a friend of mine did a high school project where he and a friend learnt it well enough to have a short conversation with each other. That's the only time it has come up in life until now. I hope he sees this.
The scary thing is that it's unclear to me what would have happened if the guy hadn't had a Kik account, and the real perp had used just one underscore. Can you just pick somebody's username from another service to frame them for grooming? Couldn't you do this to anyone in that case, if that's all that it takes? I sure hope this article is leaving something out, otherwise this is some kangaroo court shit...
I don’t get the hypothetical, the perpetrator and the guy arrested were both using Kik and the account names were confused. There was no other service in this case.
I agree that IntelliJ is a monster of a resource hog, but I have yet to find an editor where code navigation is as good. That's basically all I use it for these days, in the days of LLMs, and I still think it's worth it. VSCode, especially for golang, is terrible. I might be holding it wrong, but I've really tried, and it's just not good enough.
Before LLMs, when I still refactored by hand, coworkers who were using vim or vscode used to ask me to do big refactors, because IntelliJ always got it right, whereas with the other editors it was hit-or-miss.
This is my experience and it really sucks that Jetbrains has devolved into such a poorly run company. It's clear a lot of their real talent who cared about the programming side and refactoring left years ago. Now it seems like all their product decisions are from bog standard non-technical business people who chase buzzwords.
This is a major problem for them because they fragmented their IDE codebase so much properly maintaining it requires resources and people they don't have and would have to invest years of effort to replace. But that doesn't maximize quarterly profit, so it's left to decay and we get hourly LLM plugin updates.
I've used IntelliJ since 2004 and it's always been a resource hog and always perpetually just beyond the faculties of the typical developer workstation. They've struggled with it since forever.
I don't think they've devolved at all. They've always been a mix of brilliance (far ahead of everyone else on refactoring and semantic analysis, etc) and challenges. And it has a lot to do I think with just being a relatively small team.
And the wave of LLM/agentic stuff has been a serious threat to them. Their efforts with Junie and the things before that have been faltering steps.
I do think it's beyond the point where they probably should just rewrite the core things they do in Rust. Their issue since day one has been it seems they're in a perpetual fight with the JVM garbage collector.
Significant portion of their staff left in 2022, when they decided to relocate from Russia and they keep bleeding engineers ever since. Despite registration in Prague, JetBrains has always been a Russian company with dominantly Russian employees.
Saying that VS Code is terrible for Go is simply false. The Go extension is regularly updated and works extremely well. Sure, it lacks some advanced refactoring features available in IntelliJ, like function parameters reordering, but gopls supports most refactoring you'd need to do day to day..
Sorry, but gopls doesn't even support moving files/packages and updating references properly - which is basic, tablestakes, "everyday" feature supported out of the box by Goland.
I can list 2 dozen other things that Gopls doesn't support but Goland does.
I've been working as a software developer for about ten years, and I've started to get a little annoyed when my manager asks me what I'm gonna work on improving this year. Like what can I say? That I'll try get better at coding? That I'll get better at project management? At some point the marginal utility is just not there anymore. Even if I did get twice as good (whatever that means) at systems design, it's not like there is _that_ much systems design to go around at work that it would actually be noticeable.
What do senior developers say they'll work on improving in their performance reviews?
Instead of talking about skills, or personal efficiency, talk about technologies that you're going to introduce to your product, or some specific difficult problem that you're intending to solve.
Another next career step is to take ownership of things without needing to be asked or told, to create and execute plans, to raise and address problems pro-actively etc. And if your workspace doesn't give you opportunities to do it, and you want career progression, then go somewhere else.
It really shows you're a team player when you take on more work for the same amount of money. Only a possibility of future reward, and _if_ you can spin your performance reviews correctly and _if_ management doesn't inexplicably dislike you.
This only works if your managers are actually invested and interested in having you grow.
If you start trying to take ownership of things without being asked you might also just be told to stay in your lane. If you start raising problems pro-actively you may be told to pipe down.
Yes, there's always "go somewhere else" except bad managers are more common than you think.
It's fine to prefer the comfort of familiar problems and obstacles, but you shouldn't pretend to yourself that you haven't chosen to embrace them over fear of the unknown.
Treat the answer like a game instead of treating the question like a logic puzzle. Optimizing the answer framing instead of the question framing opens up a lot of possibilities. This also works in personality conflicts affecting communication (like marriage).
Figure out something to say even though you are not yet very clear on the other person's communication. Common approaches: Ask for clarification, mirror what they say. Growing up autistic, I couldn't find a way to maintain/create a positive connection until I started to focus on the emotions, not the data. I then discovered that the emotion seemed to preceede the data for many people, and that if you stayed on the emotional wavelength, sometimes the data I thought I perceived would turn out to be irrelevant. A cliche is men attributing this to women wanting to share feelings, but it parallels another cliche, men wanting to share things that anger them.
Talk about technologies you want to introduce can go more than one way. It can make you sound informed or it can make you sound like someone, who is performing CV-driven development. I know the type. Like for example needlessly wanting to push GraphQL into things that are simple REST APIs.
And that demonstrates the difference between a developer that is ready for promotion vs one that isn't. You need to be able to make the correct choices for your employer (even if they are not the best choices, or most interesting choices), and being able to recognize these is a skill.
Like all such metrics, the specifics don't really matter. All that matters is that you can tell a story, over the course of the year, on how you've "improved". The goal is to use the story to highlight the work you've been doing while passing it off as evidence. This kind of story telling is something people in management positions tend to be very good at but it's also a skill people not in management should have some proficiency in.
It is going to be easy this year. I'll make up some bullshit story about how I used Claude to improve my productivity, and how learned and used AI tools to speed up the feature delivery process. It doesn't have to be true...
