" comedy sketch.
I agree. The best investment for a doomsday scenario is to invest in yourself and your own skills first: get in shape, learn basic farming, wood/metalworking to make and repair tools, animal husbandry, basic first aid skills, learn geography and where clean water sources are, etc.
The 2nd best investment is to invest in your community and friends, because survival as a group is much easier than being a loner.
Stockpiling supplies I don't think is very relevant until signs of the collapse are obvious. A lot of medicines and some fuel don't last very long either, afaik.
Stockpiling to an extent makes sense, in my mind. Things like food and water to last at least a few weeks, ideally months or a year, are quite practical. Because the moment a problem is obvious, it's too late to get them. If you've ever lived in a hurricane area and let your toilet paper supply run low before an event, you'll know what I'm talking about ;) Alternatively, if you've ever been sick and not wanted to leave the house for a week, or lost a job and wanted to limit what you're spending, etc.
Also, stockpiling should be done smart. If fuel doesn't last long, make sure you're using things like fuel extenders to keep them usable. And ideally, make it part of your daily life. Stockpiling 5 or 500 gallons of water in your apartment or house is a great idea (when the water main breaks after an earthquake, would you rather be the person who can help others because you know you're taken care of, or the guy who's fighting off dehydration while he waits for the red cross to arrive?), but keep using it. Don't buy one of those blue tanks and just leave it in a corner, buy 10 and use them, replacing them as you use them. Same thing with food, and fuel.
Going to extremes, of course, give you diminishing returns (like anything). So stockpiling several million rounds of ammunition and more medicine than can be used before it expires doesn't make much sense.
Back in 2009, you could join, I think, two "networks" and easily search and browse within those networks, firing off messages to anyone who seemed interesting. IIRC, that functionality disappeared a few years ago. Now FB is almost entirely a way to connect with people you already know, rather than a way to actually meet people.
The article it links to higher up (the part about the tribe knowing what the hunters killed from 50 miles away) is a fascinating read about telepathy that vacillates between vaguely scientific analysis and outright fantasy. I enjoyed it from a "well, that's a fun perspective to view the world from" standpoint.
The specific Kalahari example in the linked article makes a claim without presenting any evidence; I was bummed, because I was really curious about their methodology. (Turns out there isn't any; it's just a 'synthesized' personal account of one author.)
In my opinion, "be humble" isn't a winning strategy.
Don't be so arrogant that you stop improving or fail to understand mistakes, but by all means don't be humble. Be proud of who you are and the work you've done. You work in an industry where 90% of people don't understand what you do. Chances are your own boss won't understand the actual value you're providing.
So don't be humble. "There's always someone better than you out there" -- sure, but that person's not here, right?
I think that's crossing the wires of humility and confidence. You can be confident but humble. Confidence is your ability to come up with solutions and feel like they are the right solutions, and that they are good or excellent solutions. Humility is your ability to come up with solutions and realize that (1) they might not be the _absolute best_ solutions, (2) some solutions that look like they're better are actually better (and identifying these).
I think it interacts well with the concept of “strong opinions weakly held”. Have a strong opinion that you've built a great thing, but hold it weakly so that in the face of clear arguments or evidence that it is in fact not great, or that another solution is better, you can admit it and adjust. This, to me, is the right balance of confidence and humility---in programming, as in life.
I agree with you in principle, but again, I don't think that's a winning strategy.
A humble, competent woodworker creates a piece that's beautiful, visually rich, has a solid, study feel to it, and can be appreciated by most. The software engineer, who checks in a fix on the back-end service that pre-empts several bugs that had yet to be discovered, goes relatively unappreciated.
So can one be humble and confident? Yes. Will it be understood and appreciated from the outside? Probably not. Is it a good strategy? Probably not.
I'd say a person has three options:
1) work for people who are technically competent enough to understand the true value of your work. In my experience, this is pretty rare out in the real world.
2) become a salesman and sell yourself at all times. This seems fundamentally opposed to dominant personality types in software.
3) stop being so humble and be proud of your work. This seems like the most logical choice to me.
