I feel like this ‘cloud-first’ strategy will only get worse now that AI assisted development is common. I notice my personal AI assisted C# projects get far more complex than when I use some JS framework.
If it’s not the colleges and universities, you can bet the AIs are better trained on JS/TS.
jyn’s advice here is spot on, however it misses an important point: jyn you are exceptional because you do these things. This is what excellence looks like.
Out of curiosity, why does this have to be a left-leaning initiative? I personally don’t use these political labels as I’m often confused by how they are used.
I suspect it's a minority of people on the right, and frankly, I've known people on the left (in Canada, at least) who antagonize science and various institutions for no other reason than gut feelings. People on extreme ends of political spectrums are problematic, period. They've always been present, but the Internet amplifies their mania to all of us like never before
Conservative people tend to protect their believes, no matter how wrong they are based on new evidence. Humanity has many examples of this happening through millennia, it is widely documented...
Kind of, but also, I've been watching my mainstream liberal friends update their beliefs about stuff, while conservatives still seem stuck. Certainly the point of being "progressive" is about being open to new ideas, and they don't entirely fail at their title. At least in America at the moment, I think the conservatives have it worse.
I think this has happened at times to all groups as well. Right now the conservatives are 'stuck' at least partially because of the cognitive dissonance required to elect and support the current admin.
I think people on the left arguably did the same with various social justice initiatives. Things got crazier by the month for a while until people were genuinely afraid to speak, people were being cancelled for dubious reasons, etc. I recall long periods of needing to be very careful about how (not just what) I said to peers and even some friends. This was a very left-driven phenomenon. While it was started with arguably good intentions, it got weird.
The right has adopted this, ironically, though in a different way and for different reasons. In both cases it's about ideological purity and power, though
Yeah, but part of what I'm seeing is exactly the left pulling their heads out of that mess, while the right is only digging in deeper, both on similar time scales.
Interesting point. I've generally intuited that the left would have carried on down that road were they to win the last election, but I could be wrong. And there has been a bit of a recoil from that kind of behaviour, so you're right about that.
They were already starting to pull back from the worst of the cancelly stuff starting a few years ago. It only took a few years before they realized that a lot of it was blatantly self-contradictory (e.g. broad representation in media is impossible if people are only "allowed" to tell "their own" stories). And they might also have gotten the hint that they were scoring a lot of own goals.
A lot of the other stuff, like actual policy, they're still pretty dug into. But IMO there's a greater proportion of that stuff on which they're just correct, so that's kinda respectable for me.
right and so do libertans ,communists and socialists.
Hanging on to false ideologies, no matter how disastrous, is not exclusive to right leaning its a human trait.
It surely seem like it's way more frequently the issue with right, rather than left. For example there are few if any examples of interfering with scientific work during the Baden administration, while there are many during the Trump one.
Is there much left in there besides extreme hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance? Their beliefs seem to be highly fluid and aligned with whatever the dear leader is saying at any given movement. Daily radical swings are not that uncommon..
In the context of the US in 2025 specifically, anything opposing Dear Leader's agenda will likely be tagged as left-wing, regardless of what it actually is.
This is rather silly, but then it is a rather silly regime.
Because the current right-leaning US administration (ok, some would call it far right - or rather, if you would go by the standards of pretty much any other country, you'd have to classify it as far right) is so fond of conspiracy theories and rejects science? But yes, in principle I agree that accepting scientific consensus shouldn't be a partisan issue...
This is on the engineers. Asking for time to refactor is like a painter asking for time to prime. It’s part of the job so just do it. When brought out in discussion, it sounds as if it is optional and its value dubious. That’s where the feeling of “wasting time” comes from.
Additionally, a lot of refactoring is about predicting the future rather than adapting the code to present expectations while keeping things easy to change. The only metric that your future self cares about is time to feedback. Refactor to adapt to present expectations while keeping the code easy to change in the future, and don’t ask for permission to do this- it is your job.
Snark aside, this is the main topic of Eli Goldratt's "The Goal" - one of my favourite books. Output of the business is constrained by some bottleneck. Improving efficiency away from the bottleneck is just waste. Said differently, enhancing individual productivity has no effect on the business output unless doing so elevates the bottleneck. Sadly, most business don't know what their constraints are or are otherwise blocked from elevating them due to politics and other factors.
There is something to this. I believe that if you cannot feel, you also cannot reason. It’s almost as if intellectual ability is an application of emotionality rather than something separate. For example, when something makes sense to you, what does that really mean? In my experience, when something “clicks”, that is not intellect. The intellect kicks in to retroactively explain the feeling. The “clicking” itself- that’s the feeling.
This is a well written article that points the tension between talent building and improved output. Although focused on design it gives me some ideas on how to build an effective engineering org.
What strikes me as an opportunity is creating a training program for engineers aimed at getting proficient at writing code in as short a period of time as possible so that the engineers can move onto the other more dynamic parts of the job.
> You don't have enough clout to make organizational-level changes. So process things that you see that are really inefficient, and you have some ideas how to address them? Now you've got to convince your manager and probably theirs, too, and they usually don't want to rock the boat.
As long as you are a go-to person, you have more clout than you realize. Spend your social capital while you have it and make changes. Also, making change requires allies but they don’t necessarily have to be in your direct chain of command. Lastly, to make a change in an org, just change. People will follow. Most people are not leaders, but you are. Act like it and you will see that you command far more respect than you think you do.
If it’s not the colleges and universities, you can bet the AIs are better trained on JS/TS.