Someone is allowed to say that they feel something is horrible while acknowledging that other people may feel differently and while not asserting that their feeling is an objective judgement overriding other perspectives.
Sorry to hear you're in that situation. Having been responsible for hiring at a few places I would stress to keep yourself busy and your tech skills active. If you have a big gap with no explanation or activity it's hard to justify bringing you in for interview. Find things to do, and put it on your CV but in a way that shows this is part of a work gap and you're looking for FTE.
You could contribute to open source. This can take a few forms. A few small PRs on well known projects can go a long way. Many projects are looking for docs and better test coverage, these can be easy ways in.
You can make something on your own and open source it. I'd suggest something small but complete with some sort of interesting novelty to it. Make sure any projects have interesting READMEs. Don't just follow a TODO list tutorial in language X and stick it up GitHub.
You could volunteer your tech skills somewhere. Even contacting charities and seeing if they need help with anything.
You could try write a blog, but with a specific focus on an area that interests you. I was out of work for a while and planned to do this for horizontal database scaling for example.
Any of these things look infinitely better to a potential employer than a blank space.
Finally, it's really important to own the narrative. Put on your CV you've been out of work but looking for a new opportunity. List the things you've been doing. Maybe there's a framing you can put on it, like a career break. Don't be ashamed by it, stay positive. Good luck.
I remember a previous role the team leaders all went on a management training course. Everyone came back and started adding "please" to every request. I found it really patronising and felt like I was being spoken to like a 5 year old.
> "Can you run the SQL update in prod?"
Vs
> "Can you run the SQL update in prod please?"
The "please" sounds like an exasperated parent that is fed up giving the instruction.
I'm also starting to get really sick of emojis everywhere. I don't think they added to this article at all. I hope it's just a temporary fad we are going through and this isn't the future of written communication.
Yeah. This is good advice and all but it's no use if embraced only by behavior on a superficial level. Then it's just cosmetic and can be quite vile at worst, like seeing guys repeat pick-up artist tricks.
Never went on a management course and never been a manager, I always say please and thankyou. It's polite. Sorry you have a chip on your shoulder about it though.
I think there is no hard rule. Some people say that all the time, some never. Some have a friendly tone and don't need it, but if they add it suddenly it can appear like mentioned. No one said you should stop and I'm pretty sure it won't annoy people if it comes naturally.
It's the same as when sales people talk to me and intersperse "Well, Mr. wink, you know about this great offer, that will benefit you, Mr. wink, very much. As I said earlier, Mr. wink." - makes me want to end the call right at the 2nd mention.
Which would be quite impolite, tough fella. The nice thing about working in a professional environment is that I don't have to cater to your desires, I simply have to be polite and professional :)
I can't figure out if you're patronising on purpose, or genuinely polite. FWIW I suspect it's the later, and your sorrys and smiles are meant to soften the blow. But I guess that highlights the issue - it's sometimes hard to distinguish between the two, especially when the other side (like me) is used to a more direct communication.
It depends on the culture. Come to Eastern Europe (and I guess to other similar cultures, South America maybe?) and see how far you can go without saying "please" or "thank you". Not that far, I can tell you that.
Even though things are beginning to change for the worst in tech world, but, then again, many of the tech people in here see themselves as North-Westerners who happened to be born in the wrong place.
When people use a lot of emojis, the story in my head is that they care more about keeping appearances up than about honesty and transparency. It's fake positivity.
I disagree. I feel there are certain "styles" of emoji use. I don't know if I can explain it well. for example ive worked with people who are really good communicators who use things like sunglasses emoji or muscle emoji to make you actually feel good and keep concise clear communication. But people who make some big long official announcement then pepper it with random emojis to make it more "fun" can be extremely offputting. There are appropriate times to put them but you gotta anticipate how your audience is likely to feel and use them to show you're communicating in good faith, and if you're communicating in bad faith, just don't use them at all, we can all tell.
Also the choice and timing of emojis can be good or bad. Honestly I think it literally comes down to a culture difference between hr types and engineers
Then tell them that! Give them the feedback they need so they can know how to communicate with you better. (Talking about person-to-person relationships, of course)
In the end, this is a matter of taste. Just because something works for someone, it doesn't mean that it will work for everyone. But also: Just because something fails to work for someone, it doesn't mean that it will fail to work fo everyone.
I like to use emojis when they allow me to get denser content, especially if it's to be printed to a TTY. As long as there's a key somewhere, reducing var names to a single character allows you to pack in a lot more information, while simultaneously being far more expressive than eg "i", "j", "k". It gives you the benefits of columnar data without requiring scrolling back to see headers or even requiring that the columns be perfectly evenly spaced.
...aren't you afraid someone will take a golf club and hit you with it?
Honestly, the fear of saying this phrase to someone who just happened to play Bioshock and saw Ryan's monologue is enough for me to never-ever use it. I don't know how I'd react if I heard it directed at me, but I'm 99% sure I'd - at the very, very least - say "No, I would not" and go away. There's a fine line between "formative" and "traumatic" and I'm really not sure on which side that playthrough falls, even 15 years later.
Yeah I hate "please", but assuming I'm with a cohort that understands it, "pls" seems to work a lot better, i.e:
>can you merge that pr pls
I'm not sure why, I guess it just sounds a lot more casual when written down and read? It still gets across that it's a request, not a command, but without that patronising tone. Generally speaking I've very much gone from speaking very formally in chat with my teammates to casual chat where I no longer care for punctuation or capitalisation, makes it feel a lot friendlier I guess?
