Tag Archives: don’t be ridiculous

Paying a Fair Wage Is the Opposite of Slavery

I just found out about Alex St. John’s ridiculous article on VentureBeat claiming that developers who object to working uncompensated overtime have “a wage-slave attitude”. Ummm, what? It sounds like he’s trying to use emotional terms and “snarl words” to make people think that “whatever a ‘wage slave attitude’ is, it must be bad!” But look […]

Asking for Self-Ratings Guarantees You False Information

How many times has an interviewer — either for an actual employer or for a recruiting agency — asked you: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate yourself at $insert_skill_here?” If you ask candidates to rate their own skill levels — on any scale; it doesn’t matter if it’s 1-5, 1-10, or “beginner, intermediate, […]

Let’s Unpack “Professional Victims”

The only thing more annoying than a phrase that’s overused to the point of cliché is when that overused phrase isn’t even remotely accurate — and in fact, borders on completely nonsensical. The one I’ve heard far too many times in the past year is the all-purpose favorite of Red Pillers, MRAs, GamerGaters, and other defenders […]

Why Do We Care About The Force Awakens?

It’s less than two weeks until The Force Awakens hits the theaters. The promotional team has been doing a bang-up job of building advance buzz, with everything from product tie-ins like two flavors of ice cream to getting Pentatonix to do a medley of Star Wars music alongside a 75-piece orchestra at the American Music […]

What’s Wrong With the “Minimal Weighings” Puzzle for Front-End Interviews

A while back, I came across a post by Philip Walton, who points out that most front-end interview questions aren’t well suited for their basic task of… well, testing a candidate’s front-end development knowledge. At least, the sorts of things he ran into were mostly “logical puzzles, generic coding challenges, and algorithm design problems”, as […]

Stop Designing For Men

If you’re designing or creating content on the Internet today, you need to remember one simple fact: Your audience has two genders, not just one. It isn’t just men, it’s women, too — and the women outnumber the men. Take a look at this report from last year, on “10 Key Trends From the Banking Trenches“. On […]

DDoSes Aren’t Free Speech

Anonymous is an interesting and problematic group. I often agree with their aims and goals. I have a much more varied reaction to their tactics and methods — their street protests have often been masterpieces of surrealism, and also quite effective at lampooning their targets, but their online intrusions and DDoSes annoy me with their legal […]

The Place Where Flow Goes to Die

My employer has multiple offices in different places, so people who I’ve worked “with” for months can still be newcomers to my physical work environment. A visiting co-worker recently said, “From your Twitter feed, I assumed this office would be, like, the loudest place ever.” Am I really that sensitive? I started wondering. I started keeping […]

Is It Getting Better? Or Do You Feel the Same?

I don’t normally want to “harp on” gender issues in tech by doing two posts about them in a row, but I’ve gotta write about this while the news is still kind of current. In my last post, I wrote about the Geeklist fail and the Sqoot/Boston API Jam fail. At the end of my […]

A Single Context for All Social Interaction: Merely Quixotic, or Dangerously Misguided?

I recently read a blog post by Leo Widrich, the co-founder of Buffer, entitled “Why do we have so many lives?” In it, Mr. Widrich says: We have a private life, a public life. We have a work life, a school life, a party life, a love life and I am sure you can name lots […]