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 […]
Tag Archives: don’t be ridiculous
Asking for Self-Ratings Guarantees You False Information
Saturday, January 30th, 2016 – 9:19 am
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”
Thursday, January 14th, 2016 – 8:12 am
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?
Wednesday, December 9th, 2015 – 7:53 am
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
Thursday, October 29th, 2015 – 6:24 pm
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
Saturday, July 20th, 2013 – 12:47 pm
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
Sunday, January 13th, 2013 – 9:17 pm
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
Monday, December 10th, 2012 – 9:58 pm
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?
Monday, April 9th, 2012 – 8:23 pm
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?
Thursday, January 12th, 2012 – 8:31 pm
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 […]