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

It’s a slur for Asians, more specifically Vietnamese. I can actually trigger my coworker to say it, by merely mentioning that I like Chinese food.

Even before AI, I definitely encountered people writing things on their CV with no actual idea about them.

I’ve actually done more than one phone interview where I would ask a question and then hear either keyboard tapping or multiple people whispering (or both) in the background during the long pause before the interviewee answered. It was hard to not just laugh and hang up on them.

I will never implement a sort IRL

My answer to “what’s the best sorting algorithm” is “the SORT BY clause in SQL”.

I retired as a programmer five years ago and now I drive a school bus. The difference in acceptable workplace behavior is pretty stark. In my software companies, nobody ever came anywhere close to saying anything even vaguely racist; meanwhile in the bus garage people routinely use the n-word and the g-word. And it’s not like this is Mississippi or anything - this is a suburb of Philadelphia where the entire transportation department would probably be sacked if parents were ever to become aware of how their bus drivers talk.

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’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.

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.

And a child is assumed to be a future combatant.

One thing I always liked about the various flavors of BASIC was that nobody ever pushed that shit as a religion.

You can’t just find a signal in the middle of the ocean.

Uh, this was the primary way the Allies defeated the U-Boats in WWII.

the specific term for paedophiles who are into teens rather than younger children

I think that’s called “Drake”.

I haven’t seen any of that. For me, Youtube music is almost exactly like Spotify experience-wise.