I know Qt is cross-platform, but cars? Wow! I only ever used it for shitty Skype clones for Canadian ISPs.

Well, I am a Prodigy at that sort of thing!

Y’all need Qt Creator: C++ for under the hood and Javascript for the UI. Virtually nonexistent base of coders who can do both competently and if you’re not careful you end up moving to Finland because of it.

I started out with Visual Basic using the Variant type all the time, and even though I was usually just working on one-person projects it was a fucking disaster. You don’t even have to collaborate to see the virtues of strong typing.

just because it’s innovative and disruptive to invent the machine gun doesn’t mean it’s good

That’s a great Maxim.

OP is unaware Logan’s Run was just a shitty movie - except for that open-sided dress, of course. Renew!

The penalty is usually a fine, which impacts stockholders by making the stock less valuable

Of course they can always compensate for this by firing a bunch of people.

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

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.

You misspelled “harvest” and “organs”.

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.

“Get rid of those ugly strain reliefs on the plugs!”
“Uh, we don’t make hardware.”
“I don’t care, get rid of them!”

For me, working from home meant eating endangered species for lunch seven days a week instead of just two. Checkmate, liberals.

if the code changes and the comment isn’t updated accordingly, it can be ambiguous.

People always cite this as a reason comments are bad. In 30+ years as a developer I have seen (and participated in) a lot of failed software projects, but not once has a mismatch between comments and code been the actual cause of the failure. Moreover, the same logic could be applied to the names of methods and variables (“if the code changes and the method and variable names aren’t updated accordingly, it can be ambiguous”) but nobody ever suggests getting rid of that. At the end of the day, comments are useful for imparting information about the code to future developers (or yourself) that is too complicated to be adequately communicated by a method name.