Would you think those guys would know to do something about a dude on a roof with a rifle?

It’s a slur for Asians, more specifically Vietnamese. I can actually trigger my coworker to say it, by merely mentioning that I like Chinese food.

Even before AI, I definitely encountered people writing things on their CV with no actual idea about them.

I’ve actually done more than one phone interview where I would ask a question and then hear either keyboard tapping or multiple people whispering (or both) in the background during the long pause before the interviewee answered. It was hard to not just laugh and hang up on them.

I will never implement a sort IRL

My answer to “what’s the best sorting algorithm” is “the SORT BY clause in SQL”.

I retired as a programmer five years ago and now I drive a school bus. The difference in acceptable workplace behavior is pretty stark. In my software companies, nobody ever came anywhere close to saying anything even vaguely racist; meanwhile in the bus garage people routinely use the n-word and the g-word. And it’s not like this is Mississippi or anything - this is a suburb of Philadelphia where the entire transportation department would probably be sacked if parents were ever to become aware of how their bus drivers talk.

At my last company, they usually gave end-of-the-year bonuses instead of raises. They were pretty generous, usually amounting to about half of our annual salaries, but it of course prevented us from being guaranteed that level of compensation the following year. That’s why I always describe bonuses as raises followed by pay cuts.

I once quit my job at a software company I really hated. They were desperate to keep me around for the projects I was leading so they asked if I would work hourly for a while. I quoted them a go-fuck-yourselves hourly rate which they immediately agreed to, which made me even more angry about my prior years of poor compensation. I worked under this agreement for about half a year and further improved my effective hourly rate by not working very hard.

It’s funny how people who get their news exclusively from their Facebook feeds have never heard of Cambridge Analytica. I can’t imagine how that could happen.

I’m a school bus driver and I had to ban the singing of Christmas songs on my bus before Thanksgiving. Naturally the little bastards ignore this, just like they ignore my injunction against singing Taylor Swift songs. Thank god T-Swiffer has never done a Christmas album.

You misspelled “harvest” and “organs”.

What is your area? I’ve lived in about 20 US states, in cities and rural areas, and it’s always been 1 cop per vehicle.

You’re thinking of cop shows from the '70s and '80s, not reality.

I don’t want to be the guy defending Hitler or Jeffery Dahmer, but

I’m a school bus driver and I regularly get infuriated by people who drive past me when I have my red flashers on and stop sign out, wishing there was a cop around. Only once so far have I gotten my wish … and unfortunately it was the cop driving past me at 40 mph just as some of my kids were about to cross the road. I looked down and saw him with his phone in his right hand and his left hand on the wheel, not paying the slightest attention to what was in front of him.

I’m lucky he didn’t run over any kids, because I probably would have gotten shot.

I can see valid reasons for why someone might want to use Apple Macbooks

I use one because I write apps for iOS and you can only do that on a Macbook. It doesn’t make me a fanboi.

Wow thanks, never heard of this before. I was getting all set to buy a new Macbook so I could install the latest versions of Xcode and keep developing iOS apps. Looks like I can keep on abusing my 12yo Macbook instead.

I never once had a manager who even pretended to be a coder, and I’ve worked for a wide variety of companies ranging in size from a few people to tens of thousands. The only technical manager I’ve ever witnessed was myself when I managed teams of developers (and that only happened by accident when I wasn’t really paying attention). Even then I was less of a technical manager and more of a lead developer who also took on management functions because there was nobody else around to do it.

It certainly seems like a manager with actual technical skills would make the best manager of a team of developers, as long as they also have the people skills to do it. And didn’t harbor the desire to fire everybody and just do everything themselves - like I did.

or was it that they hired “career managers” whose only skill was to organise things?

My best manager was a former dentist who quit the profession after just two months because he couldn’t stand the idea of sticking his hands in peoples’ mouths all day long. I don’t think he had anything resembling formal qualifications for management.

I’m mostly a technical unblocker that jumps into the hardest or slowest moving technical challenges

In thirty years as a programmer, I never had a manager who was capable of jumping into any technical challenges at all. For me, the best managers were the ones who kept out of my way and insulated me from their managers.

But at the same time nothing is really expected of you - by the people above or below you. And you make more money than the people doing the actual work.

I grew up in Ohio in the 1970s (which was admittedly a rough decade as far as cold weather was concerned). Generally, the first snowfall was some time in September and at some point in October the ground would be completely covered in snow and you wouldn’t see grass again until April. The snow wasn’t completely gone until May. So essentially it was six months of Winter, three months of Summer and a month and a half each for Spring and Fall. It is certainly not anything like that any more.