Is your manager really asking about your self-improvement?
Or are they asking about you improving what you can do for them, your team and your company? Your job description is a baseline but if you’ve nailed that, there’s usually more you can do that’s outside of that.
Or you can be content with doing your job well, and make up some bs so your manager can write it on a form. Both are valid.
That's the type of culture that made me leave my last job. Feels very inhuman when you see your manager every week, and they still make you fill in robotic questionnaires for potential salary raise.
It's deeply demotivating to learn that your manager doesn't know you all that well and cares more about filling in checklists, at least for me.
I understand that people who like to stay on their job dislikes this kind of questions, and I also sympathize on why tech sector now doesn't have places for them and asking people to keep improving.
However for those who are superstar / plan maker, this discussion is actually beneficial. This is the moment where among all of things available, prioritized items will be officially registered, rather than your manager make assumption on what needs focus / not. The field staffer has more knowledge on that so managers may also missing some points that can be unraveled during this discussion.
> However for those who are superstar / plan maker, this discussion is actually beneficial. ...
I hear all this and it seem useful also. But from what I have seen in last 5-8 years is that immediate supervisor/manager have hardly any power or resources to anything meaningful for employees beyond filling basic HR templates that go nowhere.
This could be different for very early career employees or startups where one's manager could be just the founder or CTO and the like. But for mid career and above employees in typical established business, managers seem merely human timesheet for work done. They have full mandate to get work done creatively , enforce corporate policies from up top but little in term of listening/approving any of their employee's considerations.
Oh true, the smaller the org is the better the benefit
Still this is a good CYA move from both you and your supervisor, since any concerns are already officially registered, action is just not taken by management
sorry you experience it as demotivating. I think this is because your expectation of who has what responsibility is not aligned with workplace expectations.
The thing is, your manager has to fill in some paperwork and other admin processes to get you that raise. The manager is probably willing to do that work for you.
You can make this easier for them by helping them fill in that template. Making your manager's job easier IS part of your job, especially making it easier for them to get you a raise.
So yes, the main part of your job is to do the work explicitly assigned to you. And another part of your job is making sure that the work you've done is easily legible to the company.
family/friends relationships have other 'rules'/courtesies.
Then hopefully the fears of replacing developer jobs are unfounded, and in fact we can expect (hope) for middle management jobs to be replaced instead?
Your boss needs paperwork to justify pay raises, promotions, etc to their boss & HR. Isn't the whole purpose of that question to leave a paper trail that both you and they can point to?
That's what I've been told, and such I always answer those questions in a way that has a concrete 'goal' that I can point to and either makes ME more valuable to the company OR delivered some thing that is valuable TO the company.
This is the correct thread. It has to be some words that don’t seem too fake and seem to plausibly suggest forward progress.
There has to be some plausible support for decisions, that someone can point to, in order to make a decision. Taking ownership of a decision means having a paper trail where you can deny responsibility for something gone wrong.
A good manager doesn’t ask what you want to get better at, they ask what they can do for you. A manager who asks these sort of dumb questions is just going through the motions, you should do the same, say whatever they want to hear and then don’t think about it again. You can, alternatively, try and make them into a better manager by changing the question but they might not be receptive.
"What you want to get better at" can turn into "what they can do for you", though. Like if a conference or training course would help you start or improve on your goal, and they can approve you to get it paid for.
I've been programming professionally for 15 years and even before that I've been coding since I was barely a teenager, and I still learn new things all the time. I'm a much better programmer now than I was 5 years ago.
This is interesting to me because in my job as a senior dev I can tell that there are greater opportunities for me if I can improve my skills. As a result, I think this may speak to your work environment more than the nature of being senior.
It's all bullshit. They have to ask because somebody is asking them how they're going to eke more productivity out of their underlings. It goes all the way to the top (the shareholders).
Just play along and talk about how you want to improve your mentoring skills or some other completely immeasurable platitude.
Ultimately this productivity-eking obsession is the organizational equivalent of free radical cellular damage. It's just a constant process of degradation to the integrity of whatever caused the business to be successful. Like death, it is unavoidable.
The caveat here is, as TFA states, is that you need to have "every constraint on the table". And that is almost never the case. Unless you create something in a mature domain, where everything has already been explored, you _won't know_ what the constraints are.
You can spend three months in whiteboard sessions planning out the perfect solution, and then your plan falls apart the second you start implementing, because the real world imposes constraints on you that were practically impossible to know a priori. Not theoretically impossible, mind you. If you'd been smart enough and spent enough time thinking about it, you would have thought of them. But you aren't smart enough, and you don't have the time. Those are some other constraints that the universe puts on you.
We spent 20 years talking about agile precisely because of this, and people took it, turned it into a checklist based processed, forgot about the short feedback loop it's precisely supposed to bring to the table to figure our your unknown unknown quickly, and declared it useless.
And now we are back to square one, where we argue again "but just make good specs".
Not too sure about the engines as of late. Bigger and heavier vehicles - yes, but still mostly rural/highway, and at way lower speeds than the EU. Overall, IMO it's just the distances involved.
Not so much the efficiency of the engine but the weight and size of the vehicle. Almost all new cars in the US are turbo charged 4 cylinders if not hybrids or pure electric, but US consumers do prefer larger vehicles which are less aerodynamically efficient wnd heavier, which is really a direct result of the distance and reliance on the vehicle Americans have.
I like the gym analogy. It's like how farmers used to be fit because farming involved a lot of manual labor. Then the tractor came and a lot of the physical work became optional and farmers got fat. Now we're all using fork lifts in the mental gym and thinking how strong we are.
