Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Oh goody! My favorite job, replacing a garage door spring. [sic] #fml

I was a little disappointed in the chapter on technical work in Sarah Jaffe's book, Work Won't Love You Back, because it focused too tightly on Silicon Valley and game development. The things she described aren't wholly unique to the game industry, but it kind of sounded that way. She did a good study on how the software industry abuses youthful enthusiasm, and her treatment of burnout, ego, and mistaking software dev for art was spot on.

Don't let the right-wing fucknuts take Viking history or Norse gods away from you. They also don't own the "Don't tread on me" flag. We know they're bullies that run in the face of stuff opposition, so stand up and show them how small of a minority they are! #NaziPunksFuckOff

Forget 5 an Hour — the Minimum Wage Should Be 4 https://theintercept.com/2021/03/05/minimum-wage-raise-15/

No, Dr Seuss and Mr Potato Head haven't been 'cancelled'. Here's the difference https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/06/dr-seuss-mr-potato-head-cancel-culture

However, you can't prove or disprove a hypothesis with no metrics, so anecdote becomes the metric; this causes people to complain about "big design up front" and "abstraction", both of which are productivity and quality enhancers when done right, but popular hypothesis of how to do both have led to an aversion of both.

The software world needs to start maturing before we have a real software crisis. #immatureSoftware

This has resulted in a reduction in reliability, because software isn't a mature field. While an EE level of CAD (automation) exists, it is little used. While metrics exist, they are little used. Repeatability is not considered a desirable trait. Untrained practitioners learn by development of small systems, and best practices in such development do not lead to best practices in the development of large systems. Some of this is the fault of bad hypothesis treated as theory. 2/n

I saw electrical engineers get replaced by CAD and outsourcing. The outsourcing was mostly skilled labor, because EE is a mature field; it is easy to judge skill level in mature fields due to more repeatability and established metrics. The CAD replaced the problematic and tedious area of board layout and the tedious area of schematic drawing. It also helped verification.
Software, OTOH, is mostly just outsourcing without a reduction in tedium or increase in automated verification. 1/n

It might be true that, "anyone can learn to code", but saying, "anyone can become a software developer", is an entirely different proposition. It's about time for the software world to adopt an attitude that software development is a profession that requires people with actual formal training and that such people have the same worth as other highly skilled fields.

Is contributing to FOSS projects the unpaid internship of the software world? Does throwing a minimum wage on it make it feel more professional or more like flipping burgers?