This is my favorite high powered individual at a company trope.
Hey you, yeah you with no power to change or order people around, yeah, you go ahead and do my job with no new tools or authority.
I have had so many CTOs tell me that I should go tell an entire department to change their entire goal system because of something they want done, but do not want to deliver any thought process of how that's going to happen or are willing to put in any effort to idk, move the gigantic ship they have in motion.
And of course, the blame only goes one direction in such a bad org, tbqh the QA person probably is happier literally anywhere else.
These seems like an inherent challenge to recommending based on stars. Stars are very sparse, so there’s little “didn’t star this” signal, and there’s no “thumbs down”.
So you’re left with things you “should” star, but there very well could be a reason you didn’t.
> anecdotally based on their own subjective experience
So the “subjective” part counts against them. It’s better to make things objective. At least they should be reproducible examples.
When it comes to the “anecdotally” part, that doesn’t matter. Anecdotes are sufficient for demonstrating capabilities. If you can get a race car around a track in three minutes and it takes me four minutes, that’s a three minute race car.
The term "anecdotal evidence" is used as a criticism of evidence that is not gathered in a scientific manner. The criticism does not imply that a single sample (a car making a lap in 3 minutes) cannot be used as valid evidence of a claim (the car is capable of making a lap in 3 minutes).
Studies have shown that software engineers are very bad at judging their own productivity. When a software engineer feels more productive the inverse is just as likely to be true. Thats why anecdotal data can't be trusted.
I think from your top post you also miss “representative”.
If you measure something and amount is N=1 it might be a fact but still a fact true for a single person.
I often don’t need a sample size of 1000 to consider something worth of my time but if it is sample N=1 by a random person on the internet I am going to doubt that.
If I see 1000 people claiming it makes them more productive I am going to check. If it is going to be done by 5 people who I follow and expect they know tech quite well I am going to check as well.
Every person I respect as a great programmer thinks agentic workflows are a joke, and almost every programmer I hold in low regard thinks they're the greatest things ever, so while I still check, I'm naturally quite skeptical.
Doesn't help that many people use AI to assist with autocompleting boilerplate crap or simple refactors, where it works well, or even the occasional small feature. But this is conflated with people who think you can just tell an AI to build an entire app and it'll go off and do it by itself in a giant feedback loop and it'll be perfect.
There are already people I follow who are startup owners and developers themselves saying they are not hiring “respectable developers” who are bashing agentic coding, they much rather hire junior who is starry eyed to work with agents. Because they see the value as they are running companies.
> the uncomfortable fact it is not very much fun to spend time with people who have small children
This is (obviously?) not a fact. I’ve had a blast hanging out with a family in Peru for the last 24 hours. I also always have a great time when I visit my sister, her husband and their little kid.
Long conversations about interesting topics are one way to have fun. And you’re right, those don’t happen as much if you just take a child free couple, some parents and maybe kids and put them in the same room.
Bigger get togethers help a lot. One kid is a handful, but six kids of varying ages can actually be easier. You can also have fun in other ways like dancing, decorating or lighting fireworks (one activity from last night).
Hard to stay warmed up that way. What you’re describing is how people tend to get big without the gym (lifting heavy things through the day) but they also tend be pretty active in between (think farm work).
But as long as you’re not going so hard you risk injury, it might be great overall. Could be really good for your mental state.
This brings up an area that’s been on the edge of my curiosity for years: how do you combine the knowledge of the experts (contestants) with logic to do better either than either strategy individually?
It’s mostly about how to elicit the information from the contestants. Once you have the probabilities from them, it seems relatively straightforward.
I think you could do some form of Bayesian analysis with the prior being how likely each contestant thought that their available partners were "The One" for each other. Then the truth booth would be used to update your priors.
The alternative to something trying to communicate through a Markov model isn’t that we’re alone. Just because there’s no life on Mars doesn’t mean there’s no other life in the universe.
Charts are one I've wondered about, do I need to try to describe the trend of the data, or provide several conclusions that a person seeing the chart might draw?
Just saying "It's a chart" doesn't feel like it'd be useful to someone who can't see the chart. But if the other text on the page talks about the chart, then maybe identifying it as the chart is enough?
It depends on the context. What do you want to say? How much of it is said in the text? Can the content of the image be inferred from the text part? Even in the best scenario though, giving a summary of the image in the alt text / caption could be immensely useful and include the reader in your thought process.
What are you trying to point out with your graph in general? Write that basically. Usually graphs are added for some purpose, and assuming it's not purposefully misleading, verbalizing the purpose usually works well.
I might be an unusual case, but when I present graphs/charts it's not usually because I'm trying to point something out. It's usually a "here's some data, what conclusions do you draw from this?" and hopefully a discussion will follow. Example from recently: "Here is a recent survey of adults in the US and their religious identification, church attendance levels, self-reported "spirituality" level, etc. What do you think is happening?"
Would love to hear a good example of alt text for something like that where the data isn't necessarily clear and I also don't want to do any interpreting of the data lest I influence the person's opinion.
Yeah, I think I misunderstood the context. I understood/assumed it to be for an article/post you're writing, where you have something you want to say in general/some point of what you're writing. But based on what you wrote now, it seems to be more about how to caption an image you're sending to a blind person in a conversation/discussion of some sort.
I guess at that point it'd be easier for them if you just share the data itself, rather than anything generated by the data, especially if there is nothing you want to point out.
An image is the wrong way to convey something like that to a blind person. As written in one of my other comments, give the data in a table format or a custom widget that could be explored.
This is huge. I was selling software to help QA. I saw a CEO demand a Head of QA guarantee their super buggy app be free of bugs by a certain date.
This is terrible. She didn’t write the thing. Total responsibility without authority trap. She was, not at all to my surprise, fired.
I think the deal fell through and I don’t know how else things ended up with them.
QA’s job is signal. If you’re getting clear signal, they’re doing their job.
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