I love you all. Wow. What a group, what a collection of perspectives.
I'm not top-tier, not in your league at all. Not dumb, but a bit late in getting organized.
I worked for a state government. For too long, trying to make it work. Then on July 7, 2005 I quit my job after deciding that I'd rather die than keep working there. Haven't worked since, as it turned out. Squeaked by somehow, since I always lived within my means and was good at saving money.
In 2011 I took early Social Security, and that thousand a month coming in was a huge relief. Way better than zero. My defined-benefit state pension kicked in during 2014, doubling my income, and now I live in Cuenca, Ecuador and am starting over at age 73, though not really worried about an income. Mostly it's about the learning, and developing skills I never got to before.
And I have learned more about life in the last 10 years than all the time before that, mostly via thinking things over. Of course, now that I'm smart, I'd do everything differently. Radically. If I had the chance.
A couple of days back I looked up a guy I used to work with. He was a young intranet webmaster at [state agency]. Since then he got into the Agile/Scrum world and made a really good living from it. Been all over state government as a contractor, and other places, like Microsoft, and even got to Australia, etc. Good for him. He decided to focus on a thing, own it, and run with it. I've always dithered. My loss.
* The real issue probably isn't finding the right job or company but finding the right people, including the right person within yourself. It always comes down to the people.
* If the Pointy Headed Boss doesn't understand it, then it can't be that important.
* Especially for a small/non-technical company, you are hired help, like a plumber or electrician -- maybe useful from time to time to do some obscure dirty thing but still just another manual laborer.
* From a non-technical boss to me, about a technical issue: I've dealt with people like you before -- you always see it as black and white, but we need more shades of gray.
* There is likely no general solution. What's right for you may not be right for anyone else.
* A well-run company is a well-run run company. That's the fundamental fundamental.
* No-code software is a tool to solve problems. To be of any use it has to be driven by someone who knows how to think, which is what a programmer is.
* The contractor who built one client-server system I worked on needed three more months to finish it. Nope -- had to meet the deadline. So three of us spent two years slapping patches on it. And all three of us left before it was working as promised.
* Words of wisdom from some of my (former) co-workers, none of whom were part of any solution, ever: (1) If it ain't broke, don't fix it. (2) We've never done it that way. (3) Wait.
Some choice thoughts from the comments here:
* "Very few passions survive contact with the industrialized version of their craft."
* "Programming is a tool. Computers are tools. You're not getting paid to program. You're getting paid to solve some problem for your employer by programming."
* "I realized that the problem is inside of my mind...It took me many years to finaly come to the deep realization that sitting down by yourself and brutaly examining my own problems that the mind generates is the only way forward."
* "What I hate about the industry is politics, short-term thinking, selfishness, dogmatism and other forms of irrationality."
* "There is next to nothing being produced today that I care about at all. I don't play games, I hardly ever use my smart phone..."
* "I try to bring a sense of craftsmanship to my work."
"This is a video of a presentation given by Clifford Stoll at a Sequent User's Group 'Enterprise Solutions Summit' in Portland, OR. I happen to find this program on a DVD as I was cleaning out some old boxes and figured it was probably the only surviving copy of this presentation in existence. Of all the programs, presentations and lectures I've attended over a long career in the IT field, this presentation has always stuck with me and I figured it would be a shame if this were lost to the world forever. I hope you enjoy the presentation as much now as I did then." -- William Danger Newman
I started out being rather afraid I'd taken this article & Clifford seriously, but it was a good talk, with strong values in it, & that resonated with me.
I continue to feel like computing is a deep rich pool, but that consumerization has us all splashing around in the kiddy pool. There's a lack of candor, dishonestly, that we work so hard to hide complexity.
There was a neandering & fun diatrabe I ran into called "Make Me Think"[1], that has gorgeous & beautiful simple pictures of how we've tackled complexity over the years: making the user juggle it all, now with user-centered design we try to pre-plan & take on the complexity from a design level so to users everything "just works." But we've kind of robbed the world of learning, of mastery, of adaptability. Stroll portrays computing as shallow, as an activity akin to a slideshow, and happening upon this post feels serendipitous similar.
Having watched the talk, the knowledge versus information aspect seems like the core axis though, the push for deepness in our cybermedias. It loops quickly back around to my other comment in this thread, on expecting more overlays, more peer-based context building, more wayposting to have emerged[2], and instead, a tyranny of flatness having become utterly dominating.