Our industry is rife with imposter syndrome, legends of the 10x engineer, impressions that everyone else is succeeding flawlessly thanks to polished blog posts and GitHub portfolios [1], and endless pontificating on things that often boil down to fashion and code style. I don't think we need anything telling us to be more humble.
You may be a completely average engineer writing CRUD software for some local bank. Yeah, maybe that guy blogging about his work at Google would do a better job than you. But he's not here, and your the best you company has found. You're valuable and capable. Be proud of what you've accomplished!
[1] - people have written recently about how Facebook causes negative feelings since you seem to see others only at their best. I think this is normal folks finding out what tech types have experienced for decades, but nobody has ever talked about it.
While “pride” is often used as the opposite of “humility”---which I think is maybe what you're getting at here---I don't think pride is always the opposite of humility. In particular, I think the word can mean many things, and the meaning you're using isn't the one that's often used as the opposite of humility.
Fundamentally, I agree that you should be proud of what you've done, even if 10X awesome dude at Google could have done better. For one thing, 10X awesome dude at Google is surrounded by other Google folks, and by 15+ years of Google technology. There's being aware that there are better possibilities out there---indeed, being interested in them and even thirsty to learn more about them---and there's being embarrassed about what you've done. You can be interested in the crazy things some people do and want to learn more about those things while still working at a smaller, more limited scope and being proud of what you achieve with what you've got. The latter is how you get confidence, the former is how you get humility.
In short, I think we're probably saying the same thing. When you build a thing, you should be proud of that thing---unless you deliberately cut corners for some other tradeoff, in which case you should be cognizant of why you did it and satisfied with the tradeoffs you made. But that doesn't mean you have to think there's no better way, nor even that you have to avoid looking into those better ways. Often, I think these things (thinking there's no better way, not looking for improvements) are what people mean when they refer to folks who aren't humble. Certainly, that's what I mean.
Failing to be humble eventually leads to arrogance. This advice is counterproductive. The part regarding being proud of who you are is completely tangential. I also highly doubt that "90% of people" in the tech industry don't understand what a "good programmer" does.
The best advice is just to become as best as you can by trying as much as you can:
1. Deliberately working
2. Learning from people you perceive to be better.
3. Keeping up with trends.
4. Mastery of the basics/fundamentals.
5. A razor sharp focus on what really matters -- value in the context of the business/domain.
> 5. A razor sharp focus on what really matters -- value in the context of the business/domain.
This is a tricky part, and you have to ask yourself explicitly - what do you want to work on? Becoming a better programmer, or a better employee/entrepreneur? Because business does not optimize just for good, quality work. It optimizes for earning money. Which involves things like:
- doing good, quality work which can be sold
- doing good enough work, minding the essential tradeoff between quality and business realities
- doing shitty, half-assed work and having a good sales team sell it anyway
- doing useless shiny things that don't really help the intended audience, but help your business to get their money
If the needs of your business are from the latter two groups, being a good programmer goes directly against your career success in that place. Unfortunately, it is my belief that most of the jobs in our industry fall into those two groups. From the POV of everyone else but programmers, the code is only means to an end.
I want to emphasize it, because a lot of advice for programmers tells you about the "razor sharp focus on what really matters -- value in the context of the business/domain", and I found that for some reason, it never resonated with me. It took me a while to understand why - it's because this advice comes from a business mindset, where making money is the goal and the means to it are tangential. I have the opposite mindset - for me, it's the product that matters, not how to make more money off it. Realizing that those are two different worldviews has helped me stop feeling inadequate just because I couldn't bring myself to enjoy the business value. It also helped me understand the POV of management and what they expect from me.
There are people who are very opinionated and also "appear" to be right almost all of the time. But in practice, I've found that this is an illusion and that there are long-term repercussions for being too invested in ideas or technical philosophies.
I think that the "be humble" criterion makes sense because it is directly correlated to the awareness that there is no single right way to do something. Changing requirements can pull the rug from underneath you and turn a good idea into a bad idea.
Software engineering is a bit like economics; a lot of people think that they understand it, but in reality nobody does.
