Is this... a joke? Performance art?

Not snarking. I'm honestly more confused reading this than I was before.

Auto-generated gibberish

They should train it on the Enron emails. Then they could sell it as an Outlook plugin that auto-generates emails full of incomprehensible management-speak!

"You'll be a thought leader in no time."

there is probably, legitimately, a market for this

There is. For yearly performance reviews.

When I worked for a big company in 2005-2009 I did, in fact, use a markov gibberish generator to fill in my yearly self-assessment.

This and also poor zoning laws and NIMBYism allow for (and encourage) constant sprawl which also drives city prices up more because some people don't want to commute two hours each way.

Now that's the fun part of the cyberpunk timeline I was looking for.

Now this is good content. Thank you!

This. I was going to say essentially the same thing.

Every adult who becomes a parent seems to realize very quickly that their parents also had no clue WTF was going on.

So yeah, no different with what we do, since we're literally always building new things that haven't been done before.

> had no clue WTF was going on

Regarding the parent issue and disregarding companies for a moment.

Not sure what you mean exactly by having no clue. You mean things like the family finances / jobs / schools stuff or parenting rules or what to do with illnesses and stuff like that?

Because I think saying nobody has a clue is a bit harsh. Some people are indeed more organized and have a better grasp on their plans and outlooks. I wouldn't say my parents had "no clue" or could have afforded to have no clue about what was going on.

I often hear this and it's probably meant as some sort of encouragement or anti-impostor syndrome talk, but it can also backfire. There is indeed value in thinking about how your family is faring, whether the finances are working out, whether you should move for a better job. It would be foolish to say nobody has any clue, so doing anything without thinking about it will be just as good.

> So yeah, no different with what we do, since we're literally always building new things that haven't been done before.

"Where do people get the confidence to say that their work is so uniquely novel that it's "something that has never been done before in the history of the universe", that the field is obviously totally different from another field they know nothing about, etc. ?" --Dan Luu

I think it is less that these things "have never been done before" and more "we haven't bothered to learn anything from people who've done things like this before". Same with parenting.

It's the same as with parenting - you can't really learn these things from people who've done this before, you have to learn them by doing it yourself. A large portion of potential parents put in a lot of effort to read up and learn stuff before their first child, but that's really nothing compared to what they can learn from actual experience; when rising your second/third/etc child, everything you'll use will be from the actual experience with previous children and just a minority of useful things will come from the initial vague guidance of others.

I had a friend who was super excited to have his second child, because he'd be able to reuse the knowledge he had picked up with the first one. Then he discovered that his kids were polar opposites - he had to start over from square one.

That too, but also combined with having to balance that the people who did this before also did it in a different time with different resources and also have selective memories.

And as often as not they managed to do an even worse job than we do today.

Very true, but you don't have to become a parent to realize this. I learned this as a latch key kid.

Also sounds exactly like what happened with tobacco companies, lead in paint/gasoline, etc.

It's like we never learn and then those who are in charge made rules to make it even harder to learn as we went forward.

Also that humans are terrible at existential threats.

This. Data engineering has ramped up significantly and if you want senior people you'll quickly run out of people who've been exclusively doing "big data" for 5+ years.

So your options are either senior software engineers who have done some data work (that's how I got to be a Data Engineer) or people who've been doing analytical data work (either in the traditional warehousing space or via science/insurance/finance type spaces) that are semi-technical but have no formal engineering background.

The former are people who went to college in the late 90s/early 2000s (like myself) when things were different. The latter need to hyperfocus on coming up to speed in engineering.

I reviewed this guide a couple months ago for my employer to consider as the basis of an internal bootcamp, and I'd note that it's perfect for the audiences I mentioned. Also, even for people with more up to date academic experience, note that the transactional database schemas that software normally deals with often look wildly different than analytical structures.

This! Ten times this! Single dependencies like this are absolutely a risk management issue.

I say this as someone who's both been a single point of failure at times (and learned my lesson) and someone who's had to clean up after piles of "clever" code that someone left behind when they got hired out somewhere else.

Ok that was a really fun read. It's amazing how many random things like this persist for centuries despite tons of evidence to the contrary existing.

We're all gonna die sometime. Some of us will starve from no food, others will have a heart attack from poor quality food.

Eat Arby's.