"When Doug Lindsay was at college he got ill very suddenly. It was the same mystery illness his mother and aunt had suffered from for most of their lives. Doctors were baffled. Doug had to drop out of college and was bedridden for years. He decided to take matters into his own hands and work out what was wrong with him. In search of a cure, Doug eventually persuaded doctors to perform a surgery that had never been done on humans before. He spoke to Outlook's Jo Fidgen, in an interview first broadcast in December 2019."
"We're supposed to believe that early hominids got to northern Asia 2.1 million years ago and then for some reason didn't go any farther north," Steeves explained. "A few thousand more kilometres, they would have been in North America. So it does not make any sense whatsoever."
There is also a link to a great podcast, and she has a book out too: "The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere"
It's there for anyone who is interested. Right now I'm skimming it to see what I can learn. Can be quite involved but can reduce errors and improve quality by orders of magnitude. (Proven.)
Given that, Humphrey repeatedly emphasizes that communication and understanding about what needs to be built are the most important parts, and that trying to test quality into larger systems can literally take years (of full-time work, by teams of dozens of developers).
Since I'm retired and reviewing all the ways that I wasted my life, then for me it's only an intellectual exercise, but this could help someone still in the thick of it. Lots of food for thought.
"Dirt to Soil One Family's Journey into Regenerative Agriculture", by Gabe Brown, 2018
Gabe Brown didn't set out to change the world when he first started working alongside his father-in-law on the family farm in North Dakota. But as a series of weather-related crop disasters put Brown and his wife, Shelly, in desperate financial straits, they started making bold changes to their farm. Brown―in an effort to simply survive―began experimenting with new practices he'd learned about from reading and talking with innovative researchers and ranchers. As he and his family struggled to keep the farm viable, they found themselves on an amazing journey into a new type of farming: regenerative agriculture.
Brown dropped the use of most of the herbicides, insecticides, and synthetic fertilizers that are a standard part of conventional agriculture. He switched to no-till planting, started planting diverse cover crops mixes, and changed his grazing practices. In so doing Brown transformed a degraded farm ecosystem into one full of life―starting with the soil and working his way up, one plant and one animal at a time.
In Dirt to Soil Gabe Brown tells the story of that amazing journey and offers a wealth of innovative solutions to our most pressing and complex contemporary agricultural challenge―restoring the soil. The Brown's Ranch model, developed over twenty years of experimentation and refinement, focuses on regenerating resources by continuously enhancing the living biology in the soil. Using regenerative agricultural principles, Brown's Ranch has grown several inches of new topsoil in only twenty years! The 5,000-acre ranch profitably produces a wide variety of cash crops and cover crops as well as grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured laying hens, broilers, and pastured pork, all marketed directly to consumers.
The key is how we think, Brown says. In the industrial agricultural model, all thoughts are focused on killing things. But that mindset was also killing diversity, soil, and profit, Brown realized. Now he channels his creative thinking toward how he can get more life on the land―more plants, animals, and beneficial insects. "The greatest roadblock to solving a problem," Brown says, "is the human mind."
Gabe Brown is a pioneer of the soil-health movement and has been named one of the twenty-five most influential agricultural leaders in the United States. Brown, his wife, Shelly, and son, Paul, own Brown’s Ranch, a holistic, diversified 5,000-acre farm and ranch near Bismarck, North Dakota. The Browns integrate their grazing and no-till cropping systems,
which include cash crops and multispecies cover crops along with all- natural, grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured pork, and laying hens. The
Brown family has received a Growing Green Award from the Natural Resources Defense Council, an Environmental Stewardship Award from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and the USA Zero-Till Farmer of the Year Award.
If you are looking for more material to help you better understand your soil, the best book I've read on the subject was A Soil Owner’s Manual: How to Restore and Maintain Soil Health. It takes a "just the facts" approach, which makes it more dense than it appears, but can be read through quickly. Here's a synopsis: https://thenaturalfarmer.org/article/a-soil-owners-manual-ho... .
About the only thing I liked about Yahoo mail was its built-in blocking feature, which apparently used Sieve without any tap dancing needed. All you had to do was pick an email address to block, block it, and that was it - you'd never get _anything_ from that sender again, and the sender wouldn't know that they'd been blocked, so they wouldn't be tempted to try another route.
Karl Voit did a dissertation on using tags, and developed some software to help...
How to Use Tags https://karl-voit.at/2022/01/29/How-to-Use-Tags/ (and there are several other posts on the subject)
Tagstore: https://karl-voit.at/tagstore/en/papers.shtml
Personally, me still be try to find system to work in own small head. Many head acheings yet.