In my opinion, the greatest advantage to an automatic is never getting ripped off by a watch repair place again.
With past watches, one little issue that required a visit to a repair shop would inevitably incur the $30 "the battery need replacing" tax. Nevermind that I just had it replaced a few months prior.
we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.
Nope. Not even close. We survived the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam War protests. For all our online angst and whining, we're not even 1/10th as far toward the tipping point as we were back then.
Those were all human-created events. What happens when we have a super-volcano eruption and the world has another mini-ice age, and there are famines across the globe? Or the coastal flooding that is predicted to happen by 2050 if we continue current warming trends. We can't just force nature to give up through a superior show of force (unlike winning a war).
By taking such a sweeping view, you're glossing over a lot of individual suffering. Even if we're better off now than prior to WW2, the >50MM casualties of that war would probably disagree.
The art in writing documentation is in effective communication to a varied target audience, not in simply fulfilling the obligation to be technically correct.
Sure, I don't disagree. I've bashed my head countless times against short, super-abstract definitions for which it is very difficult to provide concrete examples. So I totally empathize with the feeling you express.
However:
(0) As for “endomorphism”, the definition “function with the same domain and codomain” should be pretty easy to understand to anyone. (Technically, in an arbitrary category, morphisms don't have to be functions, but Haskellers work in the category Hask, whose morphisms are terminating functions.)
(1) The right place to define what a monoid is is the definition of the class Monoid, not the definition of every type that happens to have a Monoid instance.
There is a weird meme that tech people aren't capable of being "team players" or working with other people.
This is purely anecdotal, but at one particularly memorable company, the head of HR would regularly make casual comments that cast the engineers as socially incapable and childish. Meanwhile, she was constantly offending people and her life was a chaotic mess.
At the same company, they always talked about team this and team that, but efforts to actually incorporate the team (e.g. clear communication, collaboration) were obviously seen as weak, and the "arrogant know it all" persona was rewarded.
I don't know how many of these things are simply cognitive dissonance, or poor communication, and which are deliberate efforts to gain power over others. Seems like a little of all three to me. I also think it's a convenient way for technically incompetent management to lord something over you. They may not understand your technical contributions, but they can finish the review by mentioning how you need to work on some undefined and arbitrary social aspect.
> they always talked about team this and team that, but efforts to actually incorporate the team were obviously seen as weak, and the "arrogant know it all" persona was rewarded.
These are usually techniques to weed out people that the people defending those strategies think (consciously or not) are unfit. If you follow the advice you really are unfit and they will exclude you.
This is common across the board in social situations.
They say one thing, expect that people follow it, but then only promote those that explicitly do not follow it, because in reality they want to promote people that do not follow that rhetoric but saying that outright invalidates the test.
>> your problem here is that you consider climate
>> change something you can believe in or not, and
>> consider it as such.
> GP didn't say anything like that. You're all jumping
> on him in a strawman beat-down party.
That varies wildly by the design of the glasses. I tried rock climbing once with my glasses instead of contacts and it was intolerable. It wasn't immediately obvious how often I relied on a quick flick of the eyes to the outer edges until I tried it.
As to the original point, people adjust their head position all the time without even thinking about it. It's an unnatural and conditioned response to hear a noise on your right rear and move a joystick or mouse to look for the source of the noise.
I've known a few prepper types. They had plans for escape rooms, a significant cache of weapons, some ammo, and a few MREs in the closet.
Nobody had more than maybe a few liters of water per person in the home, and when I asked about an escape plan (e.g. there's a fire, get out and meet at John's house on the next street over) they looked at me like I was insane. Oh, and of course they're all in fairly bad shape.
In my opinion, most of the "prepper" stuff is about fantasy role playing. I see it as related to the "middle aged man porn" we see lately in the form of the Taken franchise of movies. It perhaps it gives a feeling of smug satisfaction in a chaotic life. You're angry that you were cut off in traffic on your way to a job that might have layoffs tomorrow, but at least you can tell yourself that when the apocalypse comes, you'll succeed while that jerk will be fodder. Sort of a tough guy variant of the classic "ass pennies" comedy sketch.