Obviously for official comms/emails/talking to someone I don't know I format properly and professionally but for day to day stuff I just like keeping casual, like you would speaking in the office I guess.
I find that this is a classic communication style preference. I also know people who find these "pleasantries" patronizing and unnecessary. I'm on the other end: someone saying "please" and "thank you" makes me feel like they're acknowledging me as a person, not just barking commands at me.
There's no right answer; you just have to learn what the person you work with needs.
yes, coworkers thanking me for a bugfix or a feature bothers the hell out of me. man I am not doing it for you, I am doing it for money that is thanks enough
That isn't the same thing. Your efforts can still be appreciated as it will have had had a positive impact on them. They're merely expressing it, which is something people do. After all, if everyone assumed the attitude in your last sentence, it would make for a highly unpleasant environment overall and make work a lot more stressful.
> yes, coworkers thanking me for a bugfix or a feature bothers the hell out of me. man I am not doing it for you, I am doing it for money that is thanks enough
And they're thanking you for doing something that will keep them employed.
I had a customer one time like you. I was talking with her on the phone and I was phrasing requests (as I often did) as "would you do this for me?"
"I'm not doing this for you, I'm doing this for my boss," she repeatedly responded, while repeatedly ignoring my directions.
Accept the expression of gratitude, even if your inner narcissism doesn't want you to.
Assuming this means the Secretary of State for Business and Trade (the UK has 17 Secretaries of State), the current one has a degree in computer systems engineering and has worked as a software engineer [1], so she probably has a fairly good idea.
I didn't know this, and have made the same snarky joke in dumb interviews about the company registration etc. - that's very cool and I will eat my words.
She somehow got away with hacking into a rivals computer/server — she would contest the use of the word hacking but by the wording of the computer misuse act it's what she did.
This makes me hyper sad. Seems Amazon are just making things worse with everything they do. Ever tried to buy something like a USB hub or charge cable off Amazon? Endless suspect brands you've never heard of with poor quality. Now they are normalising books with blurry cover art and hard to read text due to budget printing?
Authors use on-demand printing from Amazon because ordering a full print run is significantly more expensive, and due to lack of demand they'd never be able to recover the costs. These kinds of books aren't promoted by a top publisher and don't have shelf space at your local bookstore. Chances are if it weren't for Amazon they wouldn't be available for purchase at all.
People don't seem to realize how absurd it is that you can have an idea for a book, type it out, upload it to Amazon, publish it on the Kindle store, and print and ship a hardcover copy to anyone in the world all in a matter of days. If you told this to an aspiring author lining up in front of publishing houses 20 years ago they would have laughed in your face because of how unbelievable it sounds. "Oh but the cover art is blurry"...seriously? Who the hell cares?
Stick to the big five publishers section at Barnes & Noble then, and excuse the indie authors who don't have the budget to make your bookshelf look good.
No, our standards shouldn't be that low that we accept blurry covers. It's likely a good quality proxy of the content though. Attention to details is often important.
The books themselves feel a bit flimsy though, compared to well-printed books that have a sturdier feel. They still cost £30+ each and the quality of the finished product doesn't really match up with the price. And we're not just talking about indie self-publishers, I've noticed a drop in print quality from PragProg, Packt and O'Reilly too. For a while I thought this was just Amazon shipping shit quality material until Waterstones and Bookshop were sending them too.
The lower barrier to entry for self-publishing is not an excuse for a race to the bottom on quality. I can't imagine many of these books surviving as long as, say, my battered copy of K&R C.
I've bought books from book shops recently which were of pretty abysmal quality. With paperbacks publishers seem to do a decent run and then any reprints are closer to photocopy quality. Often the front cover is missing some of the edges (as in the design has been enlarged and then cropped to fit the standard size).
Basically I love books but publishers are stuck in a race to the bottom with quality.
Oh man I wish I could buy more from a book store. The selection is always so bare around me and there is never a single software book in sight, which are the kind of books I read most often. Ebay ends up being the champion for me.
Full disclosure didn't even read the article. But if you wanted to know what programming as a game would look like, play Factorio. Refactoring, decoupling, debugging, it's all there. I played it intensely for 3 weeks then had to force myself to put it down. It's a one of a kind game.
> Also from a store perspective, any game where shortcuts like this are used tend to be shit games. They don't want spam games to be pumped. There's already enough indie trash platformers that nobody wants.
I find this hard to agree with. A game engine is a "shortcut" too, I can imagine people saying at some point anything developed with Unity would "tend to be shit games".
Associating quality with visual fidelity anyway is wrong, look at Terraria, I'm pretty sure anyone semi competent with AI generation could produce better assets, but it wouldn't help them produce a better game.
People will use gen AI art in good games, and people will use gen AI art in terrible games.
> NewsGuard has a clever way to identify these junk AI-written websites...For example, one site called CountyLocalNews.com had messages like “Sorry, I cannot fulfill this prompt as it goes against ethical and moral principles …
`if str_contains(body, "Sorry, I cannot")` thanks NewsGuard, you've solved the problem pats NewsGuard on head while giving them an encouraging smile
> I do feel Rakuten's website is "